While racing to finish my Christmas shopping a few weeks ago in New York, I sensed the most acute symptom yet of the holiday hangover to come. Sure, I'd already gained a few pounds, and my checking account was ailing, but they were nothing compared to the sight of those goddamn posters for Jackie Chan's new comedy The Spy Next Door. "Part spy. Part babysitter. All hero," it promised, with our grinning, slumming star dangling by some steel wire, wielding a laser pointer while his pubescent charges struck their best hiii-yah poses beneath him. Famous for performing his own action scenes, Chan's latest marketing stunts have clearly surpassed his own acumen.

Which would have been forgettable enough, except that I knew this wasn't an isolated incident. This was the first whiff of another rancid January — that annual ritual of studio dumps and subpar multiplex stopovers on the way to DVD. And sure enough followed the stench: Dwayne Johnson with wings and hockey skates in the ads for his upcoming The Tooth Fairy. Amy Adams and Matthew Goode in Leap Year, rom-com piffle just sturdy enough to hold over viewers to Kristen Bell and Josh Duhamel's wholly interchangeable date flick When in Rome at the end of the month. In between you've got Oscar-winners Denzel Washington and Mel Gibson with dramatic thrillers apparently not quite good enough for fall (The Book of Eli and Edge of Darkness, respectively), plus the requisite seasonal horror entries Daybreakers and Legion for splattery variety.

This is standard operating procedure for Hollywood, which historically expands its awards fare from limited to wide release in January while allowing these aforementioned genre workhorses to bring up the rear. However, for the informed, discriminating moviegoer who's already consumed late fall's Oscar harvest — or who wouldn't be caught dead watching Harrison Ford's disease-of-the-week TV movie writ large Extraordinary Measures, opening January 22 — it's a cultural no man's land. Unless you're lucky and/or hardcore enough to jet off to the Sundance Film Festival at the end of the month, you're pretty much on your own to find decent flicks until mid-February, when The Wolfman (another troubled production that's been delayed more times than a porn star's orgasm) and Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island arrive in theaters.

The studios' rationale is that most moviegoers will spend the month catching up with their prestige — which is bullshit for several obvious reasons, not the least of which is that Academy Award nominations won't even be announced until February 2. Unless, that is, the hoi polloi are suddenly setting their moviegoing habits based on Golden Globe nominees. Which they're not. How do we know? Because instead they're making hits out of January dross like Bride Wars and Paul Blart: Mall Cop, which began 2009 with combined global grosses of nearly $300 million.

That's not the result of savvy marketing or striking a mass-cultural nerve, either. It's the result of the movie industry cynically throwing a fistful of horrible midwinter write-offs at the wall and seeing what sticks. Last year's Taken was an exception that proved the rule: The entertaining action hit wasn't even a Hollywood product, but rather a Fox pick-up that was independently developed, financed, and produced in Europe. The studio figured it might troll for press and soak up a few bucks in theaters before sending the film to video; it had no idea $145 million worth of American filmgoers might be in the market to watch Liam Neeson wreak havoc on his daughter's kidnappers. Naturally this January, you've got Gibson doing the same vengeful-father schtick in Darkness, itself a remake of a twenty-five-year-old BBC miniseries. Word of mouth on the film isn't good, but by Hollywood logic it doesn't have to be, because anything that breaks through at this time of year is perceived almost as a favor done on viewers' behalves. We have to watch something, right?

Well, maybe not. What if we took January off at the movies the way studios and distributors seem to do, boycotting cinemas until they started spreading the wealth over the calendar a little more? There is no reason why fall needs to be such a glutted concentration of "good" films — or why summer should have a monopoly on crowd-pleasing blockbusters — while winter pukes a bellyful of undercooked tripe all over the multiplex. Even if (God forbid) there is an actual audience for The Spy Next Door, we should at least have some sort of alternative that day that doesn't look and feel (and most of all isn't sold) like Denzel Washington's post-apocalyptic folly. Is there a reason The Fantastic Mr. Fox or Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans or even Avatar can't open on January 15? And don't say "Oscar qualification" either, because just as there's no law prohibiting decent movies in January, there's no excuse for critics and award committees to not take in the whole year of releases when sorting out their darlings each December. Who knows — A Serious Man might even have benefited more from being the first great film of 2010 as opposed to just another boutique dramedy sniffing out 2009 honors like a truffle pig.

In any case, if the studios could make a winner out of August — another infamously fallow month that nevertheless yielded Inglourious Basterds, District 9, and Julie and Julia in 2009 — then surely they can do the same for January. Until then, keep your dignity close and your options open. If Jackie Chan won't do it, somebody has to.

S.T. VanAirsdale is a senior editor at Movieline.com. His film criticism and industry analysis have appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, New York, the Huffington Post, Defamer, and The Reeler, which he founded.

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