There will be one long post published in my name tomorrow, thanks to the magic of post-dating, but I’ll actually be officially on holiday from Tuesday morning through the end of the week. So! Chris, Lauren, Kevin and others will be posting while I’m gone. Leave them lots of comments, please. I’ll be in the Vegas of the Bible Belt, hunting down Yakov Smirnoff. Is this a great country, or what?

Oh good! The long-gestating remake of George Cukor’s bitchy masterpiece The Women has a trailer––and just in time to catch all those lady filmgoers in the afterglow of their weekend orgy! Some thoughts:

__Cukor’s original, released in 1939 and based on Clare Boothe Luce’s hit play, was basically a melodrama cranked up to the tempo of screwball; the performances today play as camp, but even the comedy is underlined with some kind of emotional truth. This new trailer plays broad, broad, broad throughout. The whole idea of the text is that it offers a glimpse into the way women behave when together in uncomfortably intimate spaces; going too big with the punchlines and the delivery seems like a tonal mistake.

–Where the original film had an ultimately cynical view of female friendships, depicting them as nuanced and unstable and constantly flipping between fingers-crossed faux sympathy, outright hostility and tentative trust, thisThe Women seems to be surrounding Meg Ryan’s Mary with a Sex and the City-like cadre of demographically varied Bestest Friends. The Annette Benning character, who I think is a stand-in for Rosalind Russell in the original film, seems annoying, but hardly the busy-body back-stabber that Russell made classic.

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January 2nd is rough. The champagne’s gone, that exciting post-midnight feeling of renewal is a distant memory, and we’re left to face the harsh reality that our overly-ambitious resolutions might actually require a less-than-pleasant change in behavior. Or maybe we’re just hungover. Whatever. In any case, here’s a clip from one of my favorite New Year’s movies, George Cukor’s Holiday, in which Cary Grant spoils a New Year’s Eve party by telling his fiancee’s moneybags dad that he plans to quit working in order to “find out who I am and what goes on and what to do about it––now, when I’m young and feel good all the time!”

The 25 titles to be inducted in the National Film Registry for 2007 include some of my favorite films: George Cukor’s The Women; Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven; Nicholas Ray’s pitch-black In a Lonely Place; and, of course, my favorite franchise film of all time, Back to the Future. The full list, as well as thoughts from NFR advisory board member Dave Kehr, can be found here; see an extended clip from the Ray film above.