How I Know I Won't Like a Moovie

Observing negative movie reviews is insufficient, because critics' likes and dislikes don't always match my own. So instead, I scan the reviews to see if the criticisms sound like the sort of complaints I would make. If so, I probably won't like the movie. Here's a perfect example:

I understand that realism is not the main goal in an animated movie about anthropomorphized farm animals, but, seriously, what's with the male cows in "Barnyard"? Did the bovine gender confusion at the heart of the story give no one pause at Paramount or Nickelodeon? Did the drawbacks of featuring a female lead so outweigh the benefits of cow protagonism that a mass species sex-change was required in order for the project to go forward? Are hornless, uddered boy-cows the next big thing in aggressively marketed, reality-displacing fallacies, like Snackwells and intelligent design?

I don't pretend to know all the answers; all I can say for sure is that in writer-director Steve Oedekerk's bizarre computer-animated universe, "female cows" are required to wear hair accessories in order to differentiate themselves from "male cows," with whom they unaccountably share secondary sex characteristics.

Had I gone to see this movie, my annoyance at the unmentioned sexual identity confusion would assuredly have prevented me from appreciating anything else (if there were anything else to appreciate). Don't think I'll be seeing this one.