Hollywood gets the fear as box-office sale plummet. Is it the ever-rising cost of tickets? Is the the hassle parking? Is it the competition from DVDs?

Personally, I think it’s a combination of horribly-written, unbelievably-lame films targeted at the Hollywood elite’s idea of the mass audience’s taste (the sort of Vin Diesel flic that bores even the teenage kids), combined with the occasional twisted-liberal-sensibility Message picture (do we really want to see Clint Eastwood put some chick out her misery? or a couple of cowboys kissing?) that had made movie-going so irritating that we increasingly just give up on the whole thing and stay home.

Hollywood is proving to be just as out of touch on the issue of entertainment as it is on politics. Even now, we wait with bated breath for Steven Spielberg’s latest deep thinking picture (the guy is good with sharks, but ideas? forget it!), which rumor has it, will be a lachrymose sermonette on the futility of hunting down and killing bad guys who murder innocent people to score political protest points. Steven ought to have asked himself what John Wayne would do, and filmed that.