Every movie that hasn't come out yet is awesome

I mean, isn't that kind of the secret behind trailers in general, and trailers seen during the Super Bowl in particular?

As film fans, we are eternal optimists. The mere fact that a movie hasn't come out yet means that it is filled with unlimited potential. And if they've done a half-competent trailer -- which they usually have -- it's easy to believe those images could coalesce into The Best Movie You've Ever Seen.

Which is why even movies that we know will be bad -- such as Transformers: Dark of the Moon -- look like they might just be awesome, when offered up to us during the Super Bowl.

I usually don't watch as much of the Super Bowl as I expect to watch -- I tend to focus on the eating and the drinking and the socializing with friends. My friend Daddy Geek Boy and his wife kill themselves each year making all sorts of gourmet appetizers for us, rarely if ever repeating the same ones from year to year, and with the baby, I don't get to see these friends as regularly as I used to. So I miss the game and the commercials just about equally, though I try to pay attention during the commercials if I have the presence of mind. (And anything I miss, I can catch later, either online or on my DVR recording of the game.)

So I caught only a few snippets of this year's ads -- it's a pretty distracting environment full of kids, so even if I'm paying attention, I can only hear half of the dialogue in the ads.

But with the movie ads, all you're really going for is the images in the ads, right?

And because of the principle described above -- "every movie that hasn't come out yet is awesome" -- it's easy to dream ourselves away into the possibilities of those images.

Like when some alien probe is firing on the buildings of an American city in Transformers.

Like when Daniel Craig jumps onto an alien craft with four sets of wings in Cowboys & Aliens.

Like when there's some kind of mushroom cloud explosion in the distance in Thor.

Do I have high hopes for any of these movies? Cowboys & Aliens, maybe -- the others, nah. But on Super Bowl Sunday, anything is possible.

On Super Bowl Sunday, making a fifth Fast & the Furious movie (Fast Five) or a fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie (On Stranger Tides) may not be a bad idea. On Super Bowl Sunday, I Am Number Four could be #1. On Super Bowl Sunday, even Brooklyn Decker's jiggling boobs (Just Go With It) -- shown in slow motion, then rewound, then shown again -- might be Oscar material.

I sometimes think that we movie fans would be happiest if some of these movies never came out at all. With many of them, it doesn't get any better than the trailers. If they could somehow enter a perfect state of being forever just out of our grasp, their release date always a month or two hence on the horizon, then they could always remain The Best Movies We've Never Seen.

Once they come out, all too often, they are just another unit in the assembly line of Hollywood garbage.