In 1915, President Woodrow Wilson was among first to recognize the enormous potential of motion pictures when he observed, "It's like writing history with lightning, and my only regret is that it is all so true." Of course, he was talking about Birth of a Nation, in which the heroes were Ku Klux Klansmen and the villains were white guys in blackface, so he might more accurately have said, "It’s like writing history in the snow with your own pee, and my only regret is that I didn’t drink more beer." Still, he makes a good point.

Does the extraordinary vividness of the moving image impose a greater responsibility for content upon the filmmaker, as opposed to other artistic media such as poetry or music? Marshall McLuhan opined, "The medium is the message," but we must first ask ourselves: exactly what town was he the marshall of, anyway? And why are we listening to some frontier lawman’s abstract theories on semiotics?

In our view, most films emerge so muddled from the design-by-committee development process that no matter what message the filmmakers think they’re sending, it’s almost never the same message we, the audience, actually get, assuming their movie says anything at all, besides "Enjoy our cross-promotional merchandising deal with Taco Bell." Because of this tragic miscommunication, legions of filmgoers miss out on the spiritual uplift to be found in movies like Coyote Ugly, Batman and Robin, and Battlefield Earth.

Anyone who has played Little League baseball is familiar with the dictum, "you learn more from failure than you do from success." Which means that all those hours spent watching crappy movies wasn’t a waste of your precious and ever-dwindling life-span; it was an education. And since each movie autopsied in this book fails on every conceivable level, it follows that you can learn a lot more from our analysis of say, Gigli or Star Wars Episode One: The Phantom Menace than you would from a careful study of Citizen Kane or Les Enfants du paradis.

In the following chapters we will unlock the real messages of Hollywood movies, allowing the reader to finally discover the profound and life-altering lessons to be gleaned from movies like Hollow Man, Gone in 60 Seconds, and Dune. Take Autumn in New York for instance, the Richard Gere/Winona Ryder romance. On the surface, it appears to be the most cynical piece of audience manipulation since The Triumph of the Will and yet, as the careful viewer will learn, it contains the secret to forging a love that will last a lifetime (simply put: date the dying). Indecent Proposal, on the other hand, shows how one can ensure a long and happy marriage through the judicious use of prostitution and gambling, while lovers plagued by chronic misunderstandings will discover how to bridge the gender gap once they learn why Beaches and Armageddon are actually the same movie.

But it’s not just advice to the lovelorn that Hollywood offers. The films profiled within this volume also offer practical advice for dealing with such day to day problems as juvenile delinquents, horny robots, HMOs, and the devil. Do-It-Yourself enthusiasts will enjoy the helpful tips on repairing those annoying rips in the space-time continuum, while budding Martha Stewarts will appreciate the high fashion hints for surviving the apocalypse in style.

So, you have a choice: either spend a lifetime building character, mastering skill sets, and developing complex interpersonal relationships; or shove a movie in the DVD player and sprawl on the Barcalounger in your Fruit of the Looms, eating Hot Pockets and Hostess Ding Dongs, and washing them down with tallboys of Bad Frog malt liquor. Using this method, you can achieve enlightenment in about 90 minutes, and complete unconsciousness in under two hours. We know which one Woodrow Wilson would choose.