There's an old joke that when Hollywood films tank, their reels get cut up into thousands of guitar picks. And this year, it does seem like lots and lots of Fender Premium Celluloid picks are being created out of lots of far from premium movies, doesn't it? As I wrote a few days ago, in a post that looked askance at two recent movies, "when did Hollywood decide that all of its new films must suck?"

Tech Central Station and Power Line add two more to the list: Doom and North Country, regarding the latter, a few weeks ago, the Libertas film blog described it thusly:

So the other night I’m smoking cigars at a Beverly Hills restaurant with a screenwriter friend of ours and a development executive (I’d received a rare permission from Govindini to light-up in her vicinity), and we get to discussing the sort of movies we all despise. And what do we come up with? What sort of movie would it take some kind of gruesome dental procedure to make us watch? We all agreed on this one:

Cue trailer for Charlize Theron’s new film, “North Country.”

Feel free to check out this trailer for yourself. The gist of it is this: girl wants to work in coal mine; girl works in coal mine and gets sexually harassed by brutal, predatory males; girl files sexual harassment lawsuit and wins. Conveniently enough, this girl happens to look like … Charlize Theron, which is probably something of a rarity among coal miners. [Wait, am I guilty of stereotyping here?] Along the way we get a lot of earnest speechifying in courtrooms (including from Woody Harrelson, playing a lawyer). Sissy Spacek even shows up - remember her from Coal Miner’s Daughter? Here she apparently plays a coal miner’s mother. How quaint.

What we have here essentially is another earnest, humorless attempt from Hollywood to ennoble audiences who probably would prefer being entertained. Who is going to go see this film? Women won’t see this. If I may be so bold, most women out there do not want to be coal miners. They do want equality in the workplace, but it’s fair to assume that women are happy leaving the coal mining duties to men.

Men will not want to see this film, with the possible exception of liberal, urbanite males with a masochism complex. Why? If men want to see Ms. Theron in a movie on a Friday night, it’s not to see her slug coal around, or harangue us in a courtroom. Trust me on this one.

Why can’t the industry understand this stuff?

Understand it? Heck, they're proud of these sorts of celluloid pedantry, as this recent, glowing USA Today article illustrates.

The polar opposite of this mentality are Matt Stone and Trey Parker, the men behind South Park, so let's let them describe it in action:

TP: People in the middle of the country do not matter AT ALL to the entertainment people in LA and New York. People in the entertainment industry are by and large whore-chasing drug-addict f***-ups, right? But they still believe they’re better than the guy in Wyoming who really loves his wife and takes care of his kids and is a good, outstanding, wholesome person. Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they’re the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.

HI: PC Hollywood treats regular people like children, but also doesn’t believe they can understand or appreciate smart jokes or irony.

MS: We see that all the time…in Hollywood, there’s a whole feeling that they have to protect Middle America from itself We can all laugh at Jew jokes and gay jokes, and I can make a black joke because I’m enlightened here in Hollywood, but don’t put that on TV because when people in Nebraska hear it, they’re going to yell the ‘N word’ at the next black person. Political correctness started from there, with the idea that the middle of the country can’t handle sophisticated jokes. And that’s why ‘South Park’ was a big bit up front, because it doesn’t treat the viewer like a f***ing retard.

It's not that Hollywood is stuck on stupid, to borrow General Honore's brilliant catch phrase; stupid and fun, we'll expect from Hollywood and will happily accept (see: early careers of Spielberg and Lucas). But stupid and preachy? Include me out, as one famous Hollywood tycoon was known to say--in an era when Hollywood had far less contempt for its domestic audience.