One thing’s for sure, though–it won’t be as great as 1982. I was there to witness the miracle. And this I will recall.

Let’s accept that the notion of a “summer movie season” was well and truly born 35 years ago, with the record-shattering release of Star Wars on May 25, 1977. (The prime was pumped by the record-shattering success of Jaws two years earlier.) It took some time for the concept to jell. But by 1980, when the empire struck back, summer was entrenched as the season for school’s out “popcorn movies.” Summer 1981 was heavy on the salt and butter, with the likes of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Superman II, Stripes, Escape from New York, and Arthur (the accept-no-substitutes Arthur) all in release.

Then, thirty years ago, summer really came together. 1982 was an exceptional year for movies, bookended by Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon, Robert Towne’s Personal Best, Missing, Victor/Victoria, Diner, and, at art houses, Diva, Das Boot, Mephisto and Three Brothers before Memorial Day, and Eating Raoul, My Favorite Year, Sophie’s Choice, Tootsie, Coup de Torchon, and The Verdict after Labor Day. (And all of them more distinctive than Gandhi, that year’s respectable, King’s Speech choice for Best Picture.) It was an extraordinary year for sci-fi, horror, and fantasy films, which continue to be the bread-and-butter attractions of summer, and as we’ll see there were several classics in release that join a roll call that includes low- and high-end favorites like Venom, The Beast Within, the Cat People remake, Conan the Barbarian, The Road Warrior, The Dark Crystal, Creepshow, and Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which I will not hear a bad word about. And I haven’t even mentioned off-season action films like 48 HRS. and First Blood, and disreputable but undeniably entertaining outliers like Vice Squad, The Boogens, and The Sword and the Sorcerer, all last gasps of grindhouse and drive-in cinema. (Even flops like Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart, Wim Wenders’ Hammett, and The Border, with Jack Nicholson, were compelling in their own right.)

Returning to summer–what made it great was not an abundance of any one kind of movie, but a breadth of cinema, the sort of a la carte choices that you don’t find since the menu was set over time. In an era where the summer weekends without established tentpoles (and their sequels) tend to be filled with wannabe tentpoles, who doesn’t miss diversity?

Oh, and 1982 was the summer I received my driver’s license. There is a personal dimension to all this. I could drive myself to the movies, which was a huge deal for this New Jersey suburbanite. Me–and a succession of smokin’ hot girlfriends. (OK, just me. Or my sister. And my mom. Nothing really changed, except that I was in the driver’s seat.)

Now–on with the shows, week by week, the magnificent movie summer that was 1982.

May 25 (Memorial Day Weekend)

New in Release: Yes, kids, there was a time when Memorial Day Weekend was the official start of the summer movie season. Which isn’t to say that there weren’t summery movies already in release: Conan, Annie, the Steve Martin/Carl Reiner collaboration Dead Men Don’t Wear Don’t Plaid (which I was too green, noir-wise, to fully appreciate at that time), and, on a few screens, The Road Warrior, were all in theaters. It wasn’t until Deep Impact (1998) and The Mummy (1999) hit it big in the slot that “summer creep” gave way to the first weekend of May being established as the summer beachhead. (The success of Fast Five last year no doubt has the studios eyeing the last weekend in April as the new date to break out the sandals and suntan lotion, though the failure of The Five-Year Engagment this year postponed that plan.)

Then and now, the other studios tended to give the One Big Memorial Day Weekend Movie a wide berth. The somwhat upscale, Canadian-made slasher Visiting Hours, with William Shatner, Lee Grant, and a nasty Michael Ironside, did decent business. Before tabloid infamy hit Griffin O’Neal had a promising career as a child star, but The Escape Artist never escaped from arthouses. And the road race picture Safari 3000, with David Carradine and Stockard Channing, was simply junked on a few screens by its distributor, United Artists.

Which left the field wide open for…

Pick Hit: Rocky III, which I didn’t see in theaters. In fact, I’m not sure I’ve seen the whole movie. I recall bits and pieces, the same bits and pieces you recall: Survivor’s Oscar-nominated “Eye of the Tiger,” and of course Mr. T’s intimidating Clubber Lang, without whom the movie wouldn’t exist. (Stallone has always been an ADD filmmaker, keeping everything short and choppy.) Truth is I’ve never been much of a Rocky fan, preferring (sort of) Rambo, Sylvester Stallone’s Mr. Hyde to his palooka Dr. Jekyll, who would bow that fall. But cheering audiences made Rocky III the fourth biggest hit of 1982, just above the, uhh, “seminal” Porky’s, which dominated the spring (and was the Canadian-produced movie, ubiquitous at that time, that most successfully hit us Americans in our, uhh, sweet spot).

June 4

New in Release: Things heat up quickly. Two out of three three movies released this weekend are classics–not so hot was Hanky Panky, the first of three attempts by Gene Wilder to turn him and future wife Gilda Radner into a comedy duo. None took (with the partial exception of 1984′s The Woman in Red, memorable not for them but for the woman, model Kelly LeBrock, and Stevie Wonder’s Oscar-winning earwig “I Just Called to Say I Loved You”).

Pick Hits: How can anyone choose between Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Poltergeist? I love them both. I did see Poltergeist first, though. In fact I dragged my family to the theater extra-early, given favorable buzz, which elicited some grumbling. But–phew!–the Steven Spielberg-produced (and directed?) ghost story delivered the expected summer shocks, and more. It’s still at the head of the class where suburban-set thrillers are concerned, and a rumored curse, and the fact of two lousy sequels (and an announced remake) haven’t dimmed it. Jerry Goldsmith’s outstanding, Oscar-nominated score still gives me goosebumps.

My dad and I saw Khan. Who could blame my mother and sister for sitting it out? Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) was a stately bore (his recut version, prepared in 2001, plays better) and the more frugal sequel was met with low expectations. Nicholas Meyer surprised everyone by shaking up the entire “Enterprise” and giving it the warp speed momentum that had been missing. A model sequel (two great movie villains in Ricardo Montalban and Mr. T and we’re only two weeks in) and one that brought a tear to my eye again just a week or so ago when I caught the ending on HBO.

June 11

New in Release: “Everyone (at Paramount, which produced both) thought Grease 2, sequel to the most successful movie musical ever, would demolish Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, at the boxoffice.”–Robert Hofler, Party Animals: A Hollywood Tale of Sex, Drugs, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, Starring the Fabulous Allan Carr.

Pick Hit: “E.T. creamed us.”–Grease 2 star Maxwell Caulfield, quoted by Hofler in his book about the flamboyant producer. (He and co-star Michelle Pfeiffer would go on, Caulfield mostly onstage.) E.T.–The Extra-Terrestrial, the masterpiece of the Summer of Spielberg, creamed everything. But after I insisted we get to Poltergeist early my family got to a packed first night showing of E.T. late (unthinkable) and I missed the first five or so minutes, which I wouldn’t see until a campus screening a year or two later. The rest was pretty outstanding, though. I was a little sad when Titanic displaced this most heartfelt and intimate of blockbusters (another inexpensively produced smash) at the top of the boxoffice heap 15 years later.

June 18

New in Release: With E.T. beginning its ascent and three big hits in release the boxoffice took a breather. We do, however, see a blend of movies forming.  And a trend–that sequels, and concepts, can trump big name actors, something we see every summer now. Cases in point this weekend: Author! Author!, an ill-fated attempt to turn Al Pacino into a family comedy star, and the underwhelming Firefox, Clint Eastwood’s concession to the Cold War and Star Wars-era “hardware pictures,” and proof that he was making draggy movies a decade before his Oscar-ed respectability.

Pick Hit: Everyone saw E.T. again. Including, I suspect, Al, who made only five movies in the 80s.

June 25

New in Release: A weekend of highs and lows. Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl appealed to its fan base. Appealing to no one was the summer’s biggest dud, the expensive Megaforce, where director Hal Needham (Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run) left Burt Reynolds idling in the garage, with disastrous results. (Well, not “no one”: It allegedly inspired Team America: World Police.)

Pick Hits: Not one but two slow-burning masterpieces, unappreciated that summer, and acclaimed today. I saw John Carpenter’s The Thing with my parents, who were revolted by its staggering makeup effects. (Perhaps primed by them, they were more appreciative of The Fly, four years later.) I was floored by the movie, not just its effects, but its icy, no-exit vision. So anti-E.T. So un-summer.

A degree or two warmer was Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner…which I didn’t see, so fast did it exit theaters. It wasn’t until I viewed it on a properly letterboxed Criterion laserdisc in the late 80s that I realized what I had missed. Now that it exists on multiple cuts on Blu-ray we can clearly see its achievement, which has influenced so much in science fiction and neo-noir. The Thing has had similar far-reaching impact, which its remake could not hope to duplicate.

And yet, in 1982, they languished a rung or two up from Megaforce. Their adherents blamed “the E.T. effect,” which held that all science fiction must henceforth be sunny and optimistic. (If there was ever any credence to that, then Spielberg definitively gave up on it with 2001′s A.I. Artificial Intelligence, whose very title seems to rebut E.T.) More likely having two movies in release that brooded over the essence of humanity set off too strong a chill in theaters.

Early July

New in Release: July 4 fell on a Sunday, which seemed to crimp summer’s forward drive. July 2′s only release was Don Bluth’s animated The Secret of NIMH, not the usual family fare and another offbeat summer entry whose less-than-stellar performance was also laid at E.T.’s floppy feet.

Pick Hit: More future shock as a floundering (but often, in retrospect, interesting) Disney shook up its usual run of family fare on July 9 with Tron, which lingered in the cinematic consciousness long enough to generate a sequel in 2010. The techniques it anticipated, and its notion of gaming culture, will always be with us.

With that, sci-fi and fantasy vanished from the summer schedule, and so did any excuses for “E.T. effect” crash-and-burn. We’d sure had our fill, with bold, congenial, and competing visions. Things are about to get…dirty.

July 16

New in Release: Well, OK, Six Pack, with Kenny Rogers, was a family comedy with a performer with actual family appeal, and a decent hit among the C&W demographic. But sitcom king Garry Marshall made his film debut with the risque (and sometimes funny) Young Doctors in Love, an Airplane!-style soap opera spoof with Sean Young, fresh from Blade Runner, and General Hospital starlet Demi Moore. And let’s not forget the menage movie Summer Lovers, with Peter Gallagher romping with another Blade Runner alum, Daryl Hannah, and Conan co-star Valerie Quennessen in the Greek isles. Like director Randal Kleiser’s more notorious The Blue Lagoon (1980) the movie promised more than it could deliver in the cultural climate, but to an impressionable teen, titillation is all, and I spent way more time with it than was absolutely necessary when it hit cable in 1983.

(Oh, and if the international trailer I posted isn’t work-safe for you, then you need to find another place to work.)

Pick Hit: Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, a return to color and good cheer following 1980′s gloomy, black-and-white Stardust Memories, was a film of two significant firsts. For Allen, it was the first of 13 films that he would make with Mia Farrow; if they’d stopped at 12, or continued onto 14, maybe they would have been luckier. And it was the first movie I can remember driving myself to see, which was the most memorable thing about it. (I’d return to The Road Warrior, which went into wide release around this date, three times.)

July 23

Pre-summer Willie Aames starred with Phoebe Cates in the Blue Lagoon knockoff Paradise. Pre-Charles and Charge he and Scott Baio starred in Zapped!, the story of a telekinetic teen who can make cheerleaders’ outfits fall off. Willie, let me ask you, what’s more fun: making jiggly movies in the early 80s, or being a born-again Christian today? Be honest.

But Zapped!, which did brisk business with my peer group, and John Frankenheimer’s The Challenge, a decent cross-cultural decapitating ninjas flick with Scott Glenn and Toshiro Mifune that’s really fallen down the DVD-era rabbit hole (believe me, I’ve looked; I’m a sucker for decapitating ninja flicks) aren’t the story here.

Remember when musicals were a staple of the moviegoing diet? Well, they weren’t really in 1982, either. Grease 2 tanked and the sun did not come out for Annie, though the musical-ish Victor/Victoria was an Oscar-winning hit. This day saw the release of the 80s’  most successful musical, The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas–in part due to lack of competition (though we have two more coming up), but mostly due to the boxoffice appeal of stars Dolly Parton (singing a bit of her own “I Will Always Love You,” a decade before Whitney Houston made it her own in The Bodyguard) and a 46-year-old Burt Reynolds, in what proved to be the last leg of his lengthy good ol’ boy run (this was his final big score as a marquee attraction). Between this and Porky’s whorehouses were the place to be in 1982, though the title (from the Broadway show on which it’s loosely based) caused a ruckus in more conservative states. For the movie’s best scene Charles Durning, as an opportunistic politician, “sidestepped” his way to an Oscar nomination.

Pick Hit: Picking up Oscar nominations of their own were Glenn Close (her first of six to date, in a movie debut that set the severe tone of her career) and John Lithgow, flanking a serious Robin Williams in the film version of John Irving’s phenomenally successful The World According to Garp, the must-read novel of its time. It was a tall order for the movie to equal the book but George Roy Hill’s conscientious adaptation was up to the task; 30 years later, I imagine that both it and the book are puzzling cultural artifacts, filed under “beige comedy.” (Not altogether black, yet far from the norm.) I should see it again. (Hill blamed the summer slotting, a nervy move, for not enough audiences seeing it then.)

Still, talk about diversity–Garp, Whorehouse, ninja decapitators, and Zapped! all on the same Friday. Something for all tastes (I only saw Garp in theaters).

July 30

New in Release: Going head-to-head this Friday: the sputtering Cheech and Chong in Things Are Tough All Over (it was; their fourth feature was their final high) and an ascending Chuck Norris in Forced Vengeance. (Chuck’s appearance in the Expendables 2 trailer got a round of applause at The Avengers.)

Pick Hits: Also on Friday a summer sleeper (and another movie about hookers). Night Shift catapulted a motormouthed Michael Keaton to what stardom he had (such an odd career), and a Cheers-bound Shelley Long and up-and-coming director Ron Howard (his first big studio gig) didn’t do badly by it, either. (Not getting much traction from the straight man part, though he should have, was Howard’s Happy Days co-star Henry Winkler, the forever Fonzie.) My sister and I laughed all the way through it that Saturday. Next time it’s on I’ll look for Kevin Costner in his bit part.

The calendar is getting crowded now, with releases on Wednesdays–including the year’s biggest surprise hit. 1982′s top two attractions were E.T. and Tootsie; No. 3 was a drama that opened on July 28 and was still playing on Oscar night, where it won two trophies (it was nominated for six). In our “ancillary”-driven marketplace movies like An Officer and a Gentleman rarely get a chance to build, but driven by a gallery of fine performances (Richard Gere finally making good on his promise of stardom, a nominated Debra Winger at the start of her odd career, and an irascible Robert Loggia stealing the first part of the show as Gere’s dad) and a military-set romance that appealed to both halves of the date night equation it played and played. Having the Oscar-, Golden Globe-, and Grammy-winning “Up Where We Belong” in heavy rotation didn’t hurt, either. (The song was nearly cut from the movie.)

Stealing most of rest of the movie was drill sergeant Louis Gossett, Jr. Four years later the Oscar winner (sorry, John and Charles) would join a descending Chuck Norris in Firewalker, as Gere’s and Winger’s careers also waned. (A reinvigorated Loggia, though, was on a roll.) What goes “Up,” etc.

August 6

New in Release: Along with Roman Polanski’s little-seen Pirates (1986), the Penzance-ish “rock” musical The Pirate Movie, with Blue Lagoon star Christopher Atkins and Kristy McNichol, deep-sixed the genre until Johnny Depp got out his cutlass a generation later.

Pick Hits: Surely I’m not alone in loving The Last American Virgin, which came out when I could have played the title role? I didn’t see it then (it opened Aug. 4) but it’s another movie I watched a billion times on cable. Based on a smash Israeli comedy produced by the co-founders of the beloved ragtag outfit Cannon Films, and an early hit for the studio, Virgin really put out, with copious nudity and raunch, a tremulously beautiful Diane Franklin as a geek’s true desire, a killer soundtrack–and an unforgettably bleak ending (for a 16-year-old) that made you quite content to wait. A classic movie of its kind was just around the corner, yet it’s still my favorite. (And it was a surprise to learn that studly lady-killer Steve Antin would later date David Geffen and direct Cher in Burlesque. Folks, that’s acting.)

Unforgettable for other reasons was Alan Parker’s second distinguished film of 1982, Pink Floyd The Wall, the no-holds-barred adaptation of the 1979 album. The phantasmagoria that Parker made of it was shocking then, and could make the flesh crawl today. No doubt there’s a whole new audience for it, and a good 3D conversion would kill. (Surely Bob Geldof, enacting the agonies of Pink, did not forsee a Nobel Prize nomination in his near future.) It’s an extremely visceral experience that cries out for Blu-ray at least; that it hasn’t made the jump suggests some sort of rights limbo. Also in limbo: Parker, a key figure of the 70s and 80s, who hasn’t made a film since 2003.

August 13

New in Release: 1980′s El Nido (The Nest), a Spanish drama with Ana Torrent, star of the great Spirit of the Beehive (1973), received a foreign language film Oscar nomination in 1981, got a belated release a year later on Aug. 9 (a Monday?), and disappeared. I thought it might be a horror film before I looked it up.

I remember The Soldier, with future Wiseguy Ken Wahl, as being kind of horrible. Director James Glickenhaus made better DIY action movies, like The Executioner (1980) and Shakedown (1988). This one’s been MIA since early cable and VHS.

But the three other movies released on Friday the 13th have lingered–including the third Friday the 13th, in 3D, a process that had made a comeback earlier in the year. It was great fun at the movies, not just the comin’-at-ya gore effects but ambient imagery like laundry billowing on clotheslines. (The stereoscopic DVD, which comes with two sets of glasses, gives you a taste of that impressive experience.) Due to a series of flops and worse movies (like Jaws 3-D, Gossett, Jr.’s post-Oscar paycheck gig), 3D would be as dead as pirate films by the fall of 1983, yet it, too, would return.

Paul Mazursky had one of the exceptional, underrated careers of the late 60s and 70s,including Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, Harry and Tonto, and An Unmarried Woman. The sprawling, Shakespeare-suggested Tempest isn’t up to that standard, but a fine cast–John Cassavetes as a dissatisfied New York architect who retreats to the Greek islands and a life of celibacy (Summer Lovers this ain’t), Gena Rowlands (offscreen and here, onscreen, his wife), Raul Julia, and Susan Sarandon–all have choice moments amid the clutter. Mazursky would find his footing again with the 1986 hit Down and Out in Beverly Hills and the excellent Enemies, a Love Story (1989). And we can thank him for introducing us to Molly Ringwald, who debuted as Cassavetes and Rowlands’ daughter and would grace Sixteen Candles two years later.

Pick Hit: The last great movie of this torrid summer was Fast Times at Ridgemont High, a movie that should be mandatory viewing for teenagers. (It’s in the National Film Registry, so it’s good for you.) It’s kind of the nice twin to the scabby Last American Virgin–it has the R-rated sexual content, but  it’s non-exploitative and clear-headed about adolescent angst (Cameron Crowe adapted his own book), and a case where having a female director (Amy Heckerling, at the helm of her first and best film, though 1995′s Clueless understandably has partisans) made all the difference in tone. (That both movies tackled the subject of abortion is a big difference between 1982 and a skittish 2012.)  The casting gods clearly smiled on the production–Robert Romanus and Brian Backer were the only two who didn’t go on to bigger (if not necessarily better) things (co-star Lana Clarkson, alas, would run afoul of Phil Spector). Making a spectacular impression in his second film was Sean Penn, whose stoner Spicoli was the most imitated movie character in my senior year.

Late August-Labor Day Weekend (September 3)

New in Release: Things change: today, studios will use the dog days of summer to eke out an occasional hit. And things stay the same: then and now, the movies released in these waning weeks, up through Labor Day, tend to reek. So we had not one but two more Canadian-made attempts to ruin American morals, The Incubus (with a fresh-from-Greece John Cassavetes hunting a well-endowed, rape-happy demon who as I recall turned out to be himself–we’ve all been there) and Class of 1984, with HBO’s future go-to director, Emmy-winner Timothy Van Patten (The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, etc.), as a depraved teen punk who has teachers and classmates (including a pre-Family Ties Michael J. Fox) under his  thumb as we all worried about that scary Orwellian year. Speaking of school we had Joan Collins, amidst her Dynasty comeback, offering private Homework to a virginal student, a popular theme in those looser, jail-baiting times. (See also 1981′s Private Lessons, a really steamy opus, for one scene anyway, and 1983′s upmarket Class, with Jacqueline Bisset cougaring Andrew McCarthy.)  Fridays TV star Mark Blankfield (remember?) came and went from the big screen in the druggy dud Jekyll and Hyde…Together Again. No one remembers former Bond girl Jill St. John as a prison warden in The Concrete Jungle. (And no one seems to recall when these last two were actually released; sources differ, but they sure fit this time of the year.)

Pick Hit: Most remember The Beastmaster, from do-it-yourself fantasy specialist Don Coscarelli (Phantasm), from its constant airings on HBO (“Hey, Beastmaster’s On”) and TBS (“The Beastmaster Station”). It’s a not-bad little sword-and-sorcery flick (junior division) and I met co-star John Amos at a video store signing a few months later. I bet everyone involved loved those cable residuals.

Everyone else saw E.T. again.

Or one of the other great movies released thirty years ago. Does any summer even come close to yielding that much quality? 1982: My favorite year, indeed.

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The Hunger Games, if you’ve just followed me out from the cultural rock that I’d been living under, takes place in Panem, a war-ravaged North America where The Capitol lords it over 12 impoverished districts, and after 74 years of misery people are reduced to naming their kids Katniss and Peeta. (Which maybe isn’t so far-fetched; do you think anyone in 1938 thought “Jaden” would be a hot name in 2012?)  The Capitol enforces its rule via The Hunger Games, in which…well, you know. I hate plot summary, particularly when I have to wade through mythological terms like “The Reaping” and all that fantasy stuff. I mean, 318 pages of it on Wiki. Hats off to Suzanne Collins, but reading it as it unfolds is one thing; regurgitating it another.

By and by I like dystopic fantasy stories, not that there are many other options to choose from (cue the “In a world where…” voiceover). I might like Collins’ books; that there are only three is a plus (which, of course, means that the finale will be split into two movies, taking a page from the money-grubbing Harry Potter and Twilight playbooks). But I didn’t much care for The Hunger Games, the movie. This isn’t a total slam: adding a bow and arrow to her woodsy, Oscar-nominated Winter’s Bone portrayal, Lawrence commands the screen as best she can (a Spartacus moment with one of her arrows temporarily rouses the movie), and I liked the folksier passages of James Newton Howard’s score. The movie is better when it stays low to the ground in the backwaters of District 12, which is convincingly played by the state of North Carolina.

That’s the good news. Little else worked for me. Here we have another adaptation that doesn’t seem to have adapted anything; the movie just spits out plot and exposition and incident for 142 minutes, with nothing under the surface to draw us in outside of a few searching closeups of Lawrence’s face as she plans her next move. And there should be a lot going on under the surface of a movie about kids killing kids in a reality show context. Gary Ross, the co-writer of Big (1988), is the perfectly nice fellow behind Pleasantville (1998), which I adore, and the agreeable film of Seabiscuit (2003). But, like the perfectly nice fellows Shawn Levy (Real Steel) and Chris Columbus (Bicentennial Man), he has no feel whatsoever for this kind  of horror- and sci-fi-tinged allegory, and was clearly brought in to make The Hunger Games a safe PG-13 experience, more pleasantville than “Obamaville.” There is one gut-wrenching sequence early on, when the young combatants, loosed on the playing field, slaughter one another, but other than Katniss and the gentle Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) they’ve been given little or no personality, so we don’t grow attached to them. Isabelle Fuhrman, so memorable in the gimmicky Orphan (2009), is in the movie, not that I noticed until her name came up in the closing credits, under the sonic security blanket of Taylor Swift’s theme song, “Safe & Sound.”

A movie with this premise–my, how Scholastic Books, which publishes the novels, has changed since I was a kid!–shouldn’t be safe and sound. Katniss spends some of her ordeal in a shakycam coma (Clint Eastwood’s usual DP, Tom Stern, wallows in this and other action movie clichés), gets a lucky break or two, and mostly has to dispatch the worst of her rivals. There’s one potentially complicated scene, where she and her foes have to make off with bags of necessary supplies for their teams. The smart move would be for Katniss, a frontierswoman with more conscience than her peers, to grab up all the bags, and oblige the others (and their manipulators) to negotiate, which would add a little drama to the flaccidly paced and edited proceedings and allow us more insight into the supporting kids. But, no, the sequence proceeds exactly as you might think. (Nice knowing you, Isabelle.)

With so much dead time (literal and figurative) on my hands my mind wandered onto other matters, like the chintziness of every Lionsgate production, and how poor, how TV miniseries-level, the adult supporting cast is (yes, that is Lenny Kravitz, who is inoffensive). Stanley Tucci, Donald Sutherland, and Toby Jones are becalmed in archness, Elizabeth Banks is obscured by her Alice in Wonderland makeup and costuming, and Woody Harrelson, who’s been elevated (not unfairly) to some sort of acting god thanks to solid work in Game Change, Rampart, and Friends with Benefits, among others, is dragged down to human level. Then again Ross hasn’t found a tone for them to play in. Collins may be at fault for some of the rest of my gripes, like, why do the Games embrace a volunteer participant like Katniss (surely an independent thinker would pose a threat to the established order)? What role do the Sponsors behind each combatant play? (Other than supplying medicine on little whirlybirds, they don’t seem to do very much to keep their favorites alive.) If the powers-that-be behind the Games can control the environment and create CGI wasps and mutant dogs on the spot, why don’t they abandon all pretense and just rule the districts by terror alone? I would.

Maybe the answers to these and other questions can be found in the books. A purpose of adaptation is to fix, or discard, the weak material, but the filmmakers behind The Hunger Games, Twilight, and Harry Potter are paralyzed by their audiences’ embrace of the text. Everything seems to make it in. That’s a lovely thing in our digital, post-print world, but, by the gods, nothing happened in the first Deathly Hallows film, and the Twilights are bloodless from beginning to end. Yet, strangely, audiences come. Surely they realize how unsatisfying these rote, unimaginative movies are. Are they reading along on their Kindles? Texting? Beats me, and I fear we’re as enslaved as Katniss and her friends by their passive acceptance. Reading is fundamental–and also the enemy of engaged, creative filmmaking that should embrace the spirit of a book and never altogether its letter.

Still, The Hunger Games got me through the door, which is more than can be said for the latter installments of Team Edward and Team Harry, which I fast-forward through on cable or home video. Declawed and unrewarding though it is–Team Katniss can’t rely on my Sponsorship–it does crossbreed dystopias with another subgenre I like, humans-hunting-humans. Collins said her inspiration was TV viewing that juxtaposed Iraq War reports with reality shows…and if she threw in elements of, say, The Most Dangerous Game (1932), or The Naked Prey (1966), or Hard Target (1993), well, she shares my good taste in humans-hunting-humans flicks.

The publicity for Battle Royale: The Complete Collection, now on Blu-ray and DVD, stresses the parallels (or should we say liftings?) between two notorious Japanese films and The Hunger Games. Sure, there are similarities. Minus one: there’s less allegory and more acidity to Battle Royale (2000), which is set smack in a miserabilist Japan, a Japan that can’t say anything and has resorted to the competitive killing of ninth graders to maintain order among its restive youth. I can’t imagine The Christian Science Monitor, which endorsed The Hunger Games (85% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, so what do I know?) as a “moral parable” suitable for “multigenerational bonding,” advocating Battle Royale and its 2003 sequel as family viewing.

Fact is, I couldn’t hack it, not on first viewing, anyway. Normal people like Collins don’t spend the bucks to obtain bootleg tapes and discs of Japanese movies that go unreleased here, but even my bent self  found Battle Royale subversive in a skin-crawling way. With Columbine still fresh its first horrific sequence of bloodshed among the imprisoned kids and their tutors (chief among them the cult star Takeshi Kitano) didn’t sit real well, and it took some time before I could revisit it. (Quentin Tarantino was an early adopter, and cast the fetching Chiaki Kuriyama as the schoolgirl assassin “Gogo” in 2003′s Kill Bill.) It’s worth the effort–you don’t pause to think how the children of a pacifist nation could so quickly adapt to weapons–and the superior, legitimate presentation on Blu-ray is, short of an actual theatrical release, the showcase it required. (You get two cuts of the movie, the sequel, and a fourth DVD of extras.) The supplements within this package thorough and extensive, notably the focus on its director, Kinji Fukasaku. Best known here for directing the beloved monster movie The Green Slime (1968) and the Japanese side of Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), Fukasaku was noted at home for corrosive gangster films like 1973′s Battle Without Honor and Humanity, and the outrage of those movies bleeds right into Battle Royale. (Lacking the strong, clean line of his vision, the sequel, directed almost entirely by his son following his death, is a muddle.)

What differentiates The Hunger Games from Battle Royale is direct experience. Collins (who I bet has seen 1987′s The Running Man) took her book from TV; Fukasaku’s adaptation of the Battle Royale novel is informed by his own uneasy youth as a World War II munitions worker. Katniss stands her ground throughout her ordeal, while Battle Royale feels like something that will go off the cliff at any moment.

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If 2011 marked the death of film, why do I have so many promising movies left to see? From Certified Copy to We Bought a Zoo, I’m struggling.

Then again the record-breaking $34.5 million performance of The Devil Inside this weekend makes the death of film seem like a good idea in 2012. Cameron Crowe, Spielberg, and Fincher look on with envy; horror fans tired of cheap “found cinema” gimmicks despair; Pazuzu weeps.

“Kokumo will help me find Pazuzu”–Richard Burton, The Exorcist: Part II (1977), a movie I actually like. (Watch it with the dialogue at Artist levels and the Ennio Morricone score turned way up.)

Film criticism died a little this week with the dismissal of J. Hoberman from the Village Voice. Or maybe it’s the Voice that’s cracking, as Hoberman, an excellent thinker as well as writer, is bound to find some other gig. There’s some good film writing at the Voice (and too much that’s politically correct and/or full of look-at-me self-regard) but it’s like a planetary system without a sun now.

Hoberman’s ten lessons for film critics. “Plot synopses automatically ruin a review.” Agreed. (Mostly because I’m lousy at them. I’m not sure how I’d do as a “recapper,” the reigning form of TV criticism.)

It would be hard to summarize Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, so I’m not going to. Not because it’s muddled, but because it’s so very dense, and in an exceptionally satisfying way. Even compared with the legendary miniseries there’s nothing compressed about it. It and A Separation make for two of my Top Ten.

(I watched Margin Call again. That counts for something when making a Top Ten list, right?)

Tinker Tailor has one of the most chilling examples of “collateral damage” that I’ve ever seen in a movie, which is largely a cerebral, after-the-action movie with several startling corpses. And I thought the bloody car seat on The Walking Dead this season was bad…

Best line, Kathy Burke to Gary Oldman (who directed her in his harrowing 1997 film Nil by Mouth): “George, I think you and I are underfucked.” (Can you imagine anyone saying that to Alec Guinness?)

All the actors are terrific. Director Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) has it all under tight control. One asset that may be overlooked is its exceptional score, by Alberto Iglesias, which adds a touch of the exotic to the somber Cold War palette.

The two-time Oscar nominee (one for a prior Le Carre adaptation, 2005′s The Constant Gardener) scored The Skin I Live In for his frequent collaborator, Pedro Almodovar. I never reviewed it, and unlike other Almodovars it tanked here, for reasons that are fairly obvious (icky subject matter, clinically treated, being one). But it haunts me.

What’s with languishing franchises The Fast and The Furious and Mission Impossible suddenly roaring back to life at the boxoffice? Are audiences that starved for comfort food?

I think not, given that seven of the top ten movies at the boxoffice last year were sequels, a number that could swell to nine–nine!–if the Mission Impossible and Sherlock Holmes followups crack the list in the new year. That would leave Thor, a movie by committee if there ever was one, as the one “original” on the list. Depressing.

Worse for the business, fewer attendees are feeding at this sequel trough. (I only saw the Transformers sequel. And Thor.) At this rate of attrition there won’t be anyone left to see The Devil Inside II, The Devil Inside 3D, The Devil Inside: Ghost Protocol, and Fast Devil Five.

The not-bad indie I watched on Showtime last night, 3 Backyards with Edie Falco, grossed $43,000 in theaters. That’s not unusual. Producers and distributors say they make it up in the (shrinking) DVD rental market and On Demand, but out there in the boonies they never get a chance at being part of the conversation on cinema.

Returning to the top of the charts, not sure I missed much. Come to think of it, the best cinema I saw all year was on TV: the ninth episode of HBO’s Enlightened, “Consider Helen,” with its intense focus on Diane Ladd’s character. A stunning half-hour directed by Phil Morrison (Junebug). Nothing I saw at the movies affected me more. (And at this time of the year I’m not looking forward to any movie as much as I am to new seasons of Justified and Mad Men.)

This year’s Top Ten lists break two ways: The higher-brows go for The Tree of Life and Melancholia, the rest for The Artist and War Horse. It’s hard to find a list that finds room for all four. I haven’t seen War Horse yet but I’m not sure any of the other three will make mine; good, even great, in part, none of them totally grabbed me (and outside of its spot-on lead performance by Jean Dujardin and affection for the medium The Artist felt lazy, one missed opportunity after another).

I keep reading that The Artist, along with Hugo and Midnight in Paris, represents a trend toward nostalgia, like we saw in the early 70s, when The Sting and What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon invited audiences to laugh their troubles away and escape into past forms or the past itself. Try selling that to an audience that doesn’t seem nostalgic for anything older than Cars (2006). Will The Great Gatsby 3D prove a masterstroke for director Baz Luhrmann, or a career-halting dud like Peter Bogdanovich’s At Long Last Love and Nickelodeon, which ended the earlier craze by 1976?

Everyone’s middle choice is The Descendants. Makes sense, as it’s a decent movie that approaches you for a hug, then walks away, leaving you ambivalent despite obvious merit. George Clooney’s TV commercial for it has more passion.

A bit of a kerfuffle erupted over Christmas week when the National Film Registry announced that it had chosen Forrest Gump (1994) as one of its selections. Given its digital innovations it’s an obvious choice I think, not that Woody Allen hadn’t gotten there first in some ways with Zelig in 1983. The Post article suggests that for some in the film community, however, representation should be a factor along with artistic merit in making those choices. That’s a point worth debating, but a Gumpian amnesia settled over the whole topic by New Year’s.

What movie did I see this holiday season? A Dangerous Method. Because nothing says good will toward all men than Michael Fassbender spanking Keira Knightley.

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Instead of going over the usual internal debates that accompany these lists, I came up with a new approach this year, and I think I’m going to use it in the future. Basically, I asked myself which album made me want to tell as many people as possible about it, and what were their reactions when they heard it? American Legacies, the collaboration between the Del McCoury Band and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, quickly became the obvious choice. It’s a loose, swinging, and joyous trip through the roots of American music. Close your eyes and you can picture them in the studio, huddled over three or four microphones and making eye contact to see who gets the next solo. They’ve given this the clever name of “Mardi-grass,” but to me, it’s what rock n’ roll would have sounded like if it had been invented 10 years earlier. – Dave Lifton

Mastodon was the band that restored my faith in modern heavy metal, thanks to 2004′s outstanding Leviathan. And for my money, they’re still the best in the business. The Hunter represents the type of metal I love the most — aggressive yet melodic, skillful yet uncluttered. Mastodon is clearly hitting their stride as a band, and when I listen to them I can’t help but think back to how much fun it was to be an Iron Maiden fan in the ’80s as they released one great album after another. – Chris Holmes

The album that really met my expectations this year has to be Tom Waits’ Bad as Me, which was everything you could expect, and Waits has not sounded as clear as he does on so much of this record. He still has moments of sounding like the trash compactor from the underworld though (like on album highlight “Hell Broke Luce”) but this album presents an invigorated Waits and yet another solid entry in a very strange musical journey. – Dw. Dunphy

Foo Fighters’ Wasting Light is their best album by such a wide margin, it’s almost like I’ve been enjoying a different band with that name for the last 16 or so years. Whereas Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace had a shit-hot first single (“The Pretender”), a smattering of decent tracks, and more than its share of dross, there is no filler on Wasting Light. None. We still get the shit-hot first single (“Rope”); it’s preceded by a massive-sounding, three-gee-tar stomper (“Bridge Burning”) and followed by screamy freakout (“White Limo”), power ballad (“I Should Have Known”), and classic-sounding cut after classic-sounding cut (“Arlandria,” “Miss the Misery,” “Dear Rosemary,” and, well, all the rest). Cut on analog equipment in Dave Grohl’s garage, Wasting Light‘s warmth emanates not from the sound of the record (though that’s there, too), but from its material and performances. The Foos were the kings of rock in 2011. Long live the kings. – Rob Smith

Merrill Garbus has done more than most this year as far as giving Oakland a reason to be proud of its musical community. She has taken her band tUnE-yArDs to soaring new heights with their second album, W H O K I L L, expanding their sound to include pulsating West African rhythms, matched with unique instrumentation, a dazzling method of building and managing digital loops, and strongly delivered lyrics of personal empowerment. The band has traveled the world, played several major music festivals, and has been recognized by late-night TV hosts and influential music magazines, not to mention the adoring and enthusiastic audiences who oftentimes will mimic Merrill’s distinctive face-paint patterns on their own skin. The feeling down here on the ground is that this is just the beginning. Let’s hope so, because the world needs a band like tUnE-yArDs: positive, uplifting, original, innovative, culturally aware, and artistically inclusive of both the mainstream and the avant garde. – Michael Fortes

It feels like everyone at Popdose has sung the praises of The Damnwells and No One Listens To The Band Anymore. There’s nothing wrong with that – it totally stands head and shoulders over most of the music that’s been released in 2011 – but it’s a daunting task trying to explain what has been explained so well in the past twelve months. Here goes.

Imagine you’re a young, smart kid mired in the weird situation in which most young, smart kids of 2011 are caught. There are no steady jobs for your four years and countless dollars of earning a college degree – if you’re lucky, you’ll find some sort of simple labor, but it’s not enough to make you feel like an honest, hardworking adult. Maybe you have some things to take your mind off the seeming futility, but maybe you face more setbacks. You lose friends, you break up with the girl you thought was “the one.” You feel stupid for the way things seem to fall apart, and you feel stupid again for self-pitying yourself where others have it so much worse.

But then you take a step back and realize that, through all the layers of disappointment, things aren’t as bad as they seem. You make friends who admire you for who you are and what you like to do. You refuse to give up, with their encouragement. And you find yourself listening – something you almost never do - when your new friends suggest new music. One of those albums, in 12 tracks and 50 minutes, somehow encapsulates all the desire to love, shades of profound resignation and the incomprehensible desire to laugh through your tears that you’ve felt over 12 months. It’s an album you’ll want to use as a personal touchstone, a CD you’ll want to copy and give to all your friends full of tracks you know you’re going to use the next time you make a mix tape for a girl, a band you’ll never want to miss when they come to town, an endlessly complex reminder of how happy you are to be alive and temporarily at peace with that life, even when every third thing is a razor-sharp argument against that very idea.

I don’t want to make a mess of things by overselling an album as a panacea to all ills. But if that joyful mystery of music could do all those things to one person, imagine what it can do to you. – Mike Duquette

I made a bold declaration when I first heard St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy upon its release a few months ago that it would be my favorite album of 2011 and that has proven to be true. I think this is Annie Clark’s strongest, most personal work to date and her incredible songwriting and guitar playing talents are at their highest level. It is, by far, the album I’ve listened to the most this year and I don’t see retiring it any time soon. - Kelly Stitzel

I enjoyed the Damnwells‘ last album, One Last Century, and because I downloaded it while the band was giving it away through Paste Magazine, I felt like I owed them one when their next record came around. So I didn’t think twice when the band announced it was teaming up with PledgeMusic to release No One Listens to the Band Anymore — and I haven’t stopped listening to it since it was released on March 3.

There are too many Popdose writers with too many divergent tastes for us to have an official “album of the year,” but No One Listens to the Band Anymore came as close as any record could in 2011 — my love for this album was shared by Tall Editor Michael Parr, Infrequent Editor Matt Wardlaw, New York Times Bestselling Editor Dave Lifton, and Largely Invisible Editor Jason Hare, just to name a few of the staff members who were captivated by these songs. They’re catchy, they’re funny, they’re rousing, they’re smart, they’re heartbreaking — sometimes all at once.

How many songwriters would namecheck Dionysius and drop an f-bomb in the same chorus? How many can make you feel like you’ve got the best seat in the friendliest bar while the coolest band is rocking a perfect set on a Friday night? How many can sum up the bone-deep fear and stubborn refusal to abandon love that grips us all in post-9/11 America? Not many. Maybe only Alex Dezen of the Damnwells. – Jeff Giles

The rush to be first. Several online publications felt the need to get their year-end lists out there very early. Those who did missed my favorite album of the year. Last year the Roots were in my top ten with two albums, this year they own the top spot.

Undun is the band’s first concept album and uses reverse chronology to tell the sad story of the life and death of a small time drug dealer. The Roots are at their rocksteady best, but it is the lyricism of rapper Black Thought that makes Undun a classic. – Ken Shane

It was clear back in 2009 when they released Burn that Havok was on to something special. Their sophomore effort ups the thrash quotient by a billion compared to that debut record.

In a time when so much new thrash borrows from that current Exodus/Testament sound, Havok comes out with something that sounds so fresh and unique. The production is great on this album with each element clearly having its own voice. The riffs aren’t the standard thrash fare and Reece Scruggs shreding on “No Amnesty” is killer. David Sanchez’s vocals match the music perfectly alternating between singing, screaming and grunts. The bass is up loud enough in the mix to hear the complexities of what’s being played but it’s really the drumming that makes the difference. Pete Webber is a fucking monster on the skins. This isn’t just the typical pounding away repetitively that you hear on many thrash albums. This is some challenging shit he’s playing actually adding to the uniqueness of each track instead of just blending into the background. The most interesting thing about this too, is that the guitarist and drummer are both new to the group for this recording. Time Is Up gives you that feel of what made old school thrash so great while at the same time sounding like nothing else out today. – Dave Steed

I’m a simple man, with simple needs. Three chords, a decent hook, and something resembling the truth is usually enough to win me over. If I look back over the albums I enjoyed most in 2011, it’s an incredibly simple yet clever and catchy record that rises quickly to the top. Summer of Lust is the latest from Library Voices, a Canadian combo that’s on their second full-length. It’s a pretty classic formula–guitar-driven indie pop, layered with horns and the occasional sax solo, with sharp lyrics about twentysomething life and the vagaries of love. There are pointed moments–”Generation Handclap” takes on the modern obsession with altered states, both physical and mental–but even when they’re being arch, the band manages to stay eminently hummable. “Reluctant Readers Make Reluctant Lovers” is one of those songs that enters your head and never, ever leaves. I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s like it always is–I can’t tell you what the best album in 2011 was, because I haven’t listened to even every major release. I can tell you my favorite, and that’s Summer of Lust. – Matt Springer

Of course, there are things not touched upon yet; perhaps the most glaring of omissions would be the lack of The Beach Boys’ SMiLE Sessions as the #1 Album of the Year. It was the opinion of certain seditious editors (It was Dunphy – Ed.) that while it is the most appreciated release of many a moon, it was unfair to pit albums of new, worthy material against a new release of old classics (because Dunphy is short-sighted like that. – Ed. again). So if you have but one gift credit to spend, you would do well to lend those digits to one of Brian Wilson’s most deserving classics, SMiLE (no matter what Dunphy says. – Ed. once more). – Popdose Staff

Another subject to mention: Popdose movie critic Robert Cashill weighs in with his cinematic pick of the year.

Resolve in 2012 to see the movie that is hands down the best I saw in 2011, A Separation, which Sony Pictures Classics has in limited release beginning Dec. 30. I saw it at the New York Film Festival in October and it’s still on my mind. “(Asghar) Farhadi’s script has the beats of a John Grisham page-turner and, right underneath this suspenseful surface, a truly hunanist vision,” I wrote in October. (http://popdose.com/no-concessions-at-the-49th-new-york-film-festival/) Yes, the story of an Iranian family in crisis opens a window onto the country, showing us slices of life that are largely invisible to us. But it also has a Law & Order-type appeal that transcends cultural boundaries. I promise that seeing this Golden Globe and likely Oscar nominee will be the best resolution you make this holiday season. – Robert Cashill

Johnny Bacardi’s Comic/Graphic Novel Of 2011 Is…

When it comes to comics in 2011, there were many, many excellent releases, some modest successes, some epic in scope…but none were more epic, and more just wide open gonzo nuts, then DCs Xombi, written by John Rozum and illustrated by Frazer Irving. Xombi started out in the mid-90s as one of DC’s attempts at diversifying its line via a separate imprint called Milestone, shepherded by the late Dwayne McDuffie.

Rozum created the character of David Kim, a Korean-American who developed a nanotechnological virus capable of extensive tissue regeneration. This led to, thanks to some supernatural intervention, having nanites, tiny intelligent bots, for lack of a better description, introduced into his system…which transformed him into a eternally young being that can’t be killed and whose injuries were constantly being repaired by the tiny critters in his bloodstream. He soon acquired a supporting cast who were even odder than he, and through them he learned to adjust to his new situation, even as he was threatened by weird antagonists of an otherworldly nature, who inhabited a world which existed on the fringes of what we consider the “real” world, but fully able to threaten it just the same.

The series ran a respectable 22 issue run before it expired, with the rest of the Milestone line. It was quite odd and often brilliant, even though it was hampered by artist J.J. Birch, truly one of the worst artists I’ve ever seen in the pages of a professional comic book series. Then, over a decade later, it was surprisingly exhumed for what at first promised to be an ongoing series, again written by Rozum and illustrated this time by the brilliant Irving, whose striking work brought Rozum’s mad concepts into much clearer focus. It was a tour de force for Irving and Rozum, so no wonder the series failed to last seven incredible, imaginative issues.

Why people didn’t take to this genius comic is a mystery for the ages, but DC, to its credit, seems to be at least willing to collect all six issues in one trade paperback, which is set to come out in February. I thought Xombi was one of the best comics series of 2011, and I sincerely hope everyone who passed on it, for whatever reason, will consider picking up the trade…if they’re willing to have their minds blown in a fashion not seen since Grant Morrison in his heyday. – Johnny Bacardi

Related articles

• Popdose 2011: Dw. Dunphy’s Best Of (And The Rest Of) (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Jeff Giles’ Favorite Albums of the Year (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Ken Shane’s Favorite Albums of the Year (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Rob Smith’s Top Ten Albums (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Michael Fortes’ album highlights of the year (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Kelly Stitzel’s Favorite Albums (And More) (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Dave Steed’s Top Ten Albums (popdose.com)
• Popdose 2011: Mike Duquette’s Top Catalogue Projects (popdose.com)

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I’m making my lists and checking them twice–stocking-stuffer DVDs and Blu-rays, best DVDs and Blu-rays of the year, a Christmas movie roundup, best movies of the year, all launching in the coming weeks. Just because I’m not here doesn’t mean I’m not preparing for my next spectacular (ahem) appearance. But before all this, a pause to consider the artists the film world lost this year.

I’ve mentioned before that I don’t like to write obits. As I lose more and more favorites each year the task gets too depressing. Fortunately, I don’t have to. Turner Classic Movies does a splendid job each year with its “TCM Remembers” video. I almost hate to say this but I look forward to its being broadcast and posted every year, as an evocative way to honor the dead, with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. Christmas is for that, too.

Have a look:

It’s always more thorough than the one the Oscars offers, and as timely as it  can be, this edition getting in Harry Morgan (who, before co-starring in the politically poles apart Dragnet and MASH on TV was in every other Western, noir, or cop movie Hollywood churned out) and Deliverance‘s “squeal like a pig!” bad guy Bill McKinney. Bert Schneider, the producer who gave us the Monkees, Easy Rider (1969), and Hearts and Minds (1974), and who had the misfortune to die after the cutoff, can rest assured that TCM will remember him next year, or maybe sneak him into a reedit.

I always have one question after my first annual viewing: What’s the song? That’s an easy one to answer: “Before You Go,” by OK Sweetheart. Lovely.

Second: Who are these people? No, not, say, Peter Falk, Sidney Lumet, Jane Russell, John Barry, or Elizabeth Taylor, who you just knew was going to get the final farewell, just as she will at the Oscars. I admit I squeaked by on Hideko Takamine, recognizing her from Mikio Naruse pictures only as I saw her name. But: Miriam Seegar? Sybil Jason? Edith Fellows? Marilyn Nash? John Howard Davies? Barbara Kent? Margaret Field? Paulette Dubost? Norma Eberhardt? Leslie Brooks? Who said the silver screen guaranteed immortality? TCM does, anyway (and good to see you back, tanned, rested, and ready, Robert Osborne!). Consulting Wiki and the IMDb cleared up a few mysteries: Seegar retired in 1933; at age nine, in 1948, Davies was the star of David Lean’s Oliver Twist (later, as a TV executive, he fired Benny Hill); Dubost, the French actress, I should have recognized from The Rules of the Game (1939) and The Last Metro (1980); besides appearing in 1958′s The Return of Dracula (how did I not recall that?) Eberhardt also co-starred with the slightly more marquee-worthy Mary Murphy (The Wild One, 1953) in that same year’s Live Fast, Die Young. They didn’t (Murphy’s also in the tribute). “In 2007,” Wiki tells us, “Eberhardt’s image from Live Fast, Die Young appeared on T-shirts worn by Slash, the former guitarist for Guns N’ Roses and member of the supergroup, Velvet Revolver. Eberhardt was described as ‘highly amused’ when she discovered that her likeness appeared on Slash’s wardrobe.” Me, too.

A fond farewell to some of my cult stars: Yvette Vickers, a memorable tramp in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and Attack of the Giant Leeches (1959), whose abiding claim to fame may be her lonely end; Jimmy Sangster, who wore several hats for Hammer Films, notably the screenplays for the touchstone The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and 1958′s Horror of Dracula (the title of his autobiography, Do You Want it Good or Tuesday?, neatly encapsulates the writing life); and Dracula co-star Michael Gough, best remembered for sneering and raving through more downmarket credits like Horrors of the Black Museum (1959) and Konga (1961) until his welcome renaissance as Alfred in the first run of Batman movies.

And who can forget Tura Satana in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)? How much wardrobe has she been on? “Alright, here’s how it works–everybody’s gotta go!”

With two weeks to go–and, ask any doctor, these next two weeks tend to be very bad for dying, as the grievously ill struggle to hang on through the holidays–here’s hoping death takes a holiday. But I really should elaborate upon Ken Russell, who was a pain in the arse of “classical” British cinema and a hellbent innovator, who worked in every mode (sometimes several at once) and delivered some fabulous movies. The Devils (1971) shocked this jaded college student at a midnight screening on campus and continues to vex Warner Brothers, which has never seen fit to release it in this country since a pan/scan VHS (which I own, along with a digital stream I had the rare good sense to purchase last summer when it turned up, briefly before being yanked, on iTunes). I love how, staring down a possible lawsuit by pseudonymous author Paddy Chayefsky and under orders not to touch a word of his screenplay, he simply instructed his actors (including a debuting William Hurt) to rattle off the incomprehensible dialogue at top speed and, fusing it with mindblowing audio and special effects, came up with Altered States (1980). Crimes of Passion (1984) offers an awesome showcase for Kathleen Turner, who is simply sensational as the moonlighting hooker “China Blue.” (And Anthony Perkins is pretty memorable, too, as her reverend nemesis.) How many times did my sister and I watch Tommy (1975) back in the day on HBO? Hundreds, maybe thousands. Russell in his element, turning out one amazing sequence after another, trailblazing the “rock video” years before MTV came on the scene–and who else would dare to bring hellions Oliver Reed and Keith Moon together and suffer the consequences for art? Goodbye, Ken Russell, and you, too, Sally Simpson:

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This isn’t a review of Jack and Jill. I mean, as if–as if I’d pay to see it (well, OK, maybe a spin on cable, where I recently wasted some time with your co-star Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston in Just Tell It Like It Is, or Just Do It, or whatever the hell it was called, the point being that this 2011 release is already on cable, which should tell you something about the disposability of Adam Sandler pictures, even the sort-of funny ones, which Jack and Jill, with its 3% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes, does not look to be). As if you’d read the reviews, which by now you know better than to do when you make a movie. (The Son of No One, which received more press screenings than actual playdates and thus lived up to its title with audiences, is also at a cellar-dwelling 18% on RT.)

I get why you made Jack and Jill. Hey, Jack Nicholson made an Adam Sandler movie, and no one thinks the worse of him. (We didn’t until we realized that Anger Management would be the basis of Charlie Sheen’s TV comeback, that is.) After spending the better part of a year on The Merchant of Venice onstage in New York, it’s a decent payday, and a chance to be loose and funny (dig that crazy stache!) and to show that you’re with it, that by horndogging Adam Sandler in drag you can send yourself up.

Except that, Al, you’ve been doing that for years. And not intentionally.

No doubt about it–as stars go, you’re in the firmament. Strong choices in groundbreaking films in the 70s assure that. We don’t have to rehash the glory days–no one who sees those movies ever forgets them. We understood completely why Tony Manero, a guy on the make, hero-worshipped you in Saturday Night Fever (1977), when your career as a leading man was just six years old. We admired your contemporary, Robert De Niro, who played your father across the sands of time in The Godfather:Part II. But back then (I stress the “back then”) he was austere, remote, a little chilly, an actor’s actor, not someone we embraced. But you, Al–you were street, alive, electrifying, New York on two restless legs.

Then the business changed. Street was out as Hollywood went sidewalk and multiplex. With the exception of your “dubiously iconic” role in Scarface (1983) you pretty much said (I paraphrase) “fuck the fucking Warner Brothers” and removed yourself from the 80s, so much so that when you returned for 1989′s Sea of Love Rolling Stone interviewed you for it as if you had retreated to a yurt in the Himalayas for the duration (far enough, anyway, to remove whatever taint Cruising, Author! Author!, and Revolution left on your career).

Sea of Love wasn’t much, but it’s the sort of unpretentious thriller that “the industry” traffics in, and you were sexy-weary in it, with good hair. You’d made your peace with what Hollywood had become and you were back, working steadily–and unsteadily. The town rewarded your renewed effort by giving you its top honor, the Oscar, in 1993, for Scent of a Woman. But something smelled. After seven nominations you were overdue to win, and the Academy should have awarded you for a more fitting supporting turn for Glengarry Glen Ross that same season. Instead, they went for that big…slab of a performance, blinded and mannered, manic and “hoo-ahhing” for 152 minutes. It’s like you were still burrowing into that snow mountain at the end of Scarface, a movie you’ve never really shaken. Scent of the Woman is the one acclaimed performance of yours I’ve never wanted to revisit.

There have been others. 1993′s Carlito’s Way was Scarface after rehab, a low-key, soulful performance. Who but you could have played the mayor of New York, as you did in City Hall (1996)? There’s that wonderful scene where you and Danny Aiello are horsetrading favors that captures an essence of municipal government. And you’re terrific in Donnie Brasco (1997), an overlooked portrayal of  a gangster nobody at the end of the line, purportedly dying of “cancer of the prick,” with a heart-breaking last scene (did you improvise that moment with the fishtank? Genius.) For an actor who can play big, I prefer it when you hold back, or let others do the heavier emotional lifting, showboating, and grandstanding (Carlito’s Way, The Insider, Insomnia).

Because, Al, when you do it, you go beyond big–you go broad, and sloppy. You give us what you and your directors think we want, when what we want is to cover our ears and close our eyes, anything to escape the full Al. Heading an all-star cast you get away with it in Any Given Sunday, where you and loudmouth James Woods go to 11, then 12, then 15 in your big gridiron confrontation, a spectacle we’re glad that Oliver Stone arranged. Too often, though, we’re begging the theater manager for decibel control, take Al down a notch–think The Devil’s Advocate, Simone, The Recruit, Two for the Money. That’s a lot of ham to slice through.

(Oh, and Heat. You don’t unbalance the movie, which has become emblematic of neo-noir, but I’m relieved when De Niro is around to dry it out. De Niro, who came down from the mountaintop in 1987–”Lou Cyphre” in Angel Heart, remember?–and has spent an awful long time on the wrong side of the tracks since then, in slummy movies. An influence, perhaps? A questionable role model for you, Al. I need to send Bob a letter, but Little Fockers, a movie to make Adam Sandler look like Carl Dreyer, has silenced my pen.)

Al, you’re 71, and like a lot of seniors you’re prey to con artists. Sandler hoodwinked you into making a fool of yourself in Jack and Jill, and the movie came tumbling after a CGI-ed Mickey Rourke in Immortals at the boxoffice. But the fall from “A Film by Francis Ford Coppola” to “A Film by Dennis Dugan” is a lot longer, and sadder. And let’s draw a veil over 2008, shall we? The year you fell into the clutches of Millennium Films, the poor man’s Cannon Films, for whom you ground out two of your stinkiest sausages–Righteous Kill, where you (yelling again) and De Niro (barely awake) cancel out your epic meeting in Heat in a done-to-death good cop/bad cop scenario, and the unbelievable 88 Minutes, a gruel of serial killer, capital punishment, and paranoia cliches, a flat-out desperate script that Tom Sizemore would have swatted at his agent had he received it. Let us not speak of them again.

All of which suggest monumental indifference to your art, or hardboiled cyncism. Not so–at least, not in the theater, where, with two long-ago Tonys under your belt, you delivered a Shylock that was quite different from the one you played in Michael Radford’s 2004 film of The Merchant of Venice. (Both fine, and I admire the way you wrestle with parts for years on end; Richard III, say, or Herod in Oscar Wilde’s Salome, the basis of a new film of yours.) Or for HBO, an assisted living facility for aging talent, where you’ve earned two Emmys, for Angels in America (excellent) and You Don’t Know Jack, where, as Jack Kevorkian, you played a part fully in sync with your eccentricities and indulgences. Phil Spector (dig that crazy hairstyle!) should be another.

I sense a pattern here–giving your all to an occasional theater project, putting effort into respectable TV movies, then coasting through whatever scraps of red meat Hollywood has to offer its lions. It’s not all bad news–here’s hoping a planned film of King Lear, directed by Radford, makes it off the heath (and puts you back on Broadway as you find a new obsession). Take the choicest ones, Al. You have a legacy on the big screen, and you should enrich it, not diminish it. Give us films we can give a hoo-ah about.

Respectfully yours,

Bob

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