BREAKING: Times critic Caryn James reports Hollywood is not idea-driven (Photo: Brown University)

Today in The Times, Caryn James pulls a sigh of relief from all those readers who thought her employer's new partnership with Loews Theaters would compromise its hard-wrought elitist hegemony. James' essay, "The Trouble With Films That Think," targets a list of Hollywood's "Oscar time," "Big Idea" films as antedated oversimplifications of the serious issues they attempt to tackle; North Country, for example, drops the ball in its handling of sexual harrassment in 1989, while Good Night, and Good Luck—like Times film critics—suffers from its inclination to lock itself in a newsroom without considering its subject's broader social context or impact.

But that might be oversimplifying James, so perhaps I should let her condescend in her own words:

It's as if Hollywood is finally catching up with a country at war and a world in turmoil, reflecting a cultural mood less about post-9/11 terror than about a general, persistent sense of social crisis. … What's whispered, yet rarely said out loud, is that Hollywood producers know that most of what they churn out is junk, and they are happy to seize an opportunity— especially if it's cost-efficient and Oscar-ready—to prove they are people who think.

Because these movies are Hollywood products, though, they need to navigate between inoffensively pleasing a mainstream audience and actually saying something. What results is a genre of timid films with portentous-sounding themes, works that offer prepackaged schoolroom lessons or canned debates. Hollywood may be drawn to Big Ideas, but it is always more comfortable with sound-bite-size thoughts.

Yeah, well, news flash. I mean, even The Times plans an attenuated batch of criticism for those aforementioned Loews moviegoers, which only proves that there are profits (or at least potential) to be found in emphasizing the Small Idea. To expect anything more from Hollywood is to ignore history and thus court a pretty robust denial, and to see The Times acquiesce to this fact cannot really be a surprise—even to a critic as pie-eyed as Caryn James seems.

But when James flogs films like Good Night, and Good Luck or even A History of Violence for being Ideology Lite—stylized, dogmatic self-indulgences—I wonder what she would suggest as an alternative. Using Cache and Manderlay (and The Squid and the Whale to a token degree) as fodder, James' colleague Tony Scott recently deconstructed the class themes overriding this year's New York Film Festival; are these examples of the films she thinks Hollywood should be making? Or would their depths threaten James' didacticism—her own "schoolroom lessons" that prove irrelevant when applied in the specific context her targets deserve? In other words, do Hollywood "junk" producers—with their market, history and money—really have anything to prove to anyone, and if so, what would James recommend?

Tell you what, Caryn—think about it, and by the time your boss is ready to go national with that OnMovies digest, you too might be lucky enough to get your response condensed and diffused for a whole nation of moviegoing idiots.