"Koepp is a boob and an ignoramus"You are right on! How can the "professionals" do such a bad job selecting/defining the characters and writing the plot when there was so much opportunity to do better?
I liked it. :) Not how I would have done it, but I can't argue with its success. This "dysfunctional family" crap isn't my kind of thing, but it works.
Ordinary people who are not industry professionals can see the many flaws and logical holes and inconsistencies which spoil the movie.
There's no room for me to go into this here, but the truth is (and this may shock you) that almost no movie really makes sense when you look at it.
The movie industry is selling us a lot of junk with a few real gems in the mix (e.g., the three Lord of the Rings movies). The movie industry gets their bad movies into the theaters by forcing the theater operators to buy packages of movies in order to get the good movies.
Nope--that's illegal now.
The theater operators cannot cherry-pick only the good or best movies. They have to buy the junk movies to get the good ones. To help make up for this, the theaters jack up their prices on the food concessions and show paid advertisements for up to twenty minutes after the official start time of the movie. What a racket!
That's not really true. Block booking is illegal, and has been since the fifties. Some claim that the practice of offering movie X to get movie A still exists, and it does, but it's not the same thing because movies still get pulled from theaters if they're not selling tix. It's more complicated and subtle than I'm saying, but it's not really the same thing as block booking, a practice that died in anti-trust litigation in the 50's or 60's. Now it's more a case of the theaters NEEDING the shows because they need twenty films at a time.