Seriously, what is it with the people that make our movies? I might almost believe there was something about the higher reaches of show biz that turns people into complete and raving loons. What with a long series of much-ballyhooed movies culminating in The Green Zone, most which in some degree or other, can easily be construed as anti-troops/anti-war productions and most of which have tanked at the box office, an Oscar evening which I didn’t even bother to watch, let alone seeing any of the movies involved, and Tom Hanks near as dammit shooting himself and his TV series The Pacific in the foot with statements about American racism in interviews . . . oh, heck, can I be forgiven for wondering if there something in the water? Never mind how the Hollywood good and the great appeared to jump on the global warmening and the Obama bandwagon, almost simultaneously. Never mind how the Law’n’Order TV concession painted tea partiers as dangerous terrorists. Never mind the incessant slams against the religiously observant, or the monstering of Sarah Palin. The cumulative idiocy is almost too much to be born; it’s almost as if they don’t want us to be watching any of their damned movies or TV at all.

For the record, this last weekend, we went to see Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, which is about the first time in a year that we went to see a first-run movie in the theaters. (Last time it was Gran Torino, if memory serves, and no, I can’t remember what we went to see the time before that.) I might have gone to see Up, and Blondie and I were considering Julie and Julia, but just didn’t feel strongly enough about either to make the effort. Seriously, I used to love going to movies, but somehow and somewhere in the last decade or so I lost my enthusiasm. Between the expense and hassle of actually going to the theater, the sheer badness of most current releases, the speed with which the best of the current crop show up on DVD (where I can ask to do a review and get the darned thing for free) and the steady drip-drip-drip of ignorance and insult directed at flyover, working-class Americans, conservatives, military, and tea partiers – all sourced from the glitterati . . . well, really, what’s the point? Why should I put up with having my values routinely insulted, right along with my intelligence? I have long insisted on skipping anything which features car chases, machine-gun fire and massive explosions, in lieu of plot and dialogue. And I’d prefer to think of actors as a kind of well-trained performing monkey, whose job is to amuse the audience. I do not want them to be lecturing me on politics, history, international relations, global warming or ecology at the drop of a hat or Charlie Sheen’s trousers, whichever happens oftener. Not unless they actually have some professional education or expertise in those fields, which damn few of them appear to do anyway. Stick to entertaining me, dammit.