Therein lies the catch. In New York and Hollywood, war is bad and valor worse, but the less sophisticated folk back home can't seem to shake off the quaint notion that it is sweet and proper to die for one's country. Make the bloodshed sickeningly graphic, scissor out the moralizing, and replace John Wayne with Tom Hanks, and the critics will fall all over themselves to congratulate you for showing the naked face of war. Too many veterans have praised the authenticity of Saving Private Ryan for it to be casually dismissed as an exercise in political correctness, and there is certainly something to be said for a film that tells the unvarnished truth about the ghastly brutality of modern war, though the battle scenes are so explicit that the viewer quickly becomes numbed by the mounting carnage. At least John Wayne knew why he was pretending to fight.
Small movies can also aspire to pseudo-seriousness.
Take The Opposite of Sex, the summer movie most admired by upscale critics, some of whom actually described it as daring, a very bad sign indeed. To be sure, the film starts out nicely, with Christina Ricci playing a sociopathic teenager who gleefully wreaks havoc in the lives of a group of people, most of them gay, who are variously obsessed with sex. But to treat such matters satirically is to run afoul of the prevailing cultural assumption that sex is good and more sex better. Never were two prettier people cast in two less likely parts. In the age of postmodernism, such clarity is only possible within the stylized context of a wisecrack-encrusted genre movie, preferably one in which the good guy is a bad guy, or at best a regular guy.