Microsoft dips a toe into the movie business.

The process began at about 11:30 a.m. on Monday when several actors dressed as the Master Chief, a green-helmeted warrior from Halo, walked into the lobbies of several Hollywood studios, scripts in hand. Microsoft had taken the unusual step of paying Alex Garland, the writer of the horror film "28 Days Later", about $1 million to write a script faithful to the Halo universe.

Studio executives were asked to read it while the Master Chiefs waited in the lobbies. At Paramount, one studio executive said, the Master Chief held his helmet in his lap because he was hot. When executives were finished reading, each studio was given a proposal with Microsoft's terms and 24 hours to respond.

Hollywood Hardball

Do you see any parallels here?

Were these works of art, or were they commodities? The distinction had become blurry.

The industry does care; the people who make movies need to be able to take themselves more seriously than the people who make popcorn do.

Some of the explanation for what happened to the movies has to do with the movies and the people who make them, but some of it has to do with the audience. "It’s not so much that movies are dead, as that history has already passed them by."

In 1946, weekly movie attendance was a hundred million. That was out of a population of a hundred and forty-one million, who had nineteen thousand movie screens available to them. Today, there are thirty-six thousand screens in the United States and two hundred and ninety-five million people, and weekly attendance is twenty-five million.

In 1975, the average cost of marketing for a movie distributed by a major studio was two million dollars. In 2003, it was thirty-nine million dollars.

The primary target for the blockbuster is people with an underdeveloped capacity for deferred gratification; that is, kids.

Is the blockbuster the end of cinema?

While promoting that film over the last several weeks, Mr. Cruise engaged in an increasingly public discussion of his religion, Scientology. Then he set tongues wagging in Hollywood and elsewhere with an hourlong appearance on the May 23 "Oprah" show, during which he jumped around the set, hopped onto a couch, fell rapturously to one knee and repeatedly professed his love for his new girlfriend, the actress Katie Holmes.

Many Hollywood stars are involved with the Church of Scientology, and there is nothing particularly unusual about trumpeting a new love. But some executives at Paramount and DreamWorks have voiced concern that fans were becoming distracted from the movie, which cost some $130 million to produce.

"You can have so much attention on a particular issue that maybe the movie doesn't get as much attention as it might," Marvin Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Spielberg, a partner in DreamWorks, said of the show.

In an interview with Der Spiegel in April, Mr. Spielberg found himself defending Mr. Cruise's dedication to Scientology by comparing it to his work for his Shoah Foundation, which promotes education about the Holocaust. A DreamWorks executive called the exchange unfortunate.

How Personal Is Too Personal?

Movies have grown darker over the decades, but they've also grown more insecure.

Maybe that explains the Scientology trailers on the sets these days.

Filmmakers and studio executives no longer trust such niceties as dialogue, characterization, style or even movie star charisma to involve viewers in lovers' conflicts. Instead, today's filmmakers feel the need to pump up the volume and ramp up the firepower to make sure they hold the interest of impatient audiences.

So it's all your fault. Why can't you just pay attention?

Brad and Angelina's Old-Fashioned Romance

Who doesn't love this film?

A compelling case can be made for "The Sound of Music," as the last picture show of its kind, a triumph of craftsmanship and the apogee of the studio system that produced the kind of entertainment that dominated mid-20th-century mass culture.

A film that was easy to mock as stale and conventional in the wake of the French Nouvelle Vague (and on the brink of "Bonnie and Clyde") is far easier to appreciate now for its old-fashioned gloss and arch performances from silken pros.

"Not only too sweet for words but almost too sweet for music," Walter Kerr wrote in The New York Herald Tribune.

But from the very beginning, the public lapped it up.

"Nobody has the magic wand, or there'd be movies like this done all the time, In retrospect, it's a very good story, with very good tunes. The score doesn't really sound like a score written by 60-year-old men. There's a kind of youthfulness and honesty to the songs, about how to learn music, but also how to break down barriers. It doesn't sound like someone's trying to phony something up."

The Hills Still Resonate

The Weinsteins also recently announced a slate of films to be released by the Weinstein Company, including a sequel to Sin City due for release next summer.

Sin City duo plan horror return

There's nothing quite like a jolly good British negative review ...

Richard Dawkins: This film is even more pretentious than it is boring. Over-use of the word "paradigm" is a pretty good litmus for inclusion in the scientific equivalent of Pseud's Corner, and the film's "expert" talking heads score highly. What drives me to despair is not the dishonesty of the charlatans who peddle such tosh, but the dopey gullibility of the thousands of nice, well meaning people who flock to the cinema and believe it.

Simon Singh: I have spent my entire working life either doing science or conveying its meaning and beauty to the public. Consequently, I despise What the Bleep Do We Know!?

What The Bleep Do We Know?

"Madagascar" arouses no sense of wonder, except insofar as you wonder, as you watch it, how so much talent, technical skill and money could add up to so little.

Do I recommend this movie? No, but I do recommend this review.

'Madagascar': Escaping New York for a Real Jungle

Many in the industry are starting to ask whether the slump is just part of a cyclical swing driven mostly by a crop of weak movies or whether it reflects a much bigger change in the way Americans look to be entertained - a change that will pose serious new challenges to Hollywood.

This article is kind of hacky, but you may be interested in the data.

With Popcorn, DVD's and TiVo, Moviegoers Are Staying Home

2929 Entertainment plans to release movies in any format you want to see them, on the same day. They will close the window between when a movie is released and when it becomes available on DVD.

Smartest Guys Well Outside of Hollywood