And speaking of censorship, the Independendent Film Festival of Boston's Sunday screening of Macky Alston’s’s disturbing documentary “The Killer Within” might have been your last chance to see it. It’s been pulled from release in the wake of the Virginia Tech killings. The story of a mild-mannered septuagenarian psychology professor who suddenly revealed that he not only murdered a fellow student back in 1955 but had planned a campus massacre that would have predated Columbine by decades, it even-handedly and candidly confronts such issues as what causes mass murders and whether such killers are ever amenable to rehabilitation.

I don’t like to speak ill of the dead, and I'm sure otherwise he was a great guy, but I think in the flood of encomias for Jack Valenti someone should mention that he was instrumental in putting a stranglehold on creativity in American filmmaking and ensuring the domination of studio mediocrity for at least 40 years.

As expected, someone has figured out a way to blame the movies for the mass murder at Virginia Tech. No, it wasn’t the fact that someone with a long record of mental illness, suicidal impulses and stalking women could walk into any WalMart in Virginia and buy enough firepower to kill 32 people. It was because the guy was one of the 200 or so people in America, mostly critics like myself and others who recognized it as an outstanding film, who saw the South Korean filmmaker (there’s a connection!) Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy.

It didn’t take long for the first presidential candidate to get on the censorship bandwagon, and we can thank Don Imus for that. Or maybe Al Sharpton.

Republican presidential nobody Mike Huckabee says that if Imus gets the boot for “offensive comments,” so should everyone else, like Rosie O’Donnell and Bill Maher.

Despite successfully keeping the film out of the grasp of local alternative weekly reviewers, “Grindhouse” still laid an egg over the Easter weekend. It is a deflation of overhyped expectations on a par with last year’s (not as overpraised as “Grindhouse,” but nonetheless enthusiastically received by critics who should have known better) “Snakes on a Plane.

Since the “Grindhouse” people decided not to screen the film until Wednesday night, way too late for alternative weeklies, my review won’t appear in print until next week. If you’re interested in an early look, however, here’s what I wrote:

GRINDHOUSE

xx

Too bad Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino didn’t make the “Prevues of Coming Attractions” — Rodriguez’s “Machete” and Rob Zombie’s “Werewolf Women of the SS” — into their “Feature Presentations” in this “parody” of a 70s Z-movie twin bill.

None of us is getting any younger, and it’s probably just as well.

Maybe it was the memento mori of an orange Mickey Rourke spotted recently in Miami that leads me to that conclusion. At any rate, some recent movie developments seem to confirm its truth. Like Darren Aronofsky’s Fountain of Youth folly, “The Fountain,” which earned him withering reviews and pitiful grosses.

Only 20 months to the next election, and not a single presidential candidate has taken a stand against Hollywood indecency. But they will, they always do. How can they resist the gift of the perfect kneejerk campaign canard? One that allows them the maximum of indignation with the minimum of consequence? They figure no one is going to come to the defense of pornographers or peddlers of violence on the screen except maybe awayward ACLU lawyer or film critic and believe the vast majority of Americans will share their outrage at how sex or violence in the movies or in the media causes problems ranging from juvenile crime to Abu Ghraib.