All that Valkyrie neg-dissing you’re reading and hearing from online reporters and columnists (which I haven’t contributed to with any real gusto, being something of a mezzo-mezzo responder), is one reason why there’s some talk/expectation that Valkyrie will become a “surprise hit” over the next Xmas weekend. The new-release champs with the “just entertain us” crowd will be Adam Sandler‘s Bedtime Stories (which has big family appeal), Old Yeller/Marley and Me, and Valkyrie in third place, I’m told.

I was listening to a couple of 20-something DJ/talkshow guys on FM radio during yesterday’s big drive. Movies were on the table, and one of them, sounding like a fairly well-educated GenYer, said that when he sees a black-and-white film on the tube he goes into an auto-pilot reception mode because in his head (and, he said, in the heads of a lot of his contemporaries, raised on visual intensity/CGI/video games/IMAX/3D) “all black and white movies are the same movie.” My mouth fell open. I give up, I said to myself.

Caroline Kennedy–Chris Matthews link from Politico‘s Anne Schroeder Mullins…fine.

On 7.21 Patrick Sauriol, webmaster of the legendary Coming Attractions website which ruled from the mid ’90s to the early 21st Century, announced a re-launch of the site — Coming Attractions 2.0. He said it would be up and rolling within 30 days or so. It’s now five months later, and a Beta version is finally up and rolling.

What’s missing at this stage is new information inside the Movie Database. Sequential backstage histories of this and that film is mainly what I used to visit CA for in the old days. I remember going to CA over and over when I worked at People from ’96 to ’98 — everyone in the office who covered any aspect of the film business did. If you want this kind of thing now (i.e., possibly reliable traces of the sometimes dirty skinny about any given film, early screening reactions, early location photography) you go to the IMDB commenters, among other options.

MTV.com’s Josh Horowitz claims to have had an “interesting chat” with with Benjamin Button director David Fincher. With Button finally opening tomorrow, it’ll be interesting to hear HE reader comments about it. I’ve said before that it’s basically a languid, atmospherically-driven thing — a film with exquisite, top-of-the-line chops from start to finish that nonetheless underwhelms in a pleasant and soothing way.

I love that transition period when you’re leaving a warm building and walking out into 5 degree weather, when the warmth falls away like a fair-weather friend and you can feel micro-sized ice crystals forming inside your nose within seconds. It’s a feeling of natural wowness comparable in warm-weather California terms only to swallowing a mouthful of salt water after being kicked around by the backwash undertow of a large wave.

A boogie-boarder could conceivably drown off the California coast if things went the wrong way, and a person could easily die in Connecticut weather like this if you were suddenly stuck outside without a heavy overcoat and no place to duck into. This is extremely serious cold, and I’m about to get into an even more Arctic-like environment tonight when I arrive in Upper Siberia, about 45 minutes west of Rochester.

Last night Vice-President-elect Joe Biden told Larry King that he felt “somewhat badly” for President Bush, and that he feels that “the incident in Iraq was unfortunate, that guy throwing the shoes…it was just, it was just uncalled for .” But it was called for. It was absolutely called for and then some. This is why Muntadhar al-Zeidi‘s rude and intemperate act triggered such a huge reaction worldwide. Because of a consensus that there was enormous justification for what he did.

As I wrote on 12.15.08, al-Zeidi “has articulated a popular rage in the same way Peter Finch ‘s Howard Beale did in Network. Throwing those shoes was an act of civil disobedience no different than Boston patriots throwing tea into the harbor. Al-Zeidi did an impolite thing, but he didn’t use a weapon or hurt anyone and said what an awful lot of people (myself included) feel.”

I’m sorry, but when Rep. Gary Ackerman essentially called Caroline Kennedy the Democratic Sarah Palin, a voice within begrudgingly admitted that he wasn’t far off. Kennedy has been acting way too timid and reclusive and un-Kennedy-like to be handed Hilary Clinton‘s Senate seat. She just doesn’t have the strength of character that people generally want from a big-time legislator, let alone one with her lineage and last name.

The lady is clearly unwilling to intellectually engage off the cuff. She seems wimpy. She lacks pizazz. I’m not detecting any serious gumption or intestinal fortitude. There’s absolutely none of that Chris Matthews quality in her at all…none of that basic back-slapping, yaw-haw, gregarious, chug-a-brewski-with-the-proles quality that a good politician is supposed to have or at least simulate on the campaign trail.

Between the Palin comparison, her hide-away “listening tour” of upper New York State and recently declining to release her financial background, I think Kennedy should just pack it in. She doesn’t have it. I love the idea of a strong, bright, compassionate woman with a marquee name serving as New York’s Senator, but Kennedy doesn’t seem to have the ability to stand the heat in the kitchen, and I really do think she’s done at this point because of this.

Ackerman said “Kennedy’s name and family wouldn’t, and shouldn’t, be enough to get her appointed to the U.S. Senate seat that Hillary Rodham Clinton will vacate once she is sworn in as secretary of state. Everyone knows who she is, but I’m not sure what she is. Eventually she has to get in the ring and face the public.'”

I was too lazy to respond to Roger Friedman‘s 12.22 item about Speed-the-Plow costar Raul Esparza addressing a Sunday-matinee audience about the departed, sushi-afflicted, mercury-poisoned Jeremy Piven…so here it is 24 hours late.

The puzzler for me wasn’t Esparza (whose performance was more off-the-wall manic than Piven’s when I caught a performance in late November) saying “today was the first time I really enjoyed playing this show” and “I hope you weren’t expecting a big TV star.” The puzzler was about how costar Elizabeth Moss allegedly “sobbed” while Esparza was dissing Piven, presumably out of sympathy. Why? Who sobs for a spoiled temperamental weenie ? What kind of value system does Wilson live and feel by?

Vanity Fair‘s Julian Sancton has assembled a jukebox sampler of 11 movie-music clips, and after listening to most of them (I refuse to sample David Hirtschfelder‘s Australia music) it finally hit me why I’ve been so taken with Revolutionary Road all this time. Thomas Newman‘s score is so moving in its sadness and simplicity, so finely woven into the mood of the film (and vice versa) that it’s like a character unto itself.

The other films and their composers sampled in Sancton’s piece: Che (Alberto Iglesias), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Alexandre Desplat), The Dark Knight (Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard), Defiance (Joshua Bell), Frost/Nixon (Hans Zimmer ), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ( John Williams), The Reader (Nico Muhly), Slumdog Millionaire (A.R. Rahman) and WALL*E (Thomas Newman again).