SPOILER ALERT! (not really)

Today, two very different articles at Entertainment Weekly: this one, a fairly insightful and interesting commentary on the current culture's thirst for film and TV spoilers, and this one, from a TV critic who insists that revealing the details of major plot points and twists are necessary to providing a strong argument for or against watching, and excoriates people whose personalities prefer the destination to the journey as being unappreciative of editing, directing, cinematography, etc. (this, of course, assumes that the show was well-made).

As someone who critiques as a hobby and not a living, I strongly disagree that major plot details are necessary for providing a compelling argument for or against a production. Call me arrogant, but I believe anyone who reviews tv/film for a living should write well enough to successfully argue without doing that. The problem with arguing that audiences should be able to just enjoy the journey and not care about the destination is that a) in a well-made production, discovering the conclusion is a large part of the enjoyment of having witnessed the journey, and b) in a shoddy production, that argument is completely moot.

I realize that I have left myself wide open to you digging up a post in which I have given a major spoiler without quantifying that post as a commentary and not a review. Well, fair is fair.

Also disappointing today at Entertainment Weekly, a truly baffling rant by a journalist who believes that the current glut of superhero movies has killed summer cinema, because he hates superhero movies and thinks they're all boring, and the proliferation of them is why there aren't intelligent films in the summer anymore. He supports this idea with such compelling arguments as, we know The Dark Knight will be crappy, dumb, and unnecessary because there have already been so many films about Batman. Well yes, there have also been many films about, say, World War II, tragic romances, and heists. What's your point?