Victor Davis Hanson writes that you go into these small artisan garrets in California like Hollywood, and, like a lot of small towns on the West Coast, it's not surprising that when people get bitter, they cling to identity politics and religions such as Scientology:

It is more interested in political correctness than profits, as the Iraq War movie bombs attest. Talent is no longer gravitating to Hollywood, but staying put in Europe and Asia. Alternate media, from the Internet to video games to cable television, mean that fewer go to the movies anymore (I went once in the last 12 months). The old bread-and-butter genres—like the Western or the war movie—are either moribund or merely landscapes for political revisionism.

One difference is the steady decline in the quality of male actors. We simply do not have a James Stewart, Burt Lancaster, Henry Fonda, Gregory Peck, Bill Holden, or John Wayne any more, much less brilliant against-the grain actors like a Robert Duvall, Lee Marvin, Jack Palance, or a Yul Brenner, nor character actors like a Slim Pickens or a Ben Johnson.

Today’s he-man actors don’t even sound the same as the old breed. Compare the speech patterns and intonation of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, Spencer Tracey, Henry Fonda or Bill Holden to those of a Sean Penn, Tom Cruise, or Tom Hanks—and there seems to be a new, but separate species of male. The appeal of a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, or Daniel Day-Lewis is that they sound like, well, the old breed rather than sensitive metrosexuals.

Some of you will sigh: Victor, Victor, actors only reflect the society that produces them. We don’t have a Henry Fonda or Jimmy Stewart because we aren’t Fondas and Stewarts any more.

Perhaps, but what I also don’t understand is that we know that excellent war films—Breaker Morant, Saving Private Ryan, and Das Boot—win over critics and audiences. Why then do we keep seeing snoozers like Redacted, Lions for Lambs, or Stop Loss? Is there that little talent left?

A few years ago, Frederica Mathewes-Green wrote a superb essay on the transformation of Hollywood actors from men to perpetual adolescents. And if you work in an industry when one of your leading screenwriters can draft an essay for general consumption that includes the phrase...

This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don't mean people, I mean white men.

...your product is likely to reflect those values. Even if, as VDH notes, it costs that industry literally hundreds of millions at the domestic box office.

Speaking of movies, Glenn Reynolds links to a Popular Mechanics article that wonders when will Hollywood make another intelligent sci-fi movie. That's a topic we also discussed in this post from late 2006. In an industry that adopts to change as slowly as Hollywood (that's not really a knock--it's a titanic enterprise creating multi-million dollar budgeted movies involving armies of craftsmen and actors), most of the reasons haven't changed in the interim.