In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Ross Douthat has a very fine essay on what he frames as Hollywood’s return to the 1970’s. It puts last fall’s spate of Iraq war films in context, bringing them into place alongside everything from the neo-exploitation slasher flicks of Eli Roth to the Bourne series and mediocre remakes like The Manchurian Candidate. Lots of ink (some of it mine) was spilled last fall dissecting the movie biz’s dreary, self-righteous takes on the war, but his essay paints the clearest picture by far.

I would say, however, he gives short shrift to one point: lame-brained politics or no, the crusading, politically-infused films of the 1970’s were simply better films–and that goes for the prestige pics as well as the B-movies. Douthat notes this in passing, agreeing that the 80’s were “a more middlebrow, conservative decade in pop culture” in comparison with the political engagement of 70’s cinema.

But it’s essential to note that today’s crop–at least in its most explicitly political incarnations–is by any standard rife with unambiguously rotten material. Lions for Lambs, Redacted, and In the Valley of Elah were painful to sit through. Even the better stuff, like the 2005 Clooney duo of Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck were merely average–decent productions that fail to rise to the level of most cable television series. The only recent productions in this vein that stand out at all are the three Bourne films, which tend to use their political framework as a background and succeed mostly on the strength of their dazzling action setpieces.

Contrast this with the films of the 1970’s. There’s little comparison. Apocalypse Now may have little to do with the real-life experience of Vietnam, but it’s a hypnotic, singular vision from an accomplished cinematic artist working at the peak of his powers. All the President’s Men remains one of film’s best detective stories, and probably the best movie about Washington or journalism ever made. Middlebrow fare like The Parallax View and Flight of the Condor sparkled in a way that today’s mainstream thrillers rarely accomplish. And even low-budget films like Death Race 2000 and The Warriors crackled with a sense of outrage, awareness, and energy. Movies like these, as well as the early works of directors like John Carpenter and David Cronenberg, indulged in exploitation flick shenanigans. But they also had a tremendous amount of fun, and maybe even managed to say something about the state of the world, too.

Heaven knows the politics of Hollywood in 1970’s were off the wall, perhaps even wackier and more radical than today’s. But somehow, they still managed to turn out movies that were far less irritating than the artless, self-satisfied liberal consciousness-raisers we seem to be stuck with now.

I’ll leave judgments about the historical veracity of HBO’s new miniseries, John Adams, to those with some expertise in the field (at least one historian seems to think it’s not perfect, but not bad either). The real question is: Is it worth watching? And judging from the two episodes that aired this week, the series is (slightly) less than the sum of its parts. The good news, however, is that the parts are generally excellent.

Strong performances anchor the series. Paul Giamatti plays the title character, a lumpy, bald Boston lawyer who finds his way to greatness after successfully defending the British soldiers involved in the Boston massacre. Giamatti is characteristically frumpy here, but he lends Adams an interesting blend of arrogance and anxiety as well. He’s a patriot, yes, concerned for his country, but also about his own family, life, and legacy. It’s a showcase for Giamatti, but Tom Wilkinson (as Ben Franklin), Laura Linney (as Abigail Adams), David Morse (as George Washington) and Stephane Dillane (as Thomas Jefferson) also make quite the impression as well.

Meanwhile, from the costumes to the extravagant sets, everything on the production side is superb, but the standout element is the photography, which looks positively stunning in HD. Director of Photography Tak Fujimoto is a longtime Hollywood hand (I first recall noticing his work in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs), and his visual trademarks are evident in nearly every scene.

He’s got two main modes behind the lens—the participant and the voyeur. The first mode is primarily used in the larger setpieces, most notably in the series’ opening sequence, which depicts the Boston Massacre; a handheld camera follows Adams as he stumbles through the streets and into the bloody scene, running side-by-side with the man as if his partner. It puts viewers inside the scene, makes them part of it. The more intimate scenes, mostly between Adams and his wife Abigail, are typically shot in low light, and often from another room, or behind an object. The effect is of peering in on history from the outside, watching an American founder from the outside.

The series’ weaknesses come mostly in the script by Kirk Ellis, which, at least at this point, has failed to bring the many other fine elements together. There are many strong moments, especially between John and Abigail (a nighttime monologue in which Adams, laying next to his silent wife, thinks through his dilemma—and those of the country—is particularly touching). But too many scenes feel overly scripted, as if the characters were simply spouting miniature editorials. I have no doubt they were eloquent men, but surely they stumbled once in a while? And in both of the inaugural episodes, there is far too much reliance on courtroom-style drama, as the series would really rather be Law & Order: American Revolution. Still, it’s by far the best thing on TV right now, and anyone with even a passing interest in the subject would do well to check it out.

If everyone at the Manhattan Institute suddenly became raving socialists and decamped to Baltimore to concoct a sprawling, five-year missive on urban decay and the failures of public institutions in story form, you might end up with something resembling The Wire. Never before has any television series been so deeply and smartly concerned with the interplay between public policy, local institutions, and individual lives. What happens when teachers’ unions threaten the mayor’s office in a bid to get more funding and the police department budget is shorted? The Wire shows us. And not just at the political level–but also on the streets, in the lives of cops, kids, teachers, and drug dealers, as well as the politicos at city hall.

The HBO series–as far as I’m concerned, the best that television’s ever seen–ended last night with an episode that managed to be both satisfying and appropriately open-ended (Andrew Johnston has a great write-up on the finale over at The House Next Door). Sopranos creator David Chase should take note: As much as I enjoyed and defended the non-ending ending to his show, this is how to end a major series. Major plot points were largely resolved, but the intractable problems of social organization and human fallibility were not. That’s one of the marks of a genuinely great series-that it feels as if there is something outside the confines of the hours we see on screen. In that respect, no other show comes close to what Wire-creator David Simon has accomplished over the last five seasons. These stories come to an end, but for everyone in the show who survives–and, in this case, that means much of the city of Baltimore–life will go on.

With Cloverfield, producer J.J. Abrams and director Matt Reeves clearly had no intention of seriously addressing September 11th. As Keith Uhlich said, the movie’s more or less “a first person episode of Felicity interrupted by a humongous, pissed-off crustacean!” Serious political commentary was never the point.

And that’s fine. Watching WB-network-ready downtown hipsters get crushed by humongous monsters is every American moviegoer’s God-given right, or something like that. But the problem is that the film tries to have it both ways. So, despite the film’s political apathy (it’s more concerned with girl troubles than international affairs), we get shots that are clearly meant to invoke the terror and panic of that day’s events: buildings crash, sending walls of debris push through downtown streets; ash-covered New Yorkers walk zombie-eyed through the lower-east side; TV news reports lead with graphics declaring that the city is under attack. Yet somehow, not one of the movie’s characters mentions September 11th. Is it even remotely possible that the similarity wouldn’t occur to any of them?

It’s a cheap and, I think, telling, appropriation of the days’ events. On one hand, it doesn’t want anything to do with the reality of September 11th; on the other, it borrows the images and sensations from the day in service of what is no more (at best) than an agreeably shallow bit of entertainment. J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, it seems, are exclusively interested in the day as spectacle, for its “wow factor,” as if no one should much worry about reimagining the 9-11 as a theme-park ride and ignore the rest

Is the new Rambo an argument for American intervention? Matt Zoller Seitz, who says that he “can’t think of another blockbuster action franchise that has been so unabashedly right wing in its world view,” makes the case:

Cowritten and directed by Stallone, the fourth Rambo movie is a bracingly political picture — as much an argument in movie form as No End In Sight; a pro-interventionist rebuttal to all the 2007 documentaries and dramas about America losing bits of its soul in Iraq. The I-word is never spoken in Rambo, yet in its coded way, the film makes a case for why we are in Iraq and should stay there until the job is done, whenever that may be.

In the comments section below Seitz’s long and intelligent post, the author further notes that Stallone, who co-wrote and directed the film, recently endorsed John McCain, and considers this further evidence that the film is a pro-intervention parable. Overall, it’s a very savvy reading of a very workmanlike film (I focused more on the film’s working- class ethos in my review), but I think Seitz gives the film too much credit when he calls it “an argument in movie form.”

Rambo, as the protypical 80’s action hero, is a macho man’s macho man—a tough-talking, bulked-up, weapon-wielding one-man army. He’s a militarized, ultra-violent version of Superman (same jaw, same over-muscled physique, same one-man-against-the-world ideals). Violence isn’t just his way—it’s his nature. It’s central to the character in the way that, say, bedding beautiful women is inherent to James Bond. You simply can’t separate the two. Moreover, the Rambo films themselves are, essentially, violence-delivery systems. They’re simple, straightforward pictures that exist almost solely to give audiences their violent jollies and let them be on their way.

But to justify that nature and purpose, and to sell it to a movie-going audience who wants to get their fill of bloodletting but also feel fine about it, you need two things: innocent victims and a cause. Because he’s a populist hero, aimed at entertaining the masses, that cause can’t be too complicated. And because he’s an American, that cause is inevitably going to end up aligned with basic American values, meaning freedom, justice, individualism, anti-authoritarianism—ideals that will easily and quickly appeal to a wide swath of the movie-going public. The victims, then, must consist of those whose freedoms are most obviously in danger, making the go-to helpless victims those who’ve been oppressed by violent totalitarians around the world (Communists in the second and third films, sadistic Burmese military warlords in the latest outing).

It’s not so much, I think, that Rambo makes an explicit argument for intervention as that it uses the widely understood morality of intervention (and not even political intervention, per se, so much as the basic rightness of protecting or avenging the innocent) as a pretext for indulging in extreme cinematic violence. Stallone’s personal politics no doubt flavor the film, but I think it’s a mistake to assign much force to the film as argument. Violence is the series’ product, and intervention is the simplest, most broadly appealing way to sell it.