This article about why Paul Blart: Mall Cop is so successful is the biggest bunch of horseshit I’ve ever read. To wit:

The film’s success says less about the fallibility of tracking surveys than it does about audience demand for feel-good stories and Hollywood’s growing appetite for low-budget comedies with obvious marketing hooks.

Aren’t they one and the same? Shouldn’t a useful tracking survey say that audiences are excited to see feel-good stories? And how does Blart’s success make a point about “Hollywood’s growing appetite for low-budget comedies with obvious marketing hooks”? Isn’t that point actually made by the film’s mere existence?

“You’ve got a country that is willing to put their economic worries behind them and go to the movies,” says Doug Belgrad, the Sony production executive who developed the movie with James based on the actor’s own idea.

“And people see themselves in this guy,” Belgrad says of James’ ne’er-do-well shopping mall security guard, who foils a band of thieves who invade the mall he patrols on his Segway. “They love it when a guy who isn’t given credit for being good at anything succeeds.”

I don’t care how successful Doug Belgrad’s movie is, he should be fired just for saying something this ignorant. The list of movies in which “a guy who isn’t given credit for being good at anything succeeds” encompasses every movie that has ever starred Pauly Shore, Rob Schneider, or Larry the Cable Guy, and I wouldn’t exactly say those guys are sure-fire box office gold.

The question is, has there ever been a less scientific realm of study than attempting to predict cultural tastes? Who has any idea why a movie like Paul Blart succeeds? The reason why there’s so much turnover in Hollywood is because anyone who is given the job of predicting which movies will be successful is doing a fool’s errand. Just like in the world of political punditry, there is seemingly no relationship between one’s ability to make predictions and one’s success rate.

Here’s a question for all you scientists of human nature: why do we continue to try and predict the future despite the fact that our methods and level of success have shown little improvement since the days of the oracles? Wouldn’t that be a trait that evolution would beat out of us?

And here’s another totally unrelated question that I was thinking about the other day: does the fact that dinosaurs roamed the earth for 165 million years and seemingly developed no tools or technology negate the belief that self-awareness is a desirable evolutionary trait? Wouldn’t a properly functioning system of evolution create creatures who were able to do everything they needed to do without the use of tools or clothing? In short, doesn’t the dinosaurs’ lengthy reign in comparison to (presumably) ours indicate we’ve taken an evolutionary step backwards? Discuss.