I took a brief nap at 7 pm last night, planning to have dinner around 8:45 or 9 pm at Dao Ten in Hoi An. I woke up at 1:45 am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I wrote all night and watched Flirting With Disaster on Netflix, and then went for a walk around 6 am. The Hoi An scooters are out in force at that hour. What a gloriously exotic environment — a paradise of vibrant color, very subtle aromas, heavy sea air and abundant vegetation. And friendly people everywhere you turn.

At first it seemed as if the ranks of Silver Linings haters were extremely marginal if not microscopic, like the carriers of an extremely rare disease. But others have pushed through (notably and bizarrely New Yorker critic David Denby, whose brief pan of David O. Russell‘s film is roughly similar to Bosley Crowther‘s dismissal of Dr. Strangelove), and with, it has to be acknowledged, remarkable levels of battery acid.

One in ten reviewers, I’d say, are in the hater camp. Their stuff reads like Sean Hannity rants on Fox News. Never have so few worked so hard and whipped themselves into such a strange lather about such an expertly assembled, deceptively good-timey, emotionally grounded, once-in-a-blue-moon payoff film.

The haters know SLP is nudging a 90% Rotten Tomatoes approval and is made of the stuff that works with people who are open to its manic charms and currents so they’re focusing on trying to wound its award potential. Their need to take this extraordinary effort down is, I feel, far more pathological than my mostly respectful and fair-minded remarks about Steven Spielberg‘s Lincoln.

I’ve recognized all along that Silver Linings Playbook winning the Best Picture Oscar is unlikely given the general prejudice against comedies or spirited dramedies (regardless of whatever emotional truths, heart, edge and wit they may deliver), but the sentiments of the anonymous secreter known as Oscar Tipster…words fail. Guys like this are actually walking around.

Some are having problems with the treatment of mental illness or the hyper personality of Bradley Cooper‘s Pat Solitano during the first half. Cole Smithey called it “a Hollywood romantic comedy made to mask the horrific downside of mental illness while still giving the audience a little sense of superiority as they walk out of the cinema.” Russell has a son with Asperger’s Syndrome. Think about that for five or six seconds.

But primarily the haters seem locked into the idea, to paraphrase Rotten Tomatoes fan reviewer Nate Zoebl, that enjoyment and creative accomplishment are, in fact, opposing forces and that being a rousing, crowd-pleasing sort of movie is, in fact, a yoke that weighs down its artistic integrity. Tell that to The Lady Eve, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, My Man Godfrey and Some Like It Hot.

The key thing, of course, is that Silver Linings Playbook is offering a lot more than just feelgood vibes, and if that’s all you’re getting from it, God fucking help you and any kids you might have. Repeating from 11.16: “The real lame-itude is dismissing or marginalizing a film because it’s buoyant and screwball-intense and furiously spirited and is all about want and need and dealing with recognizable demons, and is therefore not the equal of more steadily (or more slowly) paced solemn-attitude Best Picture contenders that are about real pain, real loss and are therefore truly serious.”

Denby actually called SLP “pretty much a miscalculation from beginning to end…it just feels worked up — an exercise in which actors can blow off steam.”

I don’t believe that many more people are on my side of the fence — I know it. I know that guys like =Detroit News critic Tom Long, who writes plainly and frankly, know whereof they speak. But what a gulf between the camps.

“It’s your boy-meets-girl formula at heart,” Zoebl wrote on 11.21, “but the execution is so extremely sure-footed, so exceptionally handled, that the movie leaves you buzzy and beaming. Once it ended, I wanted to run around, shouting from the rooftops for people to run out and see this movie. I freely admit that Silver Linings Playbook is a masterful movie that knows what it takes to get an audience cheering, and I was thrilled to be part of that cheering throng. Here is a movie that just makes you feel good. I was so happy after my screening that it felt like a high I didn’t want to come down from.”

A friend wrote the following last night: “There you are in Vietnam while Thanksgiving Day is underway in the States. Which offers a faint touch of irony if you weave in memories of Arthur Penn‘s Alice’s Restaurant. Arlo Guthrie‘s original ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ song, released in ’67, is about a couple of guys dumping garbage ‘by the side of the road’ on Thanksgiving Day back in ’65. The song became an anti-war anthem because it told about Guthrie’s rejection from the military service in Vietnam due to littering,” etc.

My response: “So it’s Thanksgiving and I’m in Vietnam and…where’s the irony again? I don’t feel tied to or particularly moved by what happened 43 or 45 or 47 years ago…sorry. My life began with having kids in the late ’80s and then getting the online column in the late ’90s and into the aughts.

“‘Alice’s Restaurant‘, a 1967 ‘anti-stupidity’ song (in Guthrie’s words) that equated petty, scolding, conservative small-town values with kneejerk support for the scorched-earth ravaging of Vietnam, was becoming a huge hit, and therefore…I don’t feel it. The actual garbage-dumping incident happened in ’65, the song came out in ’67 and the film was released in ’69.

“Did you know Guthrie has become a registered Republican and a Ron Paul Libertarian?

“It’s cool to spot M. Emmet Walsh in the trailer as a barking military guy during the draft-board scene, but the green values and attitudes of 2012 are prompting me, 45 years after the song, to ask a question. What’s so cool and people-friendly and folksy charming about dumping a truckload of garbage in the Stockbridge woods?

“The song and film versions happened before the first Earth Day in 1970, and it’s obviously a different world now. Dumping waste and polluting nature’s garden…isn’t that what conniving corporations do, dumping their toxic wastes in rivers and polluting the water table, etc.? Same basic instinct. Corporations can’t be bothered to follow rules and regs about respecting nature, and neither could Arlo and his pally (who looked like Kim Hunter in Planet of the Apes).

“On top of which Alice’s Restaurant was not, in my recollection, that terrific a film. A passable, good-natured social satire aimed at a very easy mark. Arthur Penn was peaking big-time when he made it. He’d been going great guns all through the ’60s and would next make the respectable Little Big Man, and then enjoy a relatively fertile and satisfying ’70s, but Alice’s Restaurant was a meh. It sought to toe the line by portraying local authorities in Stockbridge (‘Officer Obie‘) as metaphors for nearly all people in authority, which is to say petty, sour of spirit and asserting a gruff, kneejerk support of traditional apple-pie, World-War-II-generation American values and a loathing of all things long hair-ish, which was to say lefty, communal, pot-smoking and anti-Vietnam War.

“A boilerplate generation-gap movie, in short, with Penn doing what he could to make it into a cultural touchstone film (as the song had been), and not quite getting there. The song was enough.”

I was fairly whipped yesterday afternoon from too little sleep, but Binh (whose full name is Nguyen Thai Binh) was eager to show me the ancient village of Hoi An, and particularly the food market. Portions of the village have been Disneyland-ified, true, but the outdoor food market is a genuine sensual pleasure — an aroma-gasm and a novel learning experience. Everything in the Hoi An market feels warm, organically raw, steamy, fresh, ripe, alive.

There’s a slight downside in that the food sellers and merchants are constantly hitting on you. They have very little money and they know you have a fair amount of it. I don’t think it’s a stretch to describe Hoi An as a relatively poor town for…perhaps not the majority of the residents but a fair portion of them. I’m not trying to romanticize poverty in any way or downplay the downsides, but it seems as if Hoi An-style poverty is — I want to put this carefully — somewhat more manageable or tolerable than the big-city variety.

Life feels very natural and fresh and buoyant and wonderfully atmospheric here, and everyone seems to know each other and the vibe is very enveloping and almost joyous in a way. Okay, not “joyous” but mellow and serene. The community is one big family, or so it seems.

When Vietnamese parents get too old to fend for themselves they live with their kids until the end. This, at least, is what I was told by Binh, who is married with a kid and another — a boy — due in December.

The city is also famed for its 200-plus tailoring shops. You can have a decent business suit made within a day for roughly $120 or so, or so I was told. The actual suit-weaving isn’t done in Hoi An but in out-of-sight sweat shops.

Binh took me for a ride down the Thu Bon River on an African Queen-sized tourist boat. I tipped the boat owner about 50,000 dong, or $2.50.

For whatever reason I haven’t been hungry since I arrived in Vietnam, and I’m feeling really good now because of this mini-fast. That’s a pretty ridiculous thing to say when you’re in one of the greatest food towns on the planet, but that’s where I’m at now.

“Imagine if there was a farmer’s market a few blocks from your house and everything there was in peak season all year round, and also everything was grown within 10 miles of the market, probably organic, and picked less than 24 hours before it went on sale,” a travel writer has written. “Also imagine that everything at the market was so cheap that it might as well be free. This seems to be the case in much of Vietnam, and definitely in Hoi An.

“Another way of thinking about it is, if you were going to prepare a complicated dish that had 5 or 6 different vegetables and herbs in it, and you went to Whole Foods to get the best quality you could find, it might cost $10 or more. If you wanted to make the same thing here it might cost $1 for those same things, and they’d be at least a day or two fresher as well. This helps explain why the food here is so amazing and so cheap at the same time.”

The famed Confucious Cup, which is the only one of its kind in Asia, or so Binh claims. There is another somewhere in Europe, he says.

“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.

The Honolulu-to-Tokyo flight was hell, but we landed on time. Now I’m about to board a six-hour flight to Hanoi leaving in 35 minutes. (I wrote earlier that it was a four-hour flight.) This is brutal. It’s now 1:30 am LA time and 11:30 pm Honolulu time. I can at least report first-hand that the Tokyo Narita wifi is excellent — significantly faster than any airport wifi I’ve ever sampled. I’d read that wifi was faster here but wow. Few things in life turn me on as much as top-tier wifi.