Item: 1 LA Times entertainment section

I wondered this week, for the first time, why it is that I even read the entertainment section.  If you've never seen the LA Times entertainment section, it's largely ads - and I do mean largely - full-page movie ads, one after another, and some related articles.  I have always looked through it at least because it's where the comics are.  But given that I have so little interest in movies, directors, actors, or the like, I could probably just skip it.

I'm becoming increasingly tired of the overlap of Hollywood culture with my life.  But I always find myself tempering this reaction, because it implicates some people who I like as people, who believe in what they're doing.

I learned, via one of last week's entertainment sections, that there's a movie coming out called Nativity, which is the movie version of Luke Chapter 2.  My heart sank at this, because I really couldn't imagine it being anything other than horrible.  I don't care how hard they worked to make it look authentic.  I don't care what the director's credentials are.  I've heard the music, and I've seen the trailer:  "One family.  One journey.  One child who would change the world.  Forever."  It looks to me like cheap dramatics through and through, and who needs this?  Who needs a movie version of a story that's already perfect?

In a room full of writers, I can bash the movies anytime I want, and talk freely about the ways in which a movie cannot add anything to a story, it can only take away from it.  But in most other social environments, I feel the need to play nice.  I don't generally like to stomp on other people's enthusiasms (and I expect the same in return).  This requires that socially, I mostly do not say what I think about movies in general and movies in particular.  This doesn't mean that I don't ever like movies or think that some are good, but I just don't share the assumption that the movies are Absolutely The Most Important Communications Venue in Our Culture and thus must be honored above all else.  So I wind up feeling like I've been untrue to myself by playing along in a conversation with people who believe this, as if I agree.

I used the word overlap deliberately.  I love LA more and more, but I grow more and more weary of all things Hollywood.  In a way you might say I live in the wrong city, but in a way I don't.  LA is much more than Hollywood; it's just that you can't ever totally separate it either.