Juno was charming, if a bit overrated, and even our current John Hughes - Judd Apatow - revealed some conservative leanings in his very funny film “Knocked Up”. What other movie in recent memory is so contemptuous of abortion that it would have the line: “and then she had a real baby!”.

TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE

The big eyed puppets are actually more sympathetic and emotionally involving then Clooney, Redford etc. And who could resist a cheer when the female character kicks Kim Jong Il up the bum and into the shark filled pool.

And the fundamental message of the necessity of thumos is correct - even if an excess of undisciplined thumos can be very annoying.

I think a big influence on today’s movies is postmodernism, in which the personal is everything. The ’70s movies, for all their one-dimensional politics, did at least toy with the idea that there were things out there that fell into other realms. You could say “the personal is political” back then, because there was an understanding that “the political” was a valid, separate category. Some attempt was made to parse the “political”: investigate it, deconstruct it, at least hold it up to ridicule.

Today’s movies dismiss the “political” right away as a Big, Like, Total Bummer. It’s not fascinating, not the source of interesting drama and motivations, it’s just common dog poop — and the steaming pile is always left by the middle-aged white men. Yawn. The plot inevitably revolves around some character’s attempt to shovel the dog poop, point it out, photograph it, and maybe heap some dirt on it so it won’t smell so much. There’s only so much you can do with that; it’s a dramatic dead end. We know from the start that it’s dog poop, and that what we’re there to enjoy is not any compelling revelations about the poop, but rather the well-crafted chase scenes and special effects.

It’s a lot like the dramatic problem of Immediate Sex: Hollywood’s unwritten code now requires it, lest anyone appear to be suggesting that (horrors) sex should wait, but it sure isn’t dramatically interesting. All the romantic suspense, and the fun of flirtation, expire promptly with the Immediate Sex, and there is no way to resuscitate the dramatic significance of the heroine for the remainder of the film. As my young nephew says, BO-ring.

The first two Bourne movies avoided these (and other) pitfalls, as did 300, United 93, and such oddballs as Amazing Grace. Not all of today’s movies are awful. But the political thriller does require more tolerant subtlety about, well, POLITICS, than the average modern screenwriter or producer can seem to muster. Chalk that up, at least in part, to their early indoctrination by the Weekly Reader, and all the educational wickets they passed through after that.

300 was a terrible film from a historical perspective. Aside from that, it was based on a comic book plot (literally) - it is almost beyond parody if you see this as a postive film for Western Civilisation (except South Park did parody it…).

lots of 70’s era

Oh, it’s factually accurate and interesting on that level, but it’s amusing to me how the writer considers just about every possible explanation for the failure of these movies *except* the notion that perhaps American audiences don’t care for an exclusively counterfactual “Bu$hitler Lied, People Died” view of the war, or portraying American soldiers as either hapless victims of Halliburton’s evil or evil rapists and murderers.