How Stupid is Hollywood Really?
Commentary
By John Jalsevac

This summer it’s been my lot to see a few of the newest pickings of the cinematic crop. By all accounts most of these movies are awful, and if they’re not awful they’re something worse, and anybody who knows the first thing about cinema knows it. You can be sure it’s gotten bad when reviewers replace the thumb with the shrug. Reviewers can’t even conjure the conviction to give the yea or the nay any more. Instead they shrug. “It was a movie,” they say. “Pretty. But not much else.” And so the former feeling of cinematic magic is gone, smothered by this onslaught of mediocrity.

Perhaps we could let sleeping dogs lie were it not that this particular breed of artistic triviality has profound moral consequences. You see, some of the half-baked films currently drawing an ever thinner crowd of exhausted moviegoers are The 40-year-old Virgin, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Wedding Crashers, Mr. and Mrs. Smith and The Aristocrats. One of those was called a “boob raunch-fest” by Matthew Drudge of drudgereport.com, and that description could be extended to most any of the others. The online family-friendly movie-reviewing website, Screenit.com, stigmatizes every one of these with an “extreme” grade for sex and nudity, not to mention profanity, and pretty much anything else that forbids a responsible parent to bring their child or watch the movie themselves.

Excellent!