The first two thirds of Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo (20th Century Fox, 12.23), which had a nationwide sneak last night, tries too hard to be endearing, or so it seemed to me. For 80 minutes or so it’s a not too bad family-type movie that works here and there. In and out, at times okay and other times oddly artificial. And then it kicks into gear during the last third and delivers some genuinely affecting sink-in moments and a truly excellent finale.

Matt Damon, imprisoned Bengal tiger in We Bought A Zoo.

The smarty-pants Twitter community was generally thumbs-up about Zoo following the sneak so I guess my mixed sourpuss feelings represent a minority view.

Matt Damon is better-than-decent in the lead role of Benjamin Mee, a nice guy who for complex emotional reasons decides to buy a zoo in the Thousand Oaks area. Scarlett Johansson is believably forceful as the head zoo keeper (or whatever the correct title is), and Thomas Haden Church is under-utilized as Damon’s advice-giving older brother. The stand-out performance comes from 14 year-old Colin Ford, I feel. There’s also a surprisingly inconsequential, poorly written one given by Elle Fanning, who by the way wears too much eye makeup.

The first two thirds are better at delivering family-friendly studio schmaltz than War Horse, but that’s not saying much. It suffers from on-the-nose dialogue and a bad case of the cutes, which is what happens when Crowe’s magical realism vibe doesn’t quite lift off the ground because the exact right notes haven’t been found or hit. The movie never really transforms into a suspension-of-disbelief thing. You’re constantly aware that you’re sitting in a theatre seat watching actors speak that tangy, semi-natural-sounding, spiritually upbeat Crowe dialogue and listening to the usual nifty Crowe-selected rock tunes (“Cinnamon Girl”, “Bucket of Rain”, etc.).

But the last third kicks in with better-than-decent emotional conflict and payoff scenes, and the heart element finally settles in from time to time, and there’s a great diatribe against the use of the word “whatever” and an exceptional father-son argument scene and nice use of refrain (“Why not?”). Endings are half the game, and by that rule or standard We Bought A Zoo saves itself. It won’t kill you to see it, and you might like the first two-thirds more than I did. Whatever.

Johansson gets to do a lot of arguing and shouting in this thing, and at some point I began saying to myself, “Jesus, I wouldn’t ever want to be in an argument with her…she’s really angry and adamant and unyielding.” And I began to think that I might be sensing, maybe, how her marriage to Ryan Reynolds came apart.

Damon, Johansson, Cameron Crowe during filming of We Bought A Zoo

The film is based on Benjamin Mee‘s true-life, this is what really happened book of the same title, but it’s been personalized by Crowe to some extent and is basically about recovering from loss, grief, trauma. Crowe’s marriage fell apart in 2008 and his career hit a land mine in 2005 with Elizabethtown and then stalled again with mysterious shutdown of Deep Tiki in late ’08/early ’09 so Zoo is actually his story on one level or another, I suspect.

But my basic feeling about We Bought A Zoo is similar to a line that former Secretary of State James Baker once said about a senior Iraqi official during the 1991 Gulf War: “A good diplomat with a bad brief.”

We Bought A Zoo is harmlessly decent family pap, but it rests upon a fundamentally rancid notion that zoos are cool. Zoos are emphatically not cool. I’ve been to zoos three or four times in my life and I like checking out the giraffes and lions and orangutans as much as the next guy, but they’re built on the conceit that animals living sullen and diminished lives inside cages are entertaining, and that looking at these creatures from the safe side of a cage and chuckling at their behavior and smelling their scent somehow enhances our lives by connecting us (or our kids) to nature. Which is, of course, horseshit.

Outside of the makers of this film and zoo owners and clueless lower-middle-class Walmart types, I don’t think there are any intelligent and compassionate people on the planet who believe zoos are a good idea. At best they’re an unfortunate idea. A message during the end credits informs that Mee’s zoo in England (i.e., Dartmoor Zoological Park) is a highly respected one, but it’s still a zoo.

Last month’s exotic animal slaughter in Ohio reminded a lot of us that it’s fundamentally wrong to keep exotic animals in cages to satisfy some bizarre emotional longing to bond with them, which, outside of respectably maintained zoos, is some kind of low-rent, Middle-American scumbag thing. Remember how Tony Montana kept a Bengal tiger chained up on the grounds of his mansion?

Zoos are prisons, and it’s dead wrong to sentence animals to life terms in them, however spacious and well-maintained their cages or how loving and caring and compassionate their keepers may be. Zoo animals don’t live in “enclosures,” as zoo-keepers prefer to call them these days. They live in effing jail cells just like Jimmy Cagney and George Raft did in Each Dawn I Die, or Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock.

Crowe is renowned for using great rock-music tracks in his film, but I doubt if he ever considered using Presley’s “I Want To Be Free” for We Bought A Zoo. I thought of it last night when I was driving home from the screening, I can tell you.

“There’s no joy in my heart, only sorrow

And I’m sad as an animal can be

I sit alone in my fake-love enclosure

And this enclosure is a prison to me

“I look out my window

And what do I see?

I see a bird

Up in a tree

(Chorus)

“I want to free! (oh, yeah)

Free! (oh, yeah)

Free-hee-hee…I want to be free

Like a bird in a tree (wanna be free)”

A nice-guy widower dad named Benjamin Mee (Matt Damon) decides he needs to uproot and refresh his life, partly for himself but especially for his kids, Dylan and Rosie (Colin Ford, Maggie Elizabeth), who are half-coping and half-shell-shocked by the recent death of their mom. They all need a sense of renewal and adventure, a feeling that they’re moving on. So Benjamin uses an inheritance from his dad to buy a rundown, privately-managed penal institution in Missouri that’s been threatened with foreclosure.

“We can make this jail into a better, happier place, and make ourselves better for it,” Benjamin tells his kids. “We can clean it up and apply fresh coats of paints and change — or at least try to change — the outlooks and attitudes of dozens of common felons and murderers and white-collar criminals. We can start group-therapy sessions and make them attend classes in painting and pottery and yoga, and introduce them to great literature and great theatre and cinema, and the blessings of the Bhagavad Gita and Taoism and the teachings of Baba Ram Dass and Alan Watts.

“Okay, some of the guards are a little weird and some have old-fashioned attitudes…one guy thinks he’s costarring in a 1930s Warner Bros. George Raft prison movie… but we can change that too,” he says. “And there’s this really cute guard manager lady (Scarlett Johansson) who’s tough-minded but hot, and we might wanna…you know, ahem…once the jail has been turned into a happier, healthier place and is running smoothly and profitably again.

“The bottom line is that if we make the prisoners into better, more spiritually open people they’ll eventually become more productive workers,” Benjamin concludes, “and our prisoners-for-hire program will become more profitable…and we’ll have a new extended family and a fresh start. It’ll be a good thing all around, trust me.”

Rosie is tickled and turned on. “We bought a jail!,” she exclaims from time to time. But it’s going to be a harder job that they realize at first, and the cost of turning the jail around will lead Benjamin to the precipice of financial ruin. But what’s life without a little struggle and uncertainty?

Substitute exotic animals for human prisoners and you’ve basically got Cameron Crowe‘s We Bought A Zoo. Because We Bought A Jail and We Bought A Zoo are about finding personal self-renewal and spiritual rebirth through the caring and feeding of inmates.

The difference is one of social necessity vs. childlike curiosity and ethical cluelessness. Human prisons are necessary to protect society from the predatory-criminal element and to attempt some kind of rehabilitation — they serve an unfortunate but legitimate function. Zoos serve no legitimate function at all. They’re almost entirely about satisfying pre-tweener curiosity about exotic beasts. There may be adults who visit zoos for whatever reason, but you’d have to be pretty clueless to buy a seasonal zoo pass.

One other distinction: zoo inmates are all doing life terms while most human prisoners are in for shorter stretches and are eligible for parole at regular intervals.

Speaking of miserable, I was at one of my lowest ebbs in the early fall of ’78. Living in a Soho tenement and writing reviews for free, pitching freelance articles to people who thought I was marginally competent as a writer (if that), working at restaurants as a host for chump change, barely able to pay the rent at times, borrowing money from my father when it got really awful, occasionally taking a train to Connecticut to work as a tree surgeon on the weekends. Feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, futility and despair.

But one fairly warm day I was walking near West Broadway and Prince and noticed some people clustered in front of an art gallery with generator trucks and cables leading upstairs. So without asking questions or making eye contact with anyone I walked right in and bounded up the staircase. Upstairs was a large, high-ceilinged art gallery with many people milling about. A casual vibe. Nobody said “excuse me, can I help you?” I just walked over to craft services like I was part of the crew and helped myself to an apple and a cup of coffee. I figured I’d spot a recognizable someone — a director, an actor — and figure out what the “show” was from that.

And then I walked into the main gallery room and there, sitting in a canvas chair and reading something intently, was young Woody Allen. He was being left alone, nobody hovering. Glasses, dark brownish-red hair, flannel shirt…and sitting absolutely still, like a Duane Hanson sculpture. He might have had a bit of makeup on, or so I recall. But it was Woody, all right, and right away I said to myself, “I’m gonna get busted if I stand here and just stare at him.” So I walked around a bit more with a guarded expression and then went downstairs and asked somebody what the movie was called. “It’s a Woody Allen film….that’s all I know,” some guy said.

I’m not sure anyone knew the title at the time, but the following April, or about seven or eight months later, the movie opened with a title — Manhattan.

My emotional and financial states were so precarious and I was so close to depression at the time of the Allen sighting that just glimpsing him sitting there gave me a real lift. For a minute or two I was part of a very elite and highly charged environment, if only as a secret visitor, and I felt good about myself for momentarily slipping inside and smelling the air of that set. The experience lasted for maybe three minutes, tops, but I’ve never forgotten it.

From Manhattan: “He was given to fits of rage, Jewish liberal paranoia, male chauvinism, self-righteous misanthropy and nihilistic moods of despair. He had complaints about life but never any solutions. He longed to be an artist but balked at the necessary sacrifices. In his most private moments he spoke of his fear of death, which he elevated to tragic heights when in fact it was mere narcissism.”

A Manhattan Bluray is apparently slated for release in January 2012.

The combination of this video being of such bad quality plus the temporary titles indicates that this might be a genuinely early cut of a teaser for Ridley Scott‘s Prometheus (20th Century Fox, 6.8.12), which is some kind of Alien prequel. We all remember the Alien scene when three Nostromo crew members enter the huge, horseshoe-shaped ship and come upon a dead giant with big shoulders and a big head and an elephant trunk. I’ve watched this trailer twice and haven’t spotted any of those elephant-trunk guys walking around.

Prometheus stars Noomi Rapace, Charlize Theron, Michael Fassbender, Guy Pearce, Idris Elba, Kate Dickie and Ben Foster.

Notice that the biggest…well, the only laugh comes when Allen says the words “grim, nightmarish, meaningless.” The riff is somehow better and funnier now, on YouTube, than it was during the live Cannes Film Festival press conference, which I attended, in May 2010. This is good also.

There’s a story in today’s Telegraph about the War Horse buzz; Deadline‘s Pete Hammond and some crabby sourpuss who doesn’t agree with the awesomeness are quoted. I think it’s time to back off for a while, but if anyone attends the public sneaks tomorrow morning I’d love to hear reactions. Especially if they’re…well, anyone.

Paramount’s decision to open Hugo on 1277 screens last Wednesday indicated (to me at least) that they were hedging their bets and hoping that critical raves and a word-of-mouth groundswell might materialize. As of last night Hugo had pulled in $8,545,000 after three days (having opened on 11.23) in 1277 theatres. That works out to a $6691 per-screen average…not bad, could be better. But it was fifth-placed after Breaking Dawn, The Muppets, Happy Feet 2 and Arthur Xmas (none of which I give a damn about).

Let’s spitball and say Hugo, which yesterday earned $4,532,000, ends up with $14 million for the five days and maybe $12 million for the Friday-to-Sunday period. It’s considered a decent-to-healthy theatrical run when a film earns triple its opening weekend haul. An exceptional run means a quadrupling or quintupling of the same tally. Even if Hugo quintuples the $12 million weekend figure, it ends up with $60 million…but I think it’s more likely to triple and end up with $35 million, if that. There’s also foreign plus DVD/Blurays, digital downloads and broadcast TV sales ahead, but it still seems like a bust when you factor in Hugo‘s reported cost of $170 million.

“There’s no doubt it’s going to lose money,” says boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino. “But with that said, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it scratch and claw its way to $50 or $60 million domestically. It needs to make as much as it can before the the Christmas releases come along and cripple it.”

I know, I know — what do we care if Hugo is a financial bust or not? Are we Paramount stockholders? Let’s just see it and love it and recommend it to our friends. Except I can’t honestly tell my friends that it’s a jump-for-joy experience. The only part of Hugo that really sings is the last 20 or 25 minutes. The “let’s-all-rally-round-Marty-because-we-love-his-moviemaking-heart” critical fraternity has nonethless amped up the chatter to a point in which Kris Tapley is forecasting that Hugo could be one of the top three Best Picture contenders along with War Horse and The Artist.

That could happen (as much as that scenario perplexes me) but there’s always a certain deflation of value and spirit when a Best Picture contender that has obviously cost a lot to make fails to earn sufficient coin.

I still maintain that Hugo‘s 127-minute length limits the family audience. If it had only been, say, 90 or 95 minutes, it would have been a lot easier sit for kids and for people like me as well. The first 75% is too long, too indulgent, too taken with itself.

I wonder if Hugo would have made the same or slightly less so far if it had kept the original title of Hugo Cabret?

The legendary Tom Wicker, who “brought a hard-hitting Southern liberal/civil libertarian’s perspective to his column, ‘In the Nation’, which appeared on the N.Y. Times editorial page and then on the Op-Ed Page two or three times a week from 1966 until his retirement in 1991,” died today at age 85. His obit was authored by Robert McFadden.

“On Nov. 22, 1963, Mr. Wicker, a brilliant but relatively unknown White House correspondent who had worked at four smaller papers, written several novels under a pen name and, at 37, had established himself as a workhorse of The Times‘s Washington bureau, was riding in the presidential motorcade as it wound through downtown Dallas, the lone Times reporter on a routine political trip to Texas.

“The searing images of that day — the rifleman’s shots cracking across Dealey Plaza, the wounded president lurching forward in the open limousine, the blur of speed to Parkland Memorial Hospital and the nation’s anguish as the doctors gave way to the priests and a new era — were dictated by Mr. Wicker from a phone booth in stark, detailed prose drawn from notes scribbled on a White House itinerary sheet. It filled two front-page columns and the entire second page, and vaulted the writer to journalistic prominence overnight.”

I thought this was supposed to be screening by now. For guys like me, I mean (and not super early-birds like Pete Hammond). I’d be surprised if it doesn’t show by Thursday or Friday. The Girl With Dragon Tattoo begins screening Monday morning for select press. We Bought A Zoo has its nationwide sneak tomorrow night. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close starts showing on or about Friday, 12.2. Almost everything is being let out of the cage.

If you listen to recordings or newsreels of people speaking to each other during the 1930s and ’40s, they don’t sound like people do today, for the most part. They sound a bit more naive or hee-hawish or more rigid and formal in their phrasings, like they’ve just come out of an elocution class. I’ve heard two or three voice recordings from the ’20s (one of them of Clarence Darrow speaking at the Scopes trial) but I’m presuming it was the same if not more so. A certain starched-shirt, stick-up-your-ass tonality.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Carey Mulligan and Tobey Maguire during Sydney-area filming of Baz Luhrman’s The Great Gatsby.

Something tells me you could hear all kinds of tension and constipation and uncertainty in people’s voices back in the days of The Great Gatsby. Mind your manners, know where to put your soup spoon and always dress correctly, etc. The purring be-bop talk of the ’50s (i.e., the way Marlon Brando‘s Johnny spoke in The Wild One) that came out of the post-World War II beats and their struggles to shirk off middle-class uptightness and anxieties was more than 30 years away when Gatsby’s story was happening.

Something also tells me that Leonardo DiCaprio and Tobey Maguire, as Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway, are going to sound like 21st Century guys when they say their lines in Baz Luhrman‘s 3D filmed version. Because they’re not British or RADA-trained, and because they’re native Southern Californians and they both have this way of speaking (particularly Leo) that they want and need, and I can’t imagine them ever sounding like real-deal fellows who lived and side-stepped and clinked champagne glasses 85 years ago. But I do trust that Carey Mulligan, as Daisy Buchanan, will sound exactly right.

And I’m still wondering if Luhrman will have the courage not to go all nutso and wacko with the 3D and just shoot Fitzgerald’s novel more or less straight, and let it be what it is and screw the under-35 ADDs will will (presumably) be twitching in their seats.

Last February the Hollywood Reporter‘s Pip Bulbeck quoted New South Wales (NSW) state government’s Kristina Kenneally projecting that Luhrman’s Gatsby is costing AUD$120 million (USD $118 million), with the shoot expected to last seventeen weeks” (i.e., finishing in early January 2012) “and another thirty weeks to be spent on post-production” or seven months give or take. “A reported 275-person crew will be employed during the pre-production stage with more than 400 cast and crew being employed during principal photography. Another estimated 150 post-production and visual effects crew will also be employed. Filming began on 5 September 2011 at Fox Studios in Sydney.”

This War Horse rave is not just another arising of the Poland curse. Others have told me that Steven Spielberg‘s film choked them up also, and who am I to say that’s lame or invalid? It isn’t wise or considerate to rag on anyone for succumbing to an emotional film. We all have our weak spots. I melt down every time I watch the last acts of Carousel and The Best Years of Our Lives and three or four others I could name.

But I know whore-ish, patently phony, cornball filmmaking aimed at families and kids when I see it. As I summarized yesterday, “War Horse is Darby O’Gill and the Little People go to war with a horse.” And for anyone to say, as Poland has, that War Horse delivered “some very powerful, very real human emotions”….well, I’m speechless. I throw up my hands. Maybe a part of Poland has been opened up by having been a dad for the last couple of years. You let sappy stuff in when you have young kids that you wouldn’t otherwise. I’ve been there; I remember.

“I will admit now that I shed tears watching this film,” Poland said earlier today. “More than I’d like to admit. And I don’t feel like I was manipulated at all. I felt like I was a witness to some very powerful, very real human emotions. And one cannot help but to root for this horse like you would root for any of the great heroes of the movies. He is not anthropomorphic, but he does embody the traits of persistence, courage, and survival that most people would love to feel in themselves and certainly would love to see in those they love.

“And most importantly, you want him to be loved…to not have to show that persistence and courage and survival under fire, even though we know it’s there. This is, really, what all the characters want for themselves and their loved ones in this film…whether the soldiers or the parents or the grandparents or the crowds that gather now and again through the story.”