DREAM HOUSE (SPOILER ALERT}

[stuntmovie]

Not a great movie but it made you think!

And I think I didn't understand it.

Why did the neighbor's estranged husband want the whole family dead?

And who the hell was that guy who did the killing?

Due to the Law of Economy of Characters I had the killer just about figured out from close to the git-go .... and that ruins it just about every time.

So let me ruin it for you too!

Here's how the LAW OF ECONOMY OF CHARACTERS works. You more than likely knew this earlier ... but now you got a name for it.

Movie budgets make it impossible for any film to contain unnecessary characters. Therefore, all characters in a movie are necessary to the story—even those who do not seem to be.

Sophisticated viewers can use this Law to deduce the identity of a person being kept secret by the movie's plot:

This "mystery" person is always the only character in the movie who seems otherwise extraneous.

DREAM HOUSE fit this perfectly.

[stuntmovie]

We haven't seen REAL STEEL yet, but a dollar to a do-nut says it will follow the  "Climb from Despair to Victory" formula with a strong similarity to  ROCKY and Jackie Cougan's THE KID which breaks the story-line into three parts:

(1) Defeat and despair;
(2) Rigorous training, usually shown in the form of would-be MTV videos;
(3) Victory, preferably ending in freeze-frame of triumphant hero.

But this time they'll do it with a mechanical robot.

[deadz]

Dream House sucked