I think you are "Right On!" in everything you have said, Alex William. But I think you may be taking LA entertainment writer Neal Gabler too literally.

Personally, I think the real target of Gabler's "Movies Don't Matter" piece is our air-headed [dare I say "heirheaded"?] celebrity culture - a culture neatly captured in this recent NY Times piece by Frank Rich:

Two Top Guns Shoot Blanks
By FRANK RICH
New York Times, June 19, 2005

Extract:

"The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as "a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/19/opinion/19rich.html?hp

After all, it is our mass culture which drives the mass of the movies we get, not the other way around.

If our movies "Just Don't Matter", it's because our mass culture is trivializing everything which does matter.