Eugene David<br>...The One-Minute Pundit

Posted 5:11 PM by Gene

The quality of movies has not kept pace with the soaring grosses, to put it mildly. Many critics have cast a skeptical eye at the releases of 2009. For example, in a recent article lamenting the paltry offerings in the fall awards season, Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern attacked the "compromised, bloated and misshapen" movies of the season.

Even when these new movies are adapted from highbrow literary works, they cry out for better writing. Older movies were smart to employ many novelists and playwrights who honed their craft in other art forms. Perhaps today's producers need to cast a wider net in luring more gifted writers to try their hand at screenwriting. These 21st century film technicians are more wizardly than ever, but the art of graceful, light-fingered storytelling has been lost on the road to a 3-D, digitized Oz.

Consider 10 high-profile movies -- all eagerly anticipated, some likely to be in the Oscar race when nominations are announced Tuesday -- that are strikingly reminiscent of better movies from the past. In some instances these new pictures pale in comparison to classics from Hollywood's golden age. But in other cases, today's movies falter when placed against films from just a few years ago.

Somebody said that in LALA?!?!?

Or is this just another alibi for praise?

This artistic and commercial drought is partly due to production cutbacks. After flooding the market with too much schlock for much too long, the studios are releasing 40% fewer films than they did last fall. But it also reflects a feeling, widely shared by filmmakers and industry veterans, that Hollywood's production apparatus has broken down. Most movies presently manufactured by the studio process are as compromised, bloated and misshapen as they are—even in its darkest days General Motors knew that a car required four wheels and an engine—because the thinning ranks of executives at most studios no longer know how to make feature films that please broad segments of the audience.

An alibi. This hand-wringing sounds so damned FAKE -- perhaps because we've heard it all before, just as we've heard the concomitant RAVES WAY TOO OFTEN before.