Just over two months ago, Pajamas Media blogger Roger Kimball insisted that the economic picture could not possible be as dire as those mainstream liberal media hysterics wanted us to think. Then last week, Pajamas Media announced that their blog network is going out of business. Lesson learned: he who attempts to undercut the current economic pessimism ends up ironically fucked.

That is, unless “he” is talking about Hollywood. The movie industry is thriving so undeniably in this downturn –– Hollywood just wrapped its best January ever at the box office, with theater attendance up over 16% –– that just yesterday the MPAA’s proposed tax credits were thrown out of the economic stimulus package (California senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, no doubt well aware of the longer-tail consequences of the credit crunch on film financing, voted to keep the tax credits in). With the recent successes of mindless escapist fare like Paul Blart: Mall Cop, and the middling box office performance of “serious” Oscar contenders like Milk and Frost/Nixon, the pervasive meme in entertainment media coverage is that, just like during the first (and still the best!) Great Depression, audiences are flocking to the movies to forget their troubles.

But the (empty pockets) = (bottomless thirst for cinematic guilty pleasure) equation will really be put to the test by early February’s two high-profile chick-lit-turned-flick releases, Confessions of a Shopaholic (about what happens when a happy-go-lucky credit card abuser gets shamed by love into practicing fiscally responsibility) and He’s Just Not Into You (about what happens when married men allow themselves to be seduced by Scarlett Johansson, whose terrible costuming and hair extensions would suggest the recession has consequences we haven’t yet foreseen — more on that in my review later this week). There seems to be a common wish amongst journalists to make sense of these films (before they’ve even opened, before the audiences have had a chance to embrace or reject what they’re trying to sell) in the context not just of the filmgoing boom of the 1930s, but the substance of Old School depression films themselves.

Exhibit A: John Anderson’s review of He’s Just Not That Into You in Variety:

…the pic may also be the first contemporary escapist comedy that feels fully aware of its place in the economic vortex. The lushness, the leisure, the vicarious wealth are all balms to soothe our savaged selves as we look away from the news and onto the screen. Given the state of things, such a movie almost seems like an act of charity toward the public. It’s not screwball comedy, but the underlying sentiments are the same.

Anderson is not necessarily incorrect, but he fails to mention that the primary tone of the film is fairly grey. There is certainly a fair share of thoughtless lifestyle porn in Into You (there’s one subplot involving a character’s transformation from cheesy real estate loser into even cheesier condo broker to Baltimore’s new-money gays; in another, a couple joke about the “million undocumented workers” who are renovating their fabulous brownstone), but it is not the wacky, high-style romantic comedy that its marketing would suggest. For the most part, it takes the romantic foibles and missteps, angst and agonies of its ensemble almost absurdly seriously. At the risk of giving it too much credit (although I do think it deserves *some* credit), it’s kind of a Husbands and Wives for the US Weekly set, and though the Us Weekly set is certainly a larger, more valuable demo than the Woody Allen set, I wonder what second weekend box office will look like when women start to spread the word that the film’s kind of a bummer.

I predict Shopaholic will have an easier time of it. In today’s Los Angeles Times, Claudia Eller notes that “Shopaholic’s theme of overindulgence and unmitigated spending comes just as consumers are tapped out on their credit cards and feverishly pinching pennies,” and frets, “some observers worry that those images may not sit well with potential moviegoers who are having a hard time making ends meet.” She then (reluctantly, it seems) acknowledges that “there is some evidence that people want to see escapist fare to take their minds off their troubles. During the Depression, for example, some of the most popular movies were madcap comedies and musicals like Top Hat, with elegant couples such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers decked out to the nines.”

I haven’t seen Shopaholic, but from what I know of it, it’s the prototypical Depression fairy tale: under-funded girl lives beyond her means, only to be saved from the gutter by a well-bred love interest (her boss, no less!) The question is, will the easy out-via-improbable romance racket play to a Mall Cop nation? I don’t have the answers! What say you?