I was too busy on Christmas Day actually watching movies to bother reading or (as you hopefully noticed) writing about them, so today I'm playing a lot of catch up. I guess that led me to read too quickly, because at first glance, I thought the first graph of Nancy Ramsay's piece in yesterday's New York Times ended like this: "[New Orleans] has become perhaps the year's favorite setting as filmmakers race to exploit the implications of the storm."

Ramsay actually wrote that filmmakers are rushing to "explore" the implications of Hurricane Katrina, but when Michael Moore and Spike Lee are setting the standard, is there really that much of a difference? Athough Ramsay makes some small differentiation between the carpetbaggers now jetting into the area from New York and LA, and the local filmmakers who are using the catastrophe to fund or sell films that they couldn't get off the ground pre-Katrina, she doesn't seem particularly interested in exploring (ha ha) that dialectic. You get the idea that the two approaches are about equal – either way, tragedy and despair are feeding into some kind of swindle.

Am i just being cranky, or does the idea of filmmakers gold rushing New Orleans – reported by the New York Times as if mid-yawn – rub anyone else in a very wrong way?