March Sadness
That jerk T. S. Eliot famously remarked that "April is the cruelest month." Well, he's wrong as usual, but for once it's not his fault. Writing in 1921, Eliot could not have foreseen the brazenly shoddy offerings Hollywood would attempt to foist on us every March. Too late for Oscar consideration, too early for massive popcorn consumption, March movie offerings always remind me of that scene in The Empire Strikes Back when the Imperial star destroyers dump all their junk before jumping to hyperspace. Forget about finding the Millennium Falcon in this barrage of garbage; the best you can hope for is burnt out mechanical parts, preferable at least to the bacteria-ridden, malodorous carcass of whatever was swimming around in the trash compactor.

So just how do you go about sorting the tolerable refuse from the intolerable refuse? One simple rule renders this dubious task considerably easier: forced to choose between watching a movie with a one-word title and a similar movie with a multi-word title, always always choose the latter. I present as a test case two movies soon to be competing for you entertainment dollar: Twisted, a crime thriller starring Ashley Judd and Samuel L. Jackson; and Taking Lives, a crime thriller featuring Angelina Jolie and Ethan Hawke. Don't get me wrong. Both of these movies will stink. Jolie and Jackson are both trying to pass Nicolas Cage for the title of "actor most shamelessly trading on increasingly distant impressive previous performances." Even though I haven't seen, nor will I see either of these "contributions" to the history of cinema, you can take my word for it: somehow, some way, Twisted will be appreciably crappier. The one-word title is the tip-off.

Although the Rule of the One-Word Title (henceforth conveniently shortened to ROWT) most successfully predicts degrees of wretchedness during the March to mid-April doldrums, it maintains a fairly high degree of accuracy throughout the year. Think about it; if you can't come up with an adjective for your giant, mutated creature bonanza, do you possess the minimal verbal skills necessary to produce even an inadvertently amusing screenplay? Consider: Gothika, Underworld, Gigli, The Core, Armageddon, Anaconda, Bats, Waterworld, Ishtar, and so forth. (Note: lead articles, as in The Core, are not a factor in word count.) That's a pretty convincing array of ineptitude. But there will be inevitable objections, and even genuine exceptions, which I will now attempt to address.

OBJECTION: YOU"RE AN OBNOXIOUS ELITIST SNOT, VANWINKLE. ANACONDA RULES!
After you finish cashing your check from Jason Mastaitis, hear me out. I will concede that there is a certain pleasure to be derived from watching a B-movie, and that perhaps I am not as alert to this pleasure as most of us. That said, the pleasure of watching a B-movie is utterly dependent on accepting a certain amount of lameness we aren't generally inclined to accept in other situations. So any attempt to argue the merits of (shudder) Stranded has already missed the point of the distinction I'm trying to make here. And even within this questionable subset, I suspect that B-movies with multi-word titles are still more fun than those saddled with a one-word title.

OBJECTION: CHICAGO, GLADIATOR, AND TITANIC ALL WON OSCARS, YOU FATHEAD.
True, and this leads me to offer the following qualifier: crappiness in one-word title movies is inversely proportional to the number of syllables in the word. (Misguided as it is, I'll bet Anaconda is still superior to the similar Python, which would in turn be superior to a hypothetical Asp!) But look a bit more closely at the above movies, and they offer less evidence against ROWT than might be supposed. I can't speak to Chicago, but aren't Gladiator and Titanic essentially extremely well budgeted, skillfully made B-movies? I think Russell Crowe got the lead in Gladiator after Troy McClure turned it down. Was Gladiator really better than Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? Was Titanic really better than L. A. Confidential? Remember, these people once gave a directing Oscar to Kevin Costner, and never once found Alfred Hitchcock deserving. This brings us to a conspicuous False Exception.

CONSPICUOUS FALSE EXCEPTION: ALFRED HITCHCOCK MADE A BUNCH OF MOVIES WITH ONE-WORD TITLES. WHERE'S YOUR ROWT NOW, RULE BOY?
Ashamed as I am to admit this, my dad pointed out this potential complication. "Oh, sure, you'll watch Suspicion, so why isn't it okay to watch Leviathan?" The answer to this question would, I think, be self-evident to everyone except my dad and the aforementioned Jason Mastaitis, but strictly in terms of titles and word counts he had a point. Then I got to thinking a little harder about the Hitchcock oeuvre.

Group A: Shadow of a Doubt, To Catch a Thief, Rear Window, North by Northwest

Group B: Suspicion, Notorious, Vertigo, Psycho

Each of the movies in Group A has a movie with a similar plot in Group B. Shadow of a Doubt pairs with Suspicion, To Catch a Thief with Notorious, etc. North by Northwest isn't really a match for Psycho, but they were made one after the other. My point? The films in group A are superior to their counterparts in Group B. (As long as I'm picking fights, I think Vertigo is the most overrated Hitchcock film ever.) Remember, ROWT assesses relative worth of similar movies. Even though Hitchcock's one-word films would squish a seven-word film directed by Pauly Shore, it is still nevertheless true that one-word Hitchcock films fall short of multi-word Hitchcock films.

GENUINE, PERPLEXING EXCEPTION: THE MATRIX
It starred Keanu Reeves. It was heavily dependent on special effects. It had a one-word title. And it was still really good. The success of this movie is about as probable as a three-toed sloth landing a 747 on the tip of the Washington Monument and then riding a unicycle safely down the side to solid ground. They should have quit while they were ahead. Making sequels to this movie was like winning 16.5 million dollars in the lottery, and then investing the jackpot in 16.5 million scratch tickets. Don't press your luck.

Nor should you, gentle readers. Avoid the one-word title. On the whole, you'll be glad you did.