I recently learned all about "Poe's Law," from Cracked Editor David Wong. Poe's Law is a handy little concept invented by Nathan Poe in a religious Internet forum a few years ago. According to Wikipedia, the "core of Poe's law is that a parody of something is by nature extreme, [which] makes it impossible to differentiate from sincere extremism." In Nathan's case, the law applied to his inability to distinguish religious extremism from a parody of religious extremism. I don't hang around religious forums (court order), but I'm starting to feel like Poe's Law is just as applicable to movies. Something about movies changed over the last few years. Like Poe, I'm looking at the world around me and desperately searching for a joke that would be impossible to find.

I can no longer tell if movies are being serious. I used to be able to watch trailers and say, "This is clearly a parody" or "This is just a bad movie." But, these days, the gap between the two has become so blurry and thin, I'm like Nathan Poe, looking for some kind of winking emoticon that let's me know what's what. So many people will say that they love movies like Machete and Drive Angry and Snakes On A Plane "ironically" which is absolutely meaningless to me because A) I'm kinda dumb, B) irony as a concept was murdered by the Internet years ago and C) I only know how to like movies or hate movies genuinely. Some filmmakers are embracing this idea of movies being designed to be consumed ironically, while other filmmakers are just making shitty movies. And the frustrating thing is that there is no observable difference between the two. Once upon a time, I could finish watching a trailer and my only thought would either be "That was good" or "That was bad." Now, I watch most trailers and I just scratch my head, thinking, "Hey, filmmakers: Did you really mean that? Do you think shooting a movie where Nicolas Cage has sex on a motorcycle while he shoots machine guns is a genuinely good idea, or a patently ridiculous (and therefore 'ironically' good) idea? Is any of this a joke?"