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Saturday's LAT provided us with another opportunity to play our favorite parlor game, Journalists Making Studio Executives Admit That Their Summer Movies Were Shitty. This latest round of insincere sackcloth-and-ashes fun stars Sony's Amy Pascal and Brian Grazer of Imagine, who do their part to promise the ticket-buying public through gritted teeth that this time, they really, really mean it when they say they're going to rededicate themselves to quality:

"It's really easy for all of us to blame the condition of the theaters, gas prices, alternative media, the population changes and everything else I've heard myself say," said Sony Pictures Vice Chairman Amy Pascal, whose summer releases "Bewitched" and "Stealth" flopped. "I think it has to do with the movies themselves." [...]

"There's always a year when the pundits say the movie business is over," said producer Brian Grazer, whose May release "Cinderella Man" was a disappointment despite strong reviews. "If there's a movie people want to see, they go see it. I just think we all have to do our best to make better movies."

Unfortunately, the long lead time of the film production process means that there's still plenty of crap stopping up the pipeline, but simply abandoning these projects would be prohibitively expensive. Showing an admirable commitment to this new "better movie" idea, Pascal and Grazer will add the following disclaimer to the trailers of all product developed before the New Quality Initiative: "This film was originally conceived as a cynical attempt to take your money. The studio and producers of this movie make no guarantee that you will be entertained. View at your own risk."