Ed Driscoll:

As I noted at the start of the month, Hollywood has, over the last decade or so (in other words, prior to 9/11, or even George W. Bush taking office) adopted a remarkably nihilistic view of America’s involvement in war–any war, whether it’s Iraq, the War On Terror, or even World War II. The latter is all the more remarkable, considering WWII was long thought to be “the Good War” by virtually all concerned–partially because it had the blessings of the left, happy that we stopped the Soviet Union’s former ally, Nazi Germany. Nearly a decade ago, Mark Steyn documented the first signs of the change in Hollywood’s souring on WWII in Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan:

Purporting to be a recreation of the US landings on Omaha Beach, Private Ryan is actually an elite commando raid by Hollywood and the Hamptons to seize the past. After the spectacular D-Day prologue, the film settles down, Tom Hanks and his men are dispatched to rescue Matt Damon (the elusive Private Ryan) and Spielberg finds himself in need of the odd line of dialogue. Endeavouring to justify their mission to his unit, Hanks’s sergeant muses that, in years to come when they look back on the war, they’ll figure that `maybe saving Private Ryan was the one decent thing we managed to pull out of this whole godawful mess’.

Once upon a time, defeating Hitler and his Axis hordes bent on world domination would have been considered `one decent thing’. Even soppy liberals figured that keeping a few million more Jews from going to the gas chambers was `one decent thing’. When fashions in victim groups changed, ending the Nazi persecution of pink-triangled gays was still `one decent thing’. But, for Spielberg, the one decent thing is getting one GI joe back to his picturesque farmhouse in Iowa.

But Hollywood is clueless about this. Yesterday’s LA Times wrote about the woes of the “serious” film biz.

Why haven’t more people shown up to see “A Mighty Heart,” “In the Valley of Elah” or even the comedy “Lars and the Real Girl”? Some films — like Richard Gere’s “The Hunting Party,” Kenneth Branagh’s “Sleuth” or the Mark Ruffalo-Joaquin Phoenix film “Reservation Road” — haven’t made even $1 million. And a crew of classy star vehicles from studios — essentially art films with bigger budgets — has been flailing at the box office.

Despite George Clooney’s tub-thumping, “Michael Clayton” has earned only $21 million. Cate Blanchett’s “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” has taken in $11 million, and the Brad Pitt western “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” has earned only $2 million, according to Boxofficemojo.com.

Many of those got bad or so-so reviews, so where’s the mystery? Execution of serious dramas must be spot-on or they flop. Unlike mass-audience genre pictures like The Game Plan, which can score big even while mediocre.

This is nothing new.

As for Elah and Clooney’s latest anti-capitalist spew, who wants to shell out money to hear Hollywood’s primitive worldview?

Schamus thinks there is “the same finite amount of appetite for depressing films as we’ve always had, but that appetite is being serviced by so many options on the menu that it’s difficult to make a choice.” He jokes, “In two years, as a result of this fall, there will be not one single drama on the slate. The market will be flooded by lousy comedies and consumers will be howling with disappointment.”

Despressing isn’t the point. Quality is. Little Children  or The Squid and The Whale might be considered depressing, but both were examples of great filmmaking.