In Defense of Mediocrity

A friend of mine used to say, "it'll make a turd," to describe a meal that was adequate and filling without being anything special. While the expression is crass, there's some truth to the idea that the measure of a person's happiness comes down to adequate eating and shitting.

The same goes for movies and sleep, in my opinion. That's my one and only criterion for movies these days: whether I fell asleep. No? Then the movie was good. Yes? It wasn't. Forget Rotten Tomatoes and similar rating systems. A movie's ability to keep me awake past the first 20 minutes is the one and only metric I use to judge entertainment anymore.

Of course, this mostly applies to movies viewed from my couch, since I can't remember the last movie I saw in the theater. However, I do know that by the time it ended, I was even more deaf than I'd been after seeing Guns N' Roses at Madison Square Garden on the 1991 Use Your Illusion tour.

On that note, I highly recommend a bowl of popcorn for dinner and "Out of the Furnace" (2013, free on Netflix) starring Christian Bale and Woody Harrelson. The popcorn will probably make a turd and the movie might keep you engaged enough to stay awake. And at the end of the day, what more can you really ask for in life?