If you're stuck with relatives and trying to decide on a heart-warmer for the holidays, make it Tom Cruise's Valkyrie, about Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's aborted bid to kill Hitler within the chancellor's own ranks. And if your friends give you weird looks the next day, you can use one of these five handy excuses for why the United Artists' bid for Best Picture wasn't so bad after all. Because what, like it can be any worse than Marley & Me?

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Just because Paula Wagner jumped ship doesn't mean everyone gets to: Merrill Lynch's quick buyout/merger/whatever to Bank of America will not affect the $500 million the bank promised for funding to Tom Cruise's United Artists.

“The terms are set and will not change. All of the funds are available to UA,” claimed an MGM studio exec with little to no sarcasm, despite the fact that the money's barely been touched since Cruise took over with Wagner at two years ago.

Merill Lynch might actually be in trouble should Tom Cruise and his vanity project studio quit trying to market Vaklyrie for the umpteenth time and actually start making movies.

Eleven actors portraying Nazis in Tom Cruise's dead-before-it-opens vehicle Valkyrie are suing United Artists for an accident last summer where the anti-Semitic reenactors literally fell off the back of a truck during shooting. This will fall firmly on Cruise's shoulders since he owns all of UA now, though if he's anything in real life like his cameo as a ruthless producer in Tropic Thunder, he deserves every single complaint from the Hitler Youth.

Poor Suri Cruise, she is going to grow up into a demasculinized household, where mommy and daddy have the same haircut, and daddy is always throwing hissy fits about how hard it is for a man to have a career nowadays. Ugh. Why are people always treating him like a piece of meat?! And now his partner at United Artists, Paula Wagner, is bailing on him?! It's not fair, Katie!!

Wagner's departure is only one of several blows Cruise's star has dealt him recently; Valkyrie's release date was changed again, proving that his own studio — which he runs — has no idea how to market him, now that his celebrity weirdness has totally overshadowed any sort of acting skillz he may once have had. The Nazi flick, originally slotted for 2008, was pushed forward to Feb. 2009, and now is back to being slated for December of this year. Blah, no amount of preview hype is going to convince anyone to see the movie, which will inevitably involve Cruise hamming it up at his most hammiest. And wearing an eyepatch. And let's not forget the scandal that blew up when the Germans got furious about a Scientologist playing Claus von Stauffenberg, failed Hitler assassin and national hero.

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