Diminished expectations

When people say that they enjoyed films like Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 or Transformers: Dark Of The Moon (or even RocknRolla, like Simon did) they are in fact wrong - they didn't enjoy them.

All Mark needs is five minutes, and he will explain to them why they didn't enjoy it; it is all down to diminished expectations.

The theory has its origins in Mark's time as a student at Manchester University, living on the Hulme estate. When a worker from the council was assessing conditions in the notoriously neglected area (where the rent was cheap but no-one paid it anyway, because it was the place the homeless ended up when they had nowhere else to go) and called at Mark's shared student house, he was astounded to be told that there were no problems. When pressed, Mark's housemate thought for a while and said that he supposed the lack of a boiler was a problem, as was the absence of a kitchen sink, and that the rampant cockroaches could be a touch aggressive. "Ah. We see this a lot," said the council worker. "It's called diminished expectations."

The point is that, in Mark's view, the quality of blockbuster movie entertainment had deteriorated so much that people consider Die Hard Four Point Less or Unwanted to be passably enjoyable fare, rather than the dreck that it actually is, simply because their expectations of what constitutes a good film have been eroded by too many sequels, animated post-modern fairy tales and plotless special effects-driven bonanzas. Just like how Mark's housemate didn't think to even notice the bathroom hideousness because it was just assumed that everything was like that, so audiences just convince themselves that they are having a good time regardless of the actual quality of movie. Thus, in a sense, the work of Zack Snyder really is just so much broken toilet. Only when something like Inception turned up and made a whole bunch of money despite being really good and with a brain in its head does such a deplorable state of affairs begin to be questioned.