If I was a mother with an infant child and no marketable skills other than being attractive enough to attract powerful rich guys in their 50s and receiving $15 grand per month to live on, I would subsist on $6 grand per month and sock the rest away for a rainy day. In a year’s time I’d have over $100 grand in savings, and I could use this for investments if and when the gravy train stops.

“Hey, Kirk — We last said hello at the Ed Harris tribute dinner in Santa Barbara on 10.2. I’ll always remember our discussions on the Laredo set of Eddie Macon’s Run in ’82, which I visited for a N.Y Post piece, and especially your offering me a lift on a private jet back to Houston. Love that you have a Facebook thing going.” — posted on Kirk Douglas‘s Facebook page a few minutes ago.

If Days of Heaven had never been made by Terrence Malick in the mid ’70s and come out instead as a brand-new film a month or so ago with Jake Gyllenhaal, say, in the Richard Gere role and Reese Witherspoon in the Brooke Adams part, it would be the hands-down Best Picture choice of every film critic and Academy member out there. It would be so far ahead of everything else it wouldn’t be funny.

“If moviegoers have delivered a message in the last few months,” N.Y. Times reporter Michael Cieply observed yesterday, “it is that they want their films, for the moment, at least, to be a lot more fun than their lives.” As opposed to last year or the year before when moviegoers were flocking to movies that weren’t much fun? Is Cieply supposing that The Departed, let’s say, wouldn’t sell as many tickets now as it did two years ago? I doubt that.

And yet the news that Mamma Mia!, God help us, has brought in a higher gross in the U.K. than Titanic is hard to ignore. It’s now the top-grossing film of all time in that country, having made $107.7 million after 22 weeks in theaters. Except it’s a fairly sickening thing to sit through. How to explain its enormous popularity beyond the fact that most people have degraded taste buds? Cieply’s theory about the spread of some kind of worldwide shallowness virus — a desperate need to be “entertained” at any cost — may be valid.

So let’s say for the sake of argument that up escapism, which 90% or 95% of the time tends to arrive in movies that are vapid, coarse, downmarket nightmares, is on the rise. I understand this if it’s true. The same kind of tastes (Busby Berkeley musicals, screwball comedies) were strong in the 1930s Depression era. But of course, that decade also brought forth the Warner Bros. gangster genre, the Universal horror films and all those Paul Muni, Jimmy Cagney and Bette Davis movies.

Every now and then we have to remind ourselves that there’s nothing in the world so spiritually deflating as entertainments that try to push feel-good vibes as an end in themselves. (Whereas a feel-good movie in the service of something honest or profound can be wonderful.) Because the simple effort of trying to make shallow entertainment whoopee is the strongest possible confirmation that there’s an extremely dark and malevolent river running through people’s souls — one that people feel a great need to fight or suppress.

To my mind there is nothing so loathsome as the mentality behind “Boy, do we need it now!” — that infamous copy line for That’s Entertainment! (’74), the first of a short series of anthology pics about the studio-era musicals, produced by Jack Haley, Jr. That’s Entertainment! wanted to be a tonic for the noirish “down” period of the early to mid ’70s, but what do we think of now when we think of that period? Great movies, of course — the golden era of all them Easy Riders and Raging Bulls.

My point is that the empty vessels of any generation, era or time period will always say, “Can we please have more ‘happy’ movies? We need to get away from our cares and woes, which are worse now than usual.” Things are worse now, of course. The economy is a nightmare. But we’re also talking about a pretty weak bunch of people. Folks who always have two or three different kinds of prescription drugs in their bathroom cabinet, gallon-sized Haagen Dazs containers in the freezer, Famous Amos cookies in the food cabinet, etc. I could go on and on.

The Directors Guild of America wll bestow an honorary membership upon Roger Ebert at the group’s 61st annual awards dinner, to be held at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza hotel on 1.31.09.

There’s now a Facebook fansite for Muntadar al-Zaidi — a.k.a., the Shoe- Thrower — up and running. Obviously not his own as al-Zaidi has been in custody since the shoe-throwing incident last Sunday evening.

A Int’l Herald Tribune account recaps as follows: “At a news conference with Bush and Maliki on Sunday evening in Baghdad’s Green Zone, Zaidi, a reporter for Al Baghdadia, a satellite television network, rose from his seat and threw one of his shoes at Bush’s head. He shouted: ‘This is a gift from the Iraqis. This is the farewell kiss, you dog!’

“Bush ducked and the shoe missed him. Zaidi then threw his other shoe, shouting, “This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq!” The shoe hit the wall behind Bush.”

My Valkyrie reaction is that it’s…uhm, not too bad. A passable sit, relatively okay, decent enough, I wasn’t in pain. Except it feels as if this World War II-era thriller, about an effort by a group of patriotic German officers to assassinate Adolf Hitler in the summer of 1944, is taking place inside an underground bunker. There’s something muffled and suppressed about it. As Tom Cruise and his co-conspirators go about to trying to bring down the Nazi regime, it just doesn’t feel all that suspenseful. As much as I wanted it to be The Day of the Jackal, it’s not.

Okay, it’s “interesting” as far as it goes. But I’m sitting in a Manhattan screening room in late 2008 and going, “What does this have to do with me?” And I didn’t say that while watching WALL*E.

But I just figured out how to make Valkyrie work. It’s too late to do anything now, of course, but if Singer and that king-shit, full-of-himself screenwriter Chris McQuarrie had only come to me two or three years ago…

My idea would have been to go the Quentin Tarantino/Inglorious Bastards route and tell the story of Cruise’s Col. Claus von Stauffenberg as a realistic wish-fulfilment fantasy along the lines of Occurence at Owl Creek Bridge .

In other words, show Hitler being killed by the briefcase bomb, the subsequent coup d’etat succeeding, the Nazi higher-ups fleeing for their lives, a truce being struck between the new German government and Allied forces, and Russian troops agreeing to stand down and not invade Berlin. Have it all work out just peachy with Tom von Staufenberg hailed as a national hero…and then jerk the chain 20 minutes before it ends and show that the plot in fact failed, that von Stauffenberg was in fact executed, and so on.

That movie, at the very least, would have held my attention a bit more.

The three biggest problems I had with Valkyrie are (a) I can’t quite accept Cruise as von Stauffenberg — the Jerry Maguire/Vanilla Sky/Mission Impossible factor simply checkmates his believability as a German military guy; (b) I didn’t care for Newton Thomas Sigel‘s mildly drab cinematography (unless there was something wrong, that is, with the projection standards in the bunker-like screening room I saw it in) — I just know that the photography seemed a little murky and shadowed down; and (c) the accents aren’t uniform — Cruise speaks like the right-wing U.S. Senator he played in Lions for Lambs, the British actors speak in their native British accents, the German-born Thomas Krentzman speaks German-accented English, etc.

This last shortcoming is a very important and persistent one. All you need to do if you’re making an English-language movie set in a foreign-language culture (or in an ancient one) is to set up an across-the-board system and have everyone stick to it.

In Vicente Amorim ‘s not-yet-released Good, set in Germany of the 1930s and early ’40s, everyone speaks in British accents — and it works fine. In Edward Dmytryk‘s The Young Lions (1958), the German characters all speak English in German accents — and it’s more or less okay. In Spartacus, all the elite Romans (except for John Gavin‘s Julius Ceasar) speak with British accents, and all the slave warriors speak Americanese. In Oliver Stone‘s Alexander, the Macedonian soldiers speak with Irish accents — and it pretty much works.

But the accents are catch-as-catch-can in Valkyrie, and I found that hugely distracting.

Yesterday Fox 411‘s Roger Friedman said he’d been “banned” from seeing Bryan Singer‘s Valkyrie, and then Patrick “Big Picture” Goldstein had a discussion with Mike Vollman about the Friedman situation, during which Vollman said that the New York-based columnist “just wasn’t invited…screenings are a privilege, not a right, and [if Freidman had] indicated a desire to be open-minded and not telegraphed his intentions ahead of time, we would’ve acted differently.”

The interesting part comes when Goldstein writes that he doesn’t “like the idea of studios banning writers from screenings, since judging from the state of my frosty relations with a couple of studios right now, it’s quite possible that, ahem, I could be next.” I don’t believe that for a nano-second. Nobody would dare ban Goldstein because of the lingering (i.e., actually much diminished) don’t-tread-on-me factor stemming from his L.A. Times employment. On top of which he’s finally too much of a political chess player and not nearly enough of an emotionally free-swinging, Miles Davis-styled loose cannon to get banned by anyone. I know, having experienced a few temporary freeze-outs by some major distributors in my time.

Friedrich Nietzsche once said words that I’ve always lived by: “When in danger, always move forward.” If a studio bans you, my advice is to just go “okay, whatever” and focus your energies elsewhere. Keep your head down, keep moving. Most of the time the anger over the banning issue subsides and the studio reconsiders after three or four months. I’m proud to say that right now I am no one’s shit list right now.

In a 12.15 petition, Tom Hanks, George Clooney, Alec Baldwin and more than 125 other SAG members urged guild leaders to deep-six a scheduled strike authorization vote. “We support our union and we support the issues we’re fighting for, but we do not believe in all good conscience that now is the time to be putting people out of work,” the petition said.