The odds that you remember the drunken, depraved glories of your employer's past holiday parties are virtually nil, so most of Hollywood shouldn't be too upset today to hear how the recession-to-be is affecting this year's big industry fetes. Variety reports that Disney and Viacom won't be celebrating at all, while other studios are scaling back their own events and even awards-season premieres to the extent their needy talent will allow. And if the global economic meltdown didn't feel like a crisis before, wait until you hear how the caterers will be hit:

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· Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson are searching for financing and distribution partners for their Tintin series after Universal passed. Sony is said to be interested in splitting the costs, with one studio insider explaining "A $US140 million movie about some French explorer dude with a mini-pompadour and little Wire Fox Terrier that no American kid has ever heard of? Where do we sign?" [THR]
· Universal won a bidding war for video game Dante's Inferno, revolving around a "journey through the depths of hell" presumably separate from the one parents will experience taking their kids to see Dante's Inferno. [Variety]
· McCain's appearance on SNL, an amazingly chipper performance considering Tina Fey was literally inches away from him tearing his running mate to shreds, brought the episode a 9.0 household rating/20 share. (And a seriously funny Keith Olbermann sendup from Ben Affleck. We give props where props are due.) [THR]

After the jump: Jack Bauer's back, and he's more pro-torture than ever!

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There's a valid debate to be had about the cosmic justice in news that Hayden Christensen this week agreed to a three-picture deal with Screen Gems. Beyond the obvious indignation that directors like David Lynch (and his cow) are reduced to promoting his films on the street while Werner Herzog remakes American B-pictures (when he's not remaking his own), we might look to the more bracing reality that a man best known for pouting his way through two Star Wars films as Anakin Skywalker has been entrusted with the development of three movies for Sony's genre offshoot.

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There are no quantums of solace to be found today in the Jack White household, where the recent unveiling of his and Alicia Keys's theme song to Quantum of Solace via a Coke commercial has the songwriter lashing out at his Sony patrons. "Jack White was commissioned by Sony Pictures to write a theme song for the James Bond film Quantum Of Solace, not for Coca Cola," read a statement obtained over the weekend by NME. "Any other use of the song is based on decisions made by others, not by Jack White. We are disappointed that you first heard the song in a co-promotion for Coke Zero, rather than in its entirety." Ah ah ah — make that Coke Zero Zero Seven, rebranded exclusively for the occasion of Quantum's release this November. We'll withhold judgment of the song itself until we can hear it in its entirety, but the sample available after the jump certainly sounds low-calorie.

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After a flurry of weekend headlines further detailing the closely guarded plot to offload MGM, studio reps are firing back today with public denials that the anemic, mute, tired old Lion could soon have another new cage to laze around. And now we don't know who to believe! Is it BusinessWeek, which followed up last week's rumoured Kirk Kerkorian 4.0 lowball offer with the news that Goldman Sachs is back on the scene to engineer a sale? Or is it the big, happy, skittish family at MGM HQ itself, which would require an official clarification to be issued these days even if someone said its coffee maker was broken:

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You're nobody in this town until you've been ripped off, and even then you're just a little more bitter nobody until an actual, attributable success comes along. According to a profile today in indieWIRE, director Alex Holdridge can finally lay claim to both stages in his accelerating career arc: His funny, lyrical LA romance In Search of a Midnight Kiss opens theatrically tomorrow in New York (Aug. 22 in Los Angeles), several years after a less-auspicious development left him burned at the Sony gates.

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Welcome to the latest edition of Defamer Attractions, your regular Friday guide to another oversaturated summer weekend of new movies. While The Dark Knight sets up Batcamp for another week at number one, another brooding franchise goes up against Team Apatow in the also-ran camp. A British classic gets a fine art-house face-lift, meanwhile, and a windfall of new DVD's will keep the agoraphobes among us busy for a while. As always, our opinions are our own, but they're bulletproof, so read on for the only filmgoing advice that matters.

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We bring to you yet more news of unsavory comings and goings on the Sony lot, this time in the form of an all-employees-bulletin distributed on the company intranet, informing whoever keeps sneaking up to craft services tables to load up on illicit granola bars, purloined M&Ms, and stolen slices of soggy turkey wrap that the jig is up:

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At this rate Craigslist might want to consider a subcategory for "Studio J.O. Break" or some like-titled catch-all for furtive worktime leisure pursuits; Casual Encounters can't possibly contain the epidemic of solicitations that began yesterday on the Sony lot and continues today with an even more ambitious transmission from Fox [NSFW]:

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Now comes that portion of the broadcast where we break from our hard-hitting coverage of celebrity lingerie purchases and NBA ass-tastings to focus instead on what really matters: Bringing you, the lot-bound drone in desperate need of human connection, in contact with your perfect match. We turn to the always-fertile singles' mingling grounds of Craigslist for our latest bachelor offering, a pent-up fellow currently finding it hard to concentrate on his duties at Sony Culver Studios [NSFW] :

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