“I’m a manager at a Regal 22 screen-plus-IMAX here in Charlotte, N.C., and the Sony techs came in last week and did an upgrade on all our 3D houses (there are 8) so that we can run The Hobbit in 48 FPS when it opens. We also got a 20-minute test reel to run and ensure that it looks okay. Myself and another manager spun it up last night and I can honestly say that I’m not sure what to think. I think it looks amazing but I don’t know if it’s going to be a massive distraction to Joe Popcorn or not. It’s like watching a like stage play. I think it looks great, but I don’t know how it’s going to play with a general audience.

“The big news though is that we are definitely getting it in 48fps. It’s a done deal and we are already selling advance tix to it. Everyone always asks, ‘What does the HFR mean?’ So like I said, I don’t know how Joe Popcorn is going to like it. As of right now, we’re the only theatre in Charlotte playing The Hobbit at 48. Just wanted to pass that along. Happy Thanksgiving and safe journeys.”

In Contention‘s Guy Lodge has written about how 72 years ago a pair of Alfred Hitchcock films, Rebecca and Foreign Correspondent, competed against each other for Best Picture. The melodramatic Rebecca took the prize, and it certainly holds up today…mostly. But by today’s standards Correspondent, which Hitch derided as an implausibly playful B picture, has much more vitality and dishy mise en scene. The Amsterdam assassination-in-the-rainstorm scene, the plane crash finale, the Dutch windmill scene, Edmund Gween plunging off the tower…no comparison.

Danang is a big, sprawling, intensely commercial beach town — the city with the most vibrant economy in all of Vietnam, according to Binh, my local Vidotour guy. The thing to take pictures of is the remnant of the US air base here during the Vietnam War. And the beaches are very pretty but bleachy white. Everywhere you look it’s bleachy this and bleachy that. Baking heat, white sands…and last year at this time is was cool and rainy, I’m told.

But I’m staying in the five-star Palm Garden Beach Resort, which is right on Cua Dai Beach and close to the historical city of Hoi An, which is 2000 years old.

Huong of Vidotour met me in Hanoi’s Movenpick lobby at 7:15 am, and we left for the airport directly in order to safely catch my 9:20 am flight to Danang (which is where I’m posting this from). I forget the driver’s name but he’s as cool and smooth as Huong. Scooter traffic is heavy in Hanoi around 7:30 am, and it gets a lot heavier an hour later.

Vietnam Airlines flights from Hanoi to Danang take exactly an hour.

The Vietnamese Dong vs. the US dollar is about 20,833 to 1. Seriously. So a lunch that might cost $5 or $6 US costs about 100,000 or 120,000 dong. 500,000 Vietnamese dong are worth about $24 dollars, so 2 million dong is worth $96 clams, give or take.

Huong leading me out of the Movenpick before jumping into the van.

It’s relatively common on Japan Airlines flights (or at least it was on last night’s Tokyo-to-Hanoi flight) for passengers to wear surgical masks, presumably out of fear that circulated fuselage air contains high levels of bacteria. Incidentally, I sat in coach from Honolulu on and nobody leaned their seat back into my 18 inches of private space. In fact no one leaned their seats back at all. Do Asian people understand more clearly how rude and thoughtless this is? Or were they simply fortunate enough to be born without the American asshole gene?

It’s now 6:09 am Thursday in Hanoi (3:09 pm LA time, Wednesday) and I have 55 minutes before heading back to Hanoi airport and the 9:20 am flight to Danang. And by the way…

Downtown Hanoi, looking north from my 9th-floor room at the Hanoi Movenpick — Thursday, 11.22, 6:05 am.

I was feeling okay about missing this weekend’s early-bird Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty screenings because the embargo review dates were 12.11 and 12.5 , respectively, which would have allowed me to see them and file concurrently after my return on 11.30. But Sony has now changed the ZDT review date to Sunday, 11.25, or as quickly as reviewers can post after they see it at the Pacific Design Center. The ball is in Les Miz‘s court.

I fell in love with Hanoi almost right away. My flight from Tokyo arrived at 10:25 pm (or 7:25 am LA time) so I couldn’t see all that much, and I haven’t even walked around Old Town, in part due to relentless solicitations (full-body massage, blowjobs…”what do you want, man?”) from young guys on scooters and one 30ish woman in particular who wouldn’t give up) so I’ve really only seen the outskirts and the glistenings of the Red River and the immediate neighborhood near the Hanoi Movenpick.

But I live for cities like this. Cities with natural beauty, economic vitality and tourist appeal but with a fair amount of funk and native aroma on the fringes, side streets and outlying areas, and which haven’t been noticably affected, much less smothered, by corporate plastic enterprises and bad-taste architecture and franchises or any of that 21st Century flotsam that has infected almost every large or mid-size city in the U.S.

Older cities always look and feel and smell different than you might anticipate. I haven’t begun to digest any of the aromas but I love that the corporate plastic element is almost non-existent. I realize, of course, that in celebrating this I am convincing 90% if not 95% of the typical tourists who might read this to never visit Hanoi, but them’s the breaks. Most of the people out there want synthetic comforts when they go on vacations.

Hanoi reminds me of the less slick, less wealthy sections of towns between Nice and Cannes combined with a little Mexico here and there. Elegance and history and poverty and civic pride and corporate investment and squares and government buildings and the red lights covering the walls of the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. It’s not some nouveau-riche uptown super-burgh looking to hook in tourists who want the same bland aesthetic they can get in Atlantic City, Cancun or Las Vegas, but a storied, richly atmospheric, agreeably down-at-the-heels atmosphere — not in the center of town, mind, which is fairly flush and bucks-up and well-tended but in the outskirts and along the four-lane, amber-lit boulevards coming into town. And I mean that in the most flattering way imaginable.

The air is heavy and humid in Hanoi, delightfully so. I was told to prepare for fall-type weather… wrong! I’ve seen no fast-food franchises and only one supermall, and it didn’t look like anything in the States. The occasional brick and cobblestoned sidewalks and streets and walls along the boulevards are old and imperfect and rounded down. Hanoi has been here for a thousand years. The agreeably runddown look of it is mixed in with occasional remnants of French colonial homes and the occasional soul-less hotel or office building. And in the daytime, of course, there are tens of thousands of scooters and bicycles.

It’s 1:45 am now (or 8:45 am in LA). I have to get up at 6:30 am to be at the airport (roughly a 40 minute drive to the northwest) for a 9:20 am flight to Danang. I guess I’m going to try and crash.

Ninh, a very sweet and thorough guy hired by Videotour, met me at the gate and facilitated my Vietnamese visa and passport situation.