Jonah Goldberg looks 21st century Hollywood's moral relativism:

How’s this for a plot? There’s this international conspiracy to acquire nuclear weapons and kill millions of Americans. The conspirators act with the aid of various governments, some of which pretend to be our friends. Some of these governments are ruled by medieval tyrants who keep many wives (and even more concubines), rule by fiat, and crush, behead, hang, or otherwise mutilate dissidents, free thinkers, Christians, Jews, homosexuals, and other inconvenient souls. Other governments are ruled by fascist dictators who invade their neighbors, subvert democracy, fund terrorists, collude with Western powers in criminal schemes, illegally smuggle nuclear materials, and jail, starve, imprison, and murder children while living high on the hog.

All the while, these conspirators commit countless grievous acts of cruelty and barbarism. Though they may be savages, they’re not mindless ones. They hatch brilliantly audacious schemes to bring down skyscrapers with hijacked planes. They attack naval ships with speedboats. They manipulate the Internet, the international press, and various Western governments.

Now, call me crazy, but somewhere in there I think there’s enough material for Hollywood to “rip from the headlines” (as they say on Law and Order) some plausible bad guys and pretty good plot ideas.

Apparently I’m missing something.

Consider, for example, the last big movie of August: The Constant Gardener. Now, I haven’t seen it yet, so I’m not offering a review of the movie. Besides, from what I hear it’s a pretty good flick based on a pretty good novel by John Carré. The plot of both involves an elaborate conspiracy of Western governments and pharmaceutical companies that assassinate anyone who tries to uncover their fiendish plot to experiment on poor Africans for the benefit of rich Westerners. A trailer for the film declares that pharmaceutical companies are no better than arms dealers, preying on African poverty. The film’s director told National Public Radio that the drug companies are the “perfect bad guys.”

Now, notwithstanding the mistakes of major pharmaceutical companies, I think it’s fair to say, without fear of contradiction, “Are you on crack?!”

Nahh--just on the left. Speaking of Hollywood and moral relativism, the Libertas film blog looks at Sin City, recently issued on DVD, which Libertas describes as epitomizing "everything wrong with contemporary Hollywood":

Yes, yes, the city is a violent jungle of dripping alleys and sewers, yes, yes, human nature is bestial and sadistic, yes, yes, our social institutions are predatory and corrupt, yes, yes, the sun has been banished by perpetual symbolic darkness. There is a morality of sorts at work here, but it is so grimly existential that one can hardly tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys – they equally take for granted the meaninglessness of the universe; they are equally driven by instinct and impulse; they are equally capable of sadistic glee. All of this must seem pretty damn strange from the perspective of Des Moines or Salt Lake City or Biloxi, where the hours are not perpetually shrouded in a darkness and by no conceivable stretch of the imagination do human beings belly-creep through alleys like rats.

Too bad Hollywood seems to have given up on viewers in Des Moines, Salt Lake City, Biloxi and the rest of middle America.