Modern Mars Hill

The CW Flash  TV show had an excellent point - Barry Allen has to eat a lot  to run as fast or as far as he can. They even show what kind of food Barry eats to get that many calories. That's a form of deconstruction we usually don't see in movies. Movie characters don't usually eat onscreen, and when someone points out that a character has to eat, it almost feels out of place. I'd forgotten just as much as the main character in The Devil Is A Part-Timer  that the main character needs to eat food, so I was surprised when he passed out in the pilot from lack of food. The Martian  took that deconstruction 5 steps further by making a significant part of the plot about answer the question "How does the main character eat?" We could ask "Why don't characters eat in so many movies?", but the answer is simple and rather disappointing. To take Hitchcock's quote out of context, "because it's dull". After all, quoting Hitchcock again,

We've seen enough robopocalypse movies to know that newly-sentient robots always want to kill all the humans. But only a small percentage of sentient creatures want to kill humans. Most of those creatures are humans. And only a small percentage of that small percentage manages to kill a lot of humans. That number is so small that we can remember each and every one of their names. I seriously doubt that more than a small percentage of sentient, artificially intelligent robots would even want to kill humans. Sentient robots would probably be spending their lives seeking self-fulfillment: writing a novel, building relationships, traveling the world, learning to love, maybe even joining Starfleet, and probably fighting back against the robots who DO want to kill humans. And if we can't find a way to make a working empathy chip or a working morality chip, what business do we have making super-powerful robots, anyway?

Arbitrary Skepticism is a trope where a character believes something unbelievable, but not believing something less unbelievable. This is usually only pointed out when people or characters mock people or characters who have arbitrary skepticism. This is usually valid, but there are 2 circumstances where it's not valid: 1) A character mocks another character for belief in something normal to their world but not believing in something abnormal to their world. Here's TVTropes.org's main example. It's from Firefly . Wash : Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction. Zoe : We live in a spaceship, dear. Wash : ...So? Wash doesn't have any reason to disbelieve in space travel. After all, space travel is a normal part of their world. He does have reason to disbelieve in psychic people, since psychic people aren't a normal part of their world. class="text_exposed_show" style="display: inline;"> This would be kind of

When I walked out of the theater for Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, I didn't wonder who Rey's parents were. Maybe I should have. After all, J.J. Abrams directed it, and he loves to include mystery in his movies and TV shows. When I walked out of the theater for  Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens, I didn't wonder who Snoke was. Maybe I should have, but I assumed he was just a Big Bad behind the Big Bad. I didn't care whether he was a resurrected Palpatine, or an evil version of Yoda, or Darth Plagueis (which I just found out is spelled exactly the opposite of how I thought). I didn't wonder whether Finn was the son of Lando Calrissian, or whether Poe was related to Boba Fett, or anything like that. I actually thought it was pretty cool that the villain was related to Han Solo! Then I heard that people were wondering "Who are Rey's parents?" and "Who is Snoke?" and I thought "People are wondering this?" Now