THE INCREDIBLES!

Srsly. TMO* picked it when he got the Lucky Penny** for family movie night the other night, and watching it again, after I’ve been reading McKee’s Story and thinking a lot about story structure as part of my fiction-writing aspirations, I was struck by how amazingly well-written The Incredibles is.

* The Male Offspring

** The Lucky Penny: More often than I’d like to admit, we eat dinner in front of the TV. We’ve added more and more movie-viewing options over the years, but something we always struggle with is the inevitable negotiation over What We Are Going To Watch. And coming as it does when we’re all hypoglycemic and cranky anyway, we’d always have these interminable debates where there was someone who didn’t want to watch whatever someone else proposed. So we’d finally give up and pick something really innocuous that no one really wanted, and we’d seen a bunch of times already, but that no one objected to strongly enough to veto. And no one was happy.

So we came up with a new system.

The way it works now is, we do a random drawing, and whoever gets the Lucky Penny*** gets to choose the movie. And we still honor strongly-felt vetoes, but the non-winners are motivated not to exercise those unless they really need to, in part because they know that they themselves could be the holder of the Lucky Penny tomorrow.

And the cool thing is, it works out much better in terms of the quality of what we watch. Because watching something that at least one person really wants is almost always better than arriving at a consensus choice with everyone participating. I guess this a case where the Wisdom of Crowds breaks down, and a single person’s aesthetic judgement is superior to a pooled one.

*** It used to be the Lucky Yellow Toothpick, until we discovered that my wife could distinguish the Lucky Yellow Toothpick from the Unlucky Green Toothpicks by feel. So it became the Original Lucky Penny mixed in with a group of Unlucky Pennies, and then the Currrent Lucky Penny with a different group of Unlucky Pennies that were more similar to each other, when we discovered that she could also distinguish the Original Lucky Penny by feel. Sheesh; musicians and their highly developed tactile sense.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1eLCMFR.