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.

The Honolulu-to-Tokyo flight leaves at 1 pm local time (or 3 pm LA time). Eight friggin’ hours in seat #18D, and then a one-hour layover (4 pm to 5 pm Tokyo time, and not on Tuesday but Wednesday) at Narita airport and then right off to Hanoi — a four-hour flight leaving at…now I’m confused but I know I arrive at 10:25 pm Hanoi time on Wednesday night or 5:25 am Honolulu time or 7:25 am LA time. (I think.). And no wifi the entire time.

LA is either 15 hours behind Hanoi time or nine hours in front of Hanoi but a day earlier.

$51 bills for the charger (which had to be bought as explained earlier) plus a $15 cab ride — done. The nearly-three-mile walk along Nimitz Highway was grotesque. New Jersey’s Route 22 or the Long Island Expressway as it gets into Queens have nothing on the Nimitz. Honolulu used to be a nice town, I’m sure. But we’re greedy for stuff and we need big fat stores to supply us with that stuff and big trucks and big thruways…the US of A is not what God envisioned way back when. Or maybe he did.

Jessica Chastain‘s Zero Dark Thirty character is based on “Jen”, a CIA analyst whose five years of intel assessment and laser focus led SEAL team Six to Osama bin Laden‘s compound in Abbottabad. This is according to ex-SEAL and “No Easy Day” author Mark Owen (a nom de plume) in a 60 Minutes interview piece.

“I can’t give her enough credit,” Owen says. “She…in my opinion, she kind of teed up this whole thing…we’d always talk back and forth, you know, what do you think the odds of this are? What do you think? And she was always like, ‘100 percent, he’s there.’ SEAL Team Six just took care of the last 40 minutes.” (Hat tip to Rope of Silicon‘s Brad Brevet.)

Here’s a report by CNN’s Fred Pleitgen about an iPhone app called Color Red that gives Israelis a few extra seconds to take cover before an impending Hamas rocket strike. The designer of this app is a 13 year-old kid named Liron Bar. The app “has been downloaded more than 130,000 times since the conflict began,” Pleitgen says. Hugely impressive. It’s during moments like these when weight issues just evaporate…gone!

I always leave something important behind when I go on a trip. Yesterday I forgot to pack the battery charger for my Canon Powershot Elph 110S. We all know that iPhone 5 cameras deliver better-than-decent photos, but they don’t have a wide-angle lens. I feel I can’t do Vietnam without the Elph, so I’ve decided to walk three miles (for the exercise and scenery) down the Nimitz highway to the nearest Best Buy and see about a battery charger.

Garden court of the skanky, lesbian-friendly Pacific Marina Inn.

I’ll cab back and be off to the airport by 11 am. Tokyo flight leaves at 1 pm. Many, many hours of fuselage hell await.

I landed in Honolulu at 10 pm local time (or midnight LA time) after a 5 and 1/2 hour flight. My Tokyo flight leaves tomorrow at 1 pm so I’m staying at an airport-vicinity dump called the Pacific Marina Inn, which is located among a cluster of drab warehouses and small businesses with two ugly gas stations the only beacons (apart from the PMI) of people-friendly commerce.

Pool area of the Pacific Marina Inn.

Aloha! Good to be here! The skanky industrial regions of Oahu can be just as ugly if not uglier than the skanky industrial regions around LA or Newark or Orlando.

As soon as the bags were in the room I stepped outside and breathed in the Hawaiian night air with the idea of going for a nice walk. But about 70 feet away in the darkness of the parking lot there were two curvy, bordering-on-plus-sized girls leaning against a car and making out, and every time I stuck my head out they turned around and gave me this look that said “so are you going to stare at us all night, pervy, or do we get a little privacy here?” So I began to feel intimidated. Like it or not, the girls had laid claim to the parking lot and intruders were not welcome.

Then I told myself I had just as much of a right to enjoy the parking lot as these girls did. Then I asked myself, “What would Ryan Adams do? He’s a sensitive guy, writes for Awards Daily, stands up for gay rights. He’d know what to do. I’m fairly certain he wouldn’t call these girls ‘lesbos’ but would he just roam around and take pictures and do what he wants or would he hide inside the motel room like me, unsure of his next move?”

I liked much of Judd Apatow‘s This Is 40, but in my unpublished review (to be posted in mid December) I say the following: “You know how Bill Maher goes on about the Republican bubble that rightwingers live inside of, that gelatinous membrane that keeps out all the facts and the general reality of things? That’s what I was feeling during the first hour or so of This Is 40. Like I was stuck inside a Westside Liberal Membrane for people who live north of San Vicente and west of Bundy.

“‘I’m not sure if I like these people very much,’ I was telling myself. ‘I think these people need to quit whining and complaining and basically take their fingers out of their asses and smell the breeze coming off the sea, and the daughters need to read the Baghavad Gita or go work on a horse ranch or go to Africa to help impoverished people. One way or another these fickle folks need to climb out of their bubble and focus on something greater and more nourishing than their north-of-San Vicente, west-of-Bundy problems and frustrations.”

Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal‘s Zero Dark Thirty screened last Friday night for the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, and the immediate word (based on responses from two HFPA members passed along second-hand) was “definitely Jessica Chastain for Best Lead Actress, Drama” but less enthusiasm for the film itself.

This, keep in mind, is from an organization composed of foreign-allied “journalists” who may not be as receptive to a film about a U.S. military operation as ooh-rah American journos, and who gave their Best Motion Picture, Drama award in 2010 to Avatar over The Hurt Locker.

Zero Dark Thirty clocks in around two hours and 40 minutes, or just under that. (The credit block is still being worked on.) For a film that appears to be largely an action procedural, to me this spells hard-core integrity and comprehensiveness. Bigelow and Boal arent stupid — they know it’s in their general interest to keep the running time closer to 120 minutes or a bit less, but the material told them the length had to be 160 minutes. This is what happens with every script, article, book and movie. The author is told what to do, and he/she obeys.

Late yesterday afternoon I attended an ioLA screening of Chris Kenneally and Keanu Reeves‘ Side By Side, which I’ve seen three times and have been praising for several months. The idea was to (a) show it to a friend and (b) take notes and pics during the post-screening q & a with, among others, Kenneally, Reeves, music-video guy Chris Robinson and Dark Knight Rises dp Wally Pfister.

Video streaming by Ustream

But there was a problem with the sound coming out of two large speakers. Side by Side sounded murky and bassy and echo-y. You couldn’t hear the consonants with any clarity. So I asked an ioLA guy who was standing off to the side if they could please turn up the treble and lower the murk. The guy did nothing for about three or four minutes. I went up to him again and asked if he could please adjust the sound. So he walked to the rear of the seating section and stepped into a glassed-in office or control room or whatever, and he told two or three people in charge. As I stood nearby waiting for assistance, they all began huddling and conferring with each other. I was watching the huddling and whispering and asking myself, “Why are these people not trying to fix the sound?”

Clearly they had no interest in doing anything in a constructive vein. Not for a second. What mainly concerned them, it seemed, was that I had asked for a sound adjustment.

This is what little people who don’t “get it” always do when someone has an issue. They stand around and huddle and look at the complainer and huddle some more and whisper urgently to each other and try and decide how to deal with the complainer rather than fix the problem.

A guy came out and said they don’t have the expertise to finesse the sound because they weren’t familiar with the complex sound board controlling the speakers. “You can’t just give it a shot?,” I said. “You know…just fiddle around with it? You just need to up the treble a little bit.” The guy was hostile and contentious. Nobody else had complained, he said. Then he asked me if I had paid to get into the screening. I said I’d been invited by Kenneally, but that I’d be happy to pay them if that is what it would take to fix the sound. Then he said “we’re not a theatre” and they don’t have the ability to deliver tip-top standards, etc. Things got testier and our conversation deteriorated from that point on. I finally gave up and went back to my seat. Two minutes later a security guy came over and said I had to leave. Fine, no problem, life is short.

The video of the q & a, copied from ioLA‘s live-stream, doesn’t get going until after the four-minute mark, but the video quality is obviously not that great and the sound is clearly awful in the early stages. The people who told the security guy to kick me out are (a) the dark-haired woman wearing the white jacket and (b) the guy who does the initial introductions.

HE to filmmaking community: Please support ioLA, the one place in Los Angeles to screen your film and do a q & a.

Just a reminder that bombs and death and destruction only become “real” (i.e., shift out of the realm of abstraction) when somebody you personally knows experiences the carnage first-hand, and more particularly when they flinch and go “whoa!” and look alarmed. It’s the quick grin and the slight “heh-heh” that tells you Anderson Cooper was truly jolted by the sonic iimpact.