I've been wrong before. I could be wrong now. I don't think so, though. And I have to tell you, extreme defensiveness about movies, books or music almost always says more about you than about the movie, book or music.

Some superhero movies make sense. Some don't. I prefer those that make sense.

So if the lingo was, say Ebonics, a fair criticism would be that it is not internally constant. (However, a Valley Girl speaking Ebonics might be pretty funny.) But the point was that an internal constancy is desirable. If I see an inconsistency I have a big problem.

Right. Like I said, I'm willing to judge movies based on their own internal conventions; I just want them consistently applied. For instance, when the Kevin Costner Robin Hood came out, people criticized him for not having a British accent. That in and of itself doesn't bother me, any more than a movie set in medieval times having people who speak in conventional times doesn't bother me. What made that Robin Hood weird was that some people had British accents, some had inconsistent British accents, and some had none. That bugged me. Likewise, if in a movie you have some characters who speak in modern slang but some who speak like era-appropriate people, that's a problem, to my lights.

But maybe, as well, you’re missing the point that ‘truth in film,’ as it were (and I’m not original in this; see Bazin, Deleuze), isn’t simply propositional or plot-driven. There are all sorts of different aesthetic phenomenological manifolds going on … often I don’t really care about plot at all, and many great films don’t care so much about it either.

I respect that. I just think that there's got to be some sort of artistic tradeoff to be had and, often enough, there is none. But that's a good point and well taken.