Hollywood defies the recession

The New York Times' David Carr jets out to the coast and finds that in Hollywood, it's still morning in America.

Hollywood comes by its indifference honestly. Certainly, the stock prices of the big media companies that own the film industry are getting pounded on the market along with the rest of us, and the canyons are no doubt full of little rivers of blood as individuals watch their net worth shrink.

But out there at the box office, it is still morning in America. Four major movies opened on Friday, and they came on the heels of seven movies the week before, most of which did quite nicely, thank you. The fact that “Beverly Hills Chihuahua” has topped the box office for two weeks running and has taken in over $52 million may be one of the signs of the apocalypse, but not the kind that has anything to do with credit default swaps.

“It’s times like these that some of those jokes about the people in Los Angeles seem valid,” said Peter Bart, the editor in chief of Variety. “There has always been the suggestion that this city is not acutely conscious of what is going on in the rest of the world, and this is one of the times when it lives up to the reputation. There are many people here who don’t read a lot and because of that are less obsessed by what is happening back in New York.”

He opens with an anecdote about a woman who wasn't joking when she said she's cutting back back from latte to drip.

Add NYT: Janet Maslin writes of "The Brass Verdict," Michael Connelly's latest Los Angeles mystery novel: "[It] has the sneaky metabolism of any Connelly book. It starts slowly, moves calmly, hides pertinent bits of information in plain sight and then abruptly ratchets up its energy for the denouement."