Who decides after 50 years of avoiding media attention that they want to jump into big-time politics as a U.S. Senator, a big-league, rough-and-tumble job that’s not for novices or the faint of heart, and has always demanded some basic fire-in the belly ambition? Caroline Kennedy just doesn’t strike me as the type.

She seems to have warmed to the idea of filling Hillary Clinton‘s Senate seat because she wants to do good things and help build a better future in the genteel climate of an Obama administration, but I think she lacks the necessary steel. Or so my character instinct tells me. Wanting to serve doesn’t mean zip if you don’t have the moxie and the social gregariousness and shrewd backroom moves that any tough operator needs. Plus she has a very dull speaking style.

Just today some press people asked about Kennedy’s qualifications and whatnot and she ducked into a black SUV because, according to this N.Y. Times story, her aides didn’t want her to talk. If Ms. Kennedy can’t get into a little tennis ball back-and-forth with the press about her ambition and background and whatnot, why in hell is she lobbying to be a U.S. Senator? No would-be legislators run from the press unless they’re facing indictment or some other kind of career-threatening situation.

In a post up today, Filmmaker‘s Nick Dawson asks Nothing But The Truth director-screenwriter Rod Lurie if he knew in advance that the film’s distributor, the Yari Film Group, was headed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

“I didn’t know,” Lurie responds. “I found out about 6pm [on December 12] and it was really, absolutely shocking. At this moment, I still haven’t spoken to Bob [Yari] and I’m sure he’s got incredibly important things to do. None of us really knows what it’s really going to mean, how it’s going to affect the film.

“Probably it will have it’s Academy [Awards] qualifying run and [then] there’s going to be a situation where it probably will have to get sold to another distributor. It’s rather stunning.

“This town is littered with the corpses of movies that got trapped in bankruptcies and companies that went under and we just want to do everything we can not to become one of those films. It’s very possible. I’m so proud of all the actors involved in this film, and I can’t believe that I’ve spent over a year working on nothing but this – my whole heart is in it – and then goodbye Charlie. But hopefully it will work itself out, because the Yari people are good people. They just got really trapped in really horrible economic vise.”

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.”