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The bit about connecting the dots is a good articulation of what I've always thought about this. The thing that bothers me most about it is when people say that these puzzles make a movie "smart" or for the proverbial "thinking man." I dunno, I think I'm as smart as the next guy (well, smarter, but the full extent of my ego isn't necessary for this argument!), but I like to apply my mind more to science, philosophy, and to some extent history/social science, which feel like engaging with the real world rather than some artist's cute puzzle.

I'd also object to claims that this makes me a philistine. Much of the literary canon and other "accepted" good art has layers of meaning that are difficult to catch, but they usually also have stylistic or dramatic virtues (often both, though not always) that are apparent to most reasonably intelligent people upon first reading. More importantly, these layers of meaning usually just add to some more obvious primary message upon discovery, which is entirely different than the "this movie has a secret!" model, where everything looks entirely different upon realizing a few details, and doesn't change appearance much after that. A good novel is a mine that yields lots of gold at first, and keeps giving (if at a slower rate) as you continue to dig. These "gated" movies are more like a secret vein of gold buried under a thick layer of dirt. It's the amount of gold that matters in the end, and it's hard to argue that the extra dirt is an aesthetic virtue.
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vision:
I agree, but is this really a failure of TV specifically? A serialized work may be unique in that it can respond to demand while still being created, but creators in nearly any medium won't get their works funded if they're not likely to make enough money, outside of some patronage system. Is there something particularly bad about changing in mid-creation?

internisius:
(since my fanboyness obligates me to respond to all posts involving Xenogears) The style of Japanese RPGs, with their length plus their audiovisuals, has always made me wonder if it'd be cool to have really, really long movies made. I guess they'd be kind of like strung-together episodes of TV, at least with the kind of production values they'd have to have (but let's put aside the huge problems with this whole thing as a business model, for now...). But they'd be intended for consumption all at once, maybe with some sort of rituals for giving people breaks/intermissions/otherwise making the experience bearable. It'd feel like much more of an exciting, communal event--the feeling of going to witness some complete, extensive novel-like creation, rather than a short and stylistically heavy confection like most movies. And things like that instance of a song playing for the first time would be so much more impactful--if you'd already been watching for a few hours and something hit you as if things were just "getting started." I dunno, maybe this would suck. And I'm not sure how it's relevant to the thread.

Edit for strange, wishy-washy connection to thread topic: I guess your post reminded me of this idea because one of the major characteristics of dreams is their feeling of "significance." Many movies can't achieve this feeling simply because they're so short and feel like boxed-in creations, little shaved poodles tied in tight restrictive bows (if you'll forgive the image). While dreams range at will between widely different tones and situations, and often feel like some complete message from your psyche (whether or not they really are) that draws on the full range of your worldly knowledge. A long movie could much more easily accomplish this all-encompassing, larger-than-you feel.

General thread response:
Despite my sort of bitter post above, I do think the desire for clear narrative in films gets way too out of hand sometimes. But I don't think that's inconsistent with saying that movies should be "puzzles"--in fact, it's part of the same line of thought. It's precisely because movies are about sense and mood, not the kind of stuff you could get out of a script or a written summary, that a puzzle-like film would be so disappointing even upon cracking it. The final prize, a fully coherent narrative, is not itself the thing that you should be looking for anyway. Good incoherence is better than bad coherence, but "seeming incoherence" can be even worse. Of course, many films can be seen as either "seemingly" or "truly" incoherent, so the distinction largely rides on whether the biggest fans see the movie as an experience or as an IQ test.

(As I mentioned in the movie thread, the obsession with coherence seemed especially out-of-hand to me in reviews of Paprika. I left the theater feeling like I had viewed something artistically well-created, and that was all that mattered; I had no desire to learn what was "really happening" in some of the less literal scenes, as many reviewers did. It wasn't like those scenes were meaningless masturbation or pretentious randomness. They had a clear artistic and aesthetic goal, it just happened to be something other than conveying exactly what was literally happening!)
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