Not in Hollywood, anyway: The LA Times' Patrick Goldstein asks, "With a spate of socially conscious movies like 'V for Vendetta' on the way, are the '70s back?"

Setting aside the idea that a pro-terrorist movie is "socially conscious", Libertas examines Goldstein's claims of a resurgence of seventies-style filmmaking:

1) The 1970’s introduced a new crop of fantastic filmmakers - Lucas, Spielberg, Coppola, Scorsese, Friedkin, Woody Allen, etc. Where are their like today? For example, am I supposed to believe Stephen Gaghan is as talented as Alan Pakula? He isn’t.

2) The 1970’s brought a decidedly new vision to filmmaking, both in terms of style and political content. All we’re getting today, however, is just a recycling of the same. What’s ‘new’ about blasting McCarthyism? Or spinning out plots about big-oil conspiracies involving the CIA? (We even got such a conspiracy back in Three Days of the Condor. How has Hollywood’s storyline changed?)

3) Ironically enough, the 70’s almost killed Hollywood. Although the decade produced a lot of small, edgy, wonderful films like Five Easy Pieces or The Conversation, it was basically a string of blockbusters - and their subsequent franchising - that kept the industry from collapsing in on itself. Robert Altman didn’t save Hollywood - it was The French Connection, The Exorcist, The Godfather, Star Wars, Jaws, etc., that kept the town going. So by going back to the 70’s left-wing-political mode of filmmaking, Hollywood would actually be risking its financial future again. And this takes us back to what everybody was saying about this year’s ’social activist’ Oscar films: nobody saw them.

For background material to use in my recent post about Robert Altman, I pulled out my copy of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind. I have to laugh at the tunnel-vision of the filmmakers of the 1970s (and to a certain extent, Biskind himself, as he chronicles their rise and cocaine-laden fall). Sandwiched between blockbuster crowd-favorites of the 1960s such as Dr. Zhivago, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music and The Dirty Dozen and then the Star Wars, Star Trek and Indiana Jones movies (not to mention the bulk of Steven Spielberg's first twenty years of filmmaking), they don't understand what an aberration their late '60s to early '70s films were. Much as I love some of the darker movies of the 1970s (such as M*A*S*H, Taxi Driver, Chinatown, and The Conversation), while all of these films were critics' darlings, its always been popcorn fare that's kept Hollywood afloat. .

Fortunately, as Libertas' post concludes, that's opportunity waiting to be filled.