About the $14,000 cost of a table at the biennial International Debutante Ball, which took place at the Waldorf-Astoria on Monday night, director Margaret Hedberg told the New York Times, "watches cost more"--watches here meaning Cartier, not Casio. Plus, Hedberg said, "there are a lot of waiters working tonight, so it's doing something for the economy."

It goes without saying that you can't make this kind of stuff up--not, that is, unless you are Whit Stillman. Metropolitan (1990), Stillman's debut film, is based on his past experience navigating Manhattan's debutante circuit. Anything but a radical himself, Stillman studiously avoids making monsters or cretins out of his good-natured Upper East Side college kids, who have come home for the holidays to don tuxedos and taffeta. Nevertheless, Metropolitan's protagonist is Tom Townsend, a middle-class kid from the West Side and a self-described agrarian socialist/Fourierist, who insists "it wouldn't be so bad if these people lost some of their class prerogatives." One of the pleasures of the movie is watching an unlikely friendship develop between Tom and über-WASP Nick Smith (the criminally undercast Chris Eigeman, going gangbusters in his first role). Nick laments the demise of bourgeois decadence, and does everything he can to keep blueblood traditions alive, even promoting the use of detachable shirt collars. "You're obviously talking about more than detachable collars," Tom says.

Marley & Me, the most popular film in America over the holiday weekend, is an odd take on the contemporary family movie--and not only because Owen Wilson has more chemistry with man's best friend than with co-star Jennifer Aniston. Based on a bestselling nonfiction book (subtitled Life and Love with the World's Worst Dog) Marley & Me is about the wacky adventures of a Labrador Retriever adopted as a puppy by two married journalists living in Florida. John Grogan (Wilson) sees the dog as a clever way to keep wife Jen (Anniston) at bay in her urge for children. The dog turns out to be a royal pain in the ass, of course--"Did he eat the drywall?"--and before you know it, Aniston is barefoot and preggers anyway. Three kids later, the dog's antics ("now he's eating the floor") are no longer endearing to Jen, just annoying. Having abandoned her own journalism career to become a stay-at-home mom, Aniston transforms before our eyes from America's sweetheart into America's shrew, bitching at John the minute he walks through the front door.

And this what is so strange about Marley & Me. It has become standard in the age of Shrek for Hollywood family movies to include a layer of pop cultural references and arch jokes pitched solely at the parents in the audience. But director David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) gives them instead what Slant's Nick Schrager has aptly called "a grating sitcom version of Revolutionary Road." The moral of this dimension of the story is that all the personal sacrifices John and Jen make to raise their family are worth it in the end--even if it means sitting through inane matinee fodder like Marley & Me.

A few weeks ago I bemoaned how pointless AMC's censored version of Pulp Fiction was, so I did not expect to discover over the holiday weekend a half-minute animated remake of Quentin Tarantino's 1994 hit movie that stars rabbits and is totally hilarious. The 30-Second Bunnies Theatre company--John Mathot, Douglas McInness, and creator/producer Jennifer Shiman--are currently working on their re-enactment of Twilight, and also promise Hellraiser, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and a "two-part Harry Potter medley" for 2009. In the meantime, you can enjoy the Bunnies performing their lickety-split versions of fifty different films, including The Big Chill, Fight Club, Jaws, My Dinner with Andre, It's a Wonderful Life, and The Shining.

Since its 1940 release, everything about the forgotten Remember the Night has seemed to conspire against it--including, rather ironically, its banal title, too easily confused with dozens of more mediocre films. Director Mitchell Leisen lies in the shadows of his more celebrated contemporaries, Howard Hawks and Preston Sturges. And while it was Sturges himself who scripted this picture, it was one of the last screenplays he would write for someone else before moving on to greater fame. Remember the Night also had the misfortune of being the first of four movies that Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray made together, with the second, Double Indemnity (1944), becoming far and away the most iconic. So all hail the programmers at Film Forum, where Remember the Night will screen today and tomorrow, as part of its "Essential Sturges" series, on a double bill with Christmas in July (1940).

During a deft, fast-paced opening scene--the equal of any set piece in Hitchcock--Stanwyck's petty thief and grifter, Lee Leander, steals a bracelet from a Fifth Avenue jewelry store, only to get caught trying to pawn it minutes later, on Third Avenue. Assistant D.A. John Sargent (MacMurray) is assigned to prosecute her, because convincing juries to convict sympathetic women is his specialty. But when his courtroom strategy delays the trial until the new year, John bails Lee out, so she won't have to spend Christmas in jail. Then, discovering that she's a fellow Hoosier, he offers her a lift to Indiana for the holidays.

About the small matter of that other Gus Van Sant movie that's been appearing on many people's year-end best-of lists, including that of the Voice's own J. Hoberman. With all due respect, have any of these people ever stood on a skateboard before?

If you want to see a film about skateboarding, put the 1986 Josh Brolin vehicle Thrashin' in your Netflix queue (trust me, it's awesome). Better yet, head down to your local skateshop and buy the The Final Flare DVD, which went on sale yesterday. But please don't tell me how beautiful and poetic Paranoid Park's slow-motion cinematography is--by Christopher Doyle, Rain Li and a team of others--of dudes doing airs at Portland's, uh-hum, Burnside Park.

As recently as twelve years ago, Kenneth Branagh was considered one of Hollywood's most gifted actor-directors, which is why I did a double-take this morning when I saw the headline, "Branagh Confirms Thor Rumours." Turns out the Belfast-born Branagh--who turned 48 two weeks back and who has never been admired for his physique--will only be behind the camera for this version of Marvel's comic book about the Norse god with an Earthly alter ego as a disabled medical student. Some fanboys are already grumbling ("he hasn't ever done action") but with Marvel investing its Iron Man millions in hack-helmed productions of The Avengers and Captain America, as well as an upcoming Wolverine solo flick for song-and-dance man Hugh Jackman (trailer here), I'm way more excited about what Branagh will do with this project.

Nazism continues to be shorthand in our popular culture for evil incarnate, but in recent years our received moral assumptions about World War II have been challenged by two landmark movies--Paul Verhoeven's Black Book and Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows. While acknowledging the bravery of those men and women who joined the resistance in Holland and France, respectively, these films, each in their own way, suggested that what most people did during the occupation was whatever they had to to survive.

It is therefore jarring to return to the easily defined moral clarity of Bryan Singer's Valkyrie, which opens next Wednesday, and which tells the story of a failed 1944 coup against Adolf Hitler by a cadre of his own men. Singer opens his film in North Africa, where Tom Cruise's disgruntled Colonel Claus von Stoffenberg writes diatribes in his journal about the Führer. "We can serve Hitler or Germany, but not both," says Stoffenberg, who upon returning to Berlin is recruited by a group of fellow officers who want to assassinate their commander-in-chief and end the war.

An item on IMDb this morning brought news that Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull has been awarded the dubious honor of 2008's most "gaffe-prone" movie (64 errors total) by a site we had never heard of and were tickled to discover: Movie Mistakes. Coincidentally or not, major Hollywood releases are overwhelmingly represented on Movie Mistake's list of the 139 most, er, mistaken films of the year. (Quite appropriately, Mamma Mia! and The Dark Knight rank two and three, respectively). The site's editor, Jon Sandys told WENN news that "with the budget of many movies, you'd think they could avoid mistakes like this, or at least use computers to cover them up, but they keep cropping up, and eagle-eyed movie fans keep spotting them."

When Dutch beauty Nina Foch died two weeks ago, at age 84, I put the 1953 film Executive Suite, for which she received an Oscar nomination, into my Netflix queue. I was hoping for needed relief from the glut of holiday programming dominating cable this month. What I got instead in Robert Wise's involving corporate drama was a depiction of the modern American office--not exactly the most comforting setting in this season of layoffs. Executive Suite depicts a kinder, gentler workplace where hatchets are buried with a handshake (think of it as Mad Men without the madness--but like so many corporate headquarters, the Tredway Tower is also a place where paranoia and power grabs are the daily order.

Foch plays the dedicated assistant to Tredway's CEO, who falls dead of a heart attack in a bravura, handheld opening scene shot by cinematographer George Folsey (who also lensed Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Forbidden Planet). William Holden is the young and artsy R&D man who wants to take over, so he can put an end to the cheap, proto-Ikea "KF line," which he believes is sullying the Tredway brand. Others, mostly for their own personal gain, are backing evil, hand-wringing comptroller Frederic March, who argues that the KF line "serves a definite purpose in the profit structure of this company."

It's a good bet that Hugh Jackman won't be receiving an Oscar nomination for his performance in Australia as the singing, strapping, horse-back riding object of Nicole Kidman's attentions. Last Friday, Jackman, People magazine's current Sexiest Man Alive, was chosen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to host its 81st annual awards. "The Oscars are known in the advertising world as the Super Bowl for women," The New York Times's Brook Barnes noted approvingly, while in a written statement announcing their selection, the show's producers, Laurence Mark and Bill Condon, called Wolverine "the ideal choice to host a celebration of the year's movies--and to have fun doing it"--whatever the latter is supposed to mean.

Jackman will become the first host in memory who has no background as a stand-up comedian. Johnny Carson, Ellen DeGeneres, Whoopi Goldberg, David Letterman, Chris Rock--dude, even Billy Crystal--all of them were expected to be funny. "I have no interest in him being Billy Crystal" a "Jackman insider" told Nikke Finke.