'300'

The long-simmering cold war between Hollywood and the critics has again flared hot with the release of "300," an effects-driven popcorn movie about the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 B.C., when 300 Spartan soldiers went down fighting against a Persian horde.

While the reviewers hacked away at the film — "Everything in this pea-brained epic is over-scaled and overwrought" said The Christian Science monitor; "Imagine a large cast trapped in a series of spectacular screen savers," wrote The Boston Globe — the industry fumed. Typical was the outburst by trade journal Variety's editor in chief, Peter Bart, who called critics irrelevant and out-of-touch with pop culture.

Evidence for his view is the $208-million box office the film has already done in the United States. The industry argument is that if "300" sells, it means people like it, and it is then ipso facto "good." (At least among a fan-boy demographic.) It seems almost pedantic to point this out, but not everything that's popular is "good." In fact, many things that are insanely popular at one point — Michael Jackson, Tony Blair, crystal meth, cigarettes, pre-emptive wars — don't look so great the next morning.