I haven’t laughed out loud at anything in days, and along comes this little New York Daily News story and…it happened. Each and every kid who was in that theatre — boy or girl, no matter how old — probably has the memory of that young guy hanging himself burned into their brains now…for life. The cruelest jokes are the funniest. (Mort Sahl said that.)

It’s called The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Disney, 12.9). Fine. And I’m supposed to give a shit because…? I’ve read Lorne Manly’s N.Y. Times article and I’m still shaking my head. Narnia would be another take-down movie if I cared enough to get into it.

If I were given to cynicism I would say it’s far more usual than unusual these days for big-studio marketing departments to distort, misrepresent and otherwise lie about what an upcoming movie is like, or is even about. If you wanted to really get cynical you could say it’s not movie quality (and I don’t mean esoteric Jim Hoberman-type quality, but quality your mother would recognize if she could be dragged out of her house and down to a multiplex) …it’s not quality that determines success these days, but to what degree big-studio marketers are going to fuck things up for you. That’s the determining factor…will marketing execs re-imagine and re-edit what your film is to a mild degree (like Fox has with those Sarah Jessica Parker-obsessed trailers for The Family Stone), or will they misrepresent your film all to hell in order to sell it to The Stupids and get the big opening weekend numbers no matter what? The result of which is that long-term nurturing and appreciation of your film is pretty much left to chance.

Let’s take the kids to Chicken Little. Supposed to be kinda crappy …screw it…take ’em anyway. Give Disney the $30 million weekend it doesn’t deserve. I read Jarhead blows also…let’s go see it! Way of showing support for the troops in Iraq…sorta kinda. Boring movie…nudging $30 million by Sunday! Seen Saw II yet? Blood, dismemberment, piece-of-shit…I’m there! The Legend of Zorro movie is cruddy also…let’s pay $20 plus parking, popcorn and drinks to see it and help encourage lazy Hollywood producers to make more like it! As long as I don’t have to sit through a good film, I don’t care.

The only thing I’ve heard about Steven Gaghan’s Syriana (Warner Bros., 11.23 limited) that’s sunk in to any degree is that it’s “very political.” In other words, the person who conveyed this view feels it doesn’t deliver as well in emotional, beating-heart terms. Ignore it…blue-state-persuasion people really want this movie to work. The excellent trailer suggests that the aim of Syriana (a really annoying title) is to be a Traffic-type exploration of the who-what-why behind 9/11..a probing of the politics of Big Oil, Middle Eastern subcurrents, radical Islamic rage and alienation…the whole magillah. One of those tapestries with several different characters and storylines in which “everything is connected.” Gaghan’s Oscar-winning Traffic screenplay showed him to be a superb converter-transposer of gritty real-world mucky-muck into highly absorbing movie material (okay, with Steven Soderbegh’s modest assistance), and the first film he directed, 2002’s Abandon with Katie Holmes, was certainly tolerable…stylistically assured, engaging here and there. The first Syriana press screening happens on 11.9 or thereabouts, and I’m psyched. But why am I getting this feeling of hesitancy from Warner Bros. publicity? Are they feeling antsy about the political content and feel it might be safer on some level to sit on the film until a couple of weeks before the 11.23 limited opening…or are they exuding this dithering vibe for some other reason? Pic opens wide on 12.3.

Hypothesis: Comedy Central or HBO or Showtime runs a series called “The Avengers,” about a squad of vigilantes, their activities funded by some secretive billionaire, who go out and find tech- support staffers who pick up the phone for various manufacturers of computer-related products like IPAQ handhelds and Norton Antivirus…both the out-sourcing morons in India and their U.S. counterparts…and then take them to remote warehouses, tie them down and coolly and methodically torture them in ways that would appall the Marquis de Sade, gradually inducing in each victim a ghastly, horrible, beyond-painful death. I’m just saying in a very calm and loving and Christian way I would not only watch this series, but I would send in regular cash donations to the producers.

Brokeback Mountain (Focus Features, 12.9) is about a coupla cowpokes in love with each other, but it’s not a “gay” film…not even vaguely. It’s a epic modern western with a tragic twist. It’s about lamenting, about fearfulness, about being stuck.

So what about Rachel Weicz deserving a Best Suppporting Actress nom for her work in The Constant Gardener? Right up there with In Her Shoes‘ Shirley MacLaine, Match Point‘s Scarlett Johannson, The Family Stone‘s Diane Keaton, Junebug‘s Amy Adams, et. al. And who except a total Producers water-carrier would seriously put forward Uma Thurman’s performance as any kind of competitor? Playing a dumb-blonde sex poodle in a broad, brassy comedy-musical…? C’mon!

Gold Derby’s Tom O’Neill, writing on the L.A.Times-owned site “The Envelope,” is projecting Peter Jackson’s King Kong as a credible Oscar nominee for Best Picture because director-writer Peter Jackson has taken three hours to “flesh out the love story between Naomi Watts and Adrien Brody” and “expand the psychological complexity of the movie’s lead characters, thus giving them more substance, while also fleshing out the plot so it can better explore the theme of commercial man exploiting innocent beast.” Uh-huh…and the 100-minute 1933 original didn’t address this theme sufficiently?

It’s not just me any more. New York Press critic Armond White has stood up and strongly praised Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat, which recently came out on a Fox Home Video DVD. Lifeboat shows Hitchcock using “suspense tactics to reveal spiritual and philosophical mystery, [and] thus achieves profundity akin to The Birds. Hitchcock’s famous toying with psychological dread [in this film] has a complexity that also speaks to the present political moment. Contemporary critics feel no relation to John Steinbeck’s story, to judge by the DVD’s recent reviews; they simply dismiss it as WWII sentimentality. [But] Lifeboat deals with moral and sexual compulsion no less effectively than Vertigo. Hitchcock looks deeply into the circumstances of human crisis and creates in your mind (before your eyes) the essence of their terror, passion, vitality and horror. The reason Godard called Hitchcock ‘the greatest poet among us’ was to point out this gift for imagining the depth of human experience in the most deceptively simple, ‘popular’ ways. Between silent Griffith and Spielberg/DePalma, Hitchcock stands as the finest exemplar of genre filmmaking. But actually, his best films transcend genre and become strangely poetic visions”.

An interesting coincidence that the three biggest take-down movies of the holiday season — The Producers, King Kong and Munich — are all Universal releases. Did I just say that? I just know that prior to every holiday season a journo consensus forms about which of the big hoo-hahs are cruisin’ for a bruisin’ in the biggest, most self-aggrandizing way…movies coming in with such high expectations that’s probably a good idea to smack them down on general principle. I don’t want to hate anything or anyone, but if I had to predict which of the Big Three will give forward-thinking moviegoers the most difficulty, I would have to presume The Producers, closely followed by King Kong. I’ll be surprised if Munich is a problem on its own terms, but the teaser trailer (see item below) suggest that expectations are way overblown.

Has the big emotional fight scene between Anthony Rapp’s Mark and Adam Pascal’s Roger, one of the big emotional highlights of the Rent stage show, been cut from the Chris Columbus film? Rent has begun screening and there are issues…people having trouble with this and that…the staging of certain numbers, the infamous Columbus sugar-touch. Wait, there are good things. Rosario Dawson handles the singing and dancing pretty well. Pascal holds his own. Some of it works. Is it commonly known that Sarah Silverman has a brief, comedic, non-singing role? She told me so yesterday during our Boston interview. Her character is called Alexi Bright.