Those Durned Kids! No Ideology!

Patrick Goldstein's column in today's LA Times, "The Big Picture," crabs that young moviegoers these days don't listen to critics. He has some good points, but they're pureed in with the sort of dumb statements some column writers make when they're trying to be profound. Such as:

"[T]oday we're in an era in which shared enthusiasm matters more than analysis, stylistic cool trumps emotional substance. The world has changed. The vanguard filmmakers of the '60s — the era that spawned our last great generation of critics — were Godard, Kubrick and Antonioni, filmmakers under the spell of the intellectual fervor sparked by existentialism and Marxism. The filmmakers with a youth-culture following today, be it Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson, are largely ideology free, masters of detachment and stylistic homage. Like their audience, they prefer irony to Big Ideas. "

Riiiight -- no detachment, stylistic homage, or irony in the Sixties.