Diary of a moviegoer

...For this ill-considered and desperately unfunny spoof of 1950s science-fiction movies and 1970s disaster movies Hollywood put up $70 million...

...Mike Judge's movie is a remarkably sustained explosion of jokes at everybody's expense—from a hippie schoolteacher who entertains his class with a rendition of a folk song called "Lesbian Seagull," to an overzealous FBI agent who is more than ordinarily interested in the prospect of cavity searches...

...This is the kind of movie that makes you wonder why you aren't home, watching daytime soap operas and Jenny Jones...

...So, the final tally: eight movies in five days...

...The solution: TeleTicket...

...I am here under protest...

...Uninterested in anything but MTV videos, of which they have an encyclopedic knowledge, they wander through the United States like two unholy innocents and inadvertently save the world in the process...

...After taking in a Broadway musical at 8 p.m., I find myself walking through Times Square, once the self-described entertainment capital of the world, later the armpit of the world, and now the biggest, fanciest tourist trap in the world besides Vegas...

...Diane Keaton is the saintly sister taking care of her infirm father and aunt...

...She is a harried architect and control freak with a gigantic chip on her shoulder...

...As American families gather, the entire country seems to shut down for a few days—all except New York, where Jews constitute a larger percentage of the population than in any other city on the planet outside of Israel...

...Diane Keaton is dying, and Meryl Streep and her boys come to have their bone marrow checked out to see if they can save her...

...I have found myself so disenchanted by moviegoing that I have been mostly absent this year from the darkened auditoria where I have Deputy Editor John Podhoretz appears regularly on CNN's "Reliable Sources," which airs at 6:30 p.m...

...TeleTicketed, we march in again and get just the seats we like, fourth row on the aisle...

...I'm in New York City, which is the best place to be when you're a Jew during Christmas week...

...The central joke is that every big star in the large cast is killed by Martians—a trope that suggests the ways in which the nihilism that defines post-modernism has infected even the Hollywood blockbuster...

...Monday, December 23...

...Because no matter how bad or infuriating I'm Not Rap-paport is, it couldn't possibly hold a candle to the sickening treacle that is Marvin's Room...

...Unfortunately, that secret is ridiculous—something about how nations should be like lovers, with no boundaries between them, an idea that is actually used to excuse the actions of a Nazi spy...

...I put down $8.50 for the 11 o'clock showing of Mars Attacks...

...Eastern time on Sundays...

...and sink once again into the slough of moviegoing despond from which I briefly emerged yesterday...

...It has been co-written and directed by its star, Albert Brooks, who made two of the most memorable and chilly comedies of the 1980s, Modern Romance and Lost in America...

...I don't like Mother very much, though there's a lot of funny stuff in it, because it's far too pat—a writer who can't get along with women moves back in with his withholding mother and discovers that she has always envied him because she had to give up a writing career when she got married and had children...

...Michael is sold out...

...Its director, Tim Burton, spent $17 million to make Ed Wood two years ago, easily the best movie of his career and so controlled in tone and spirit that it seemed at the time a rebirth for this immensely gifted but off-puttingly bizarre filmmaker...

...Tuesday, December 24...

...I walk over to the Orpheum, where I was taken at the age of 12 to see The Sting on its opening day and first discovered the truth about what Jews in New York do on Christmas...

...On the site of the once-glorious Loews State on Broadway, a movie palace that seated 1,500, there is now a Virgin Megastore—the largest entertainment store in the world, they tell you as you enter...

...the usher announces at the Beekman, where I first went proudly alone and unsu-pervised to a movie—I was eight years old and the film in question was The Maltese Bippy, a horror parody starring Rowan and Martin of Laugh-In...

...Maybe not, judging from Mars Attacks...

...The choice this afternoon, given the exigencies of starting times, is between Shine, a highly praised Australian film, and The English Patient, a highly praised British film...

...And its last 10 minutes feature a piece of acting by its leading man, the masterful chameleon Daniel Day-Lewis, that is so heartbreaking and powerful I cannot quite recall its equal...

...But wait: One Fine Day proves unexpectedly interesting and moving...

...For two decades, I saw almost every movie released in theaters, in all languages and of all types (with the exception of pornography and those films featuring Robby Benson or Kim Basinger, both of whom have the effect of making me wish I were anywhere else, even in a periodontist's chair...

...Theaters open early and close late to handle the traffic, and coffee bars make a killing...

...I wanted to see I'm Not Rappaport, because Walter Matthau is in it and he is my favorite film actor of all, but my father vetoed it on account of Matthau's character is an old Communist and the whole thing would give him apoplexy...

...The teaming of John Travolta as the angel and William Hurt as the reporter is memorable—Travolta makes you love his character, and Hurt makes you respect his, and the two different qualities give Nora Ephron's meandering road movie a spine...

...I am only glad I didn't go to see The English Patient with a girlfriend, because its conclusion would inevitably provoke the kind of question to which there is no correct answer: "Honey, would you have betrayed the Allies for me...

...Thursday, December 26...

...The binge begins at 4:30 on this cold afternoon with One Fine Day at the 34th Street East, the theater where I saw Jaws in 1975...

...Gripping, deeply romantic, beautifully acted, magnificently photographed, The English Patient is set up like a mystery whose secret you find out only in the last few minutes...

...It turns out that The Crucible is really good...

...The day has arrived...

...But at least it ruins only the last 30 seconds of an otherwise thrilling movie...

...Michael is immensely enjoyable, a movie about an angel on his last trip to Earth and his mission to bring a cynical journalist back to life...

...I expect to be angered by The Crucible, because the Arthur Miller play from which it is adapted draws an appalling parallel between the Salem witch trials and the investigation of Communist influence in America in the 1950s— appalling because while there were no witches in Salem, there certainly were Communists and among them were people, like Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss, who may have done their country significant harm...

...Three levels down, tucked inside the Megastore, is a multiplex...

...I called yesterday and charged seats for Mother and Michael, both of which open today, for me and my parents...

...he is a good-time newspaperman who uses oceans of charm to make up for his unreliability...

...The offensive parallels to Joseph McCarthy hardly matter here, for director Nicholas Hytner has found true heart and soul in Miller's agitprop...

...By the time 1995 rolled around, there seemed precious little pleasure to be had from moviegoing...

...Mostly, it has Pfeif-fer and Clooney, who prove yet again that there are few things as enjoyable as watching two impossibly glamorous Hollywood stars pretend that they have the same problems you and I do...

...You cannot get into a movie to save your life on Christmas, because Jews are not the only ones packing the theaters—after the presents are opened, the Gentiles come out in force too...

...I loathed the ludicrous and overripe novel on which The English Patient is based, so Shine it is to be—only on the way to the theater my heart sinks at the thought of two hours in the dark watching a schizophrenic pianist with a cruel Holocaust-survivor father...

...But it is Christmas week in New York, and I am a Jew, and so to the movies I must...

...And then there are Beavis and Butt-head themselves, two teenage boys who are so unbelievably stupid, single-minded, and oblivious that they think a hit man's $10,000 offer to "do his wife" means they will be flown to Las Vegas and given 10 large to lose their virginities...

...Two of them genuinely impressive (The Crucible, The English Patient), two touching (One Fine Day, Michael), one very funny (Beavis and Butt-head), one kind of funny (Mother), two just awful (Mars Attacks!, Marvin's Room...

...Leonardo di Caprio, who was so awful as Romeo in the recent travesty of Romeo and Juliet, outdoes himself as a petulant pyromaniacal teenager...

...And this year only a few films were in any way revivifying—Fargo, Lone Star, Twelfth...

...Joy to the world...

...My faith in the movies is renewed...

...Two single parents, Michelle Pfeiffer and George Clooney, "meet cute" one rainy morning and find themselves in a child-care crisis on a crucial day in both their professional careers...

...Tonight's entry: Beavis and Butt-head Do America...

...Night, Richard III, Jerry Maguire...

...They end up watching, running after, and even losing each other's kids all over Manhattan as they save their careers and, in a wonderful concluding image, fall asleep together on her couch for the first time in what will presumably be a happy married life...

...Still, it's offbeat and it's at least trying to get at something interesting...

...One Fine Day has some good lines, sharp direction by Michael Hoffman (who made the funniest movie of the decade, Soapdish, and if you don't believe me, rent it), and a strangely sober mood for a comedy that gives it surprising force...

...Given the fact that every year this decade has outranked its predecessor as the worst twelvemonth in the history of cinema, there was little reason to hope that the 1996 Christmas season would bring comfort and joy to this passionate and lifelong moviegoer...

...I have to catch a plane back to Washington, but before I do there's time for one last movie: Marvin's Room at the Lincoln Square, the most elaborate new movie complex in Manhattan, five floors of comfortable and attractive theaters topped off by a gigantic Imax triplex...

...Later, I head out to a 9:45 showing of The Crucible at the Baronet, where I once sat in the first row and craned my neck at an impossible angle to watch Taxi Driver, a movie that is especially striking to see 20 years after its first release because it is ambitious and dark in a way that no major Hollywood release could possibly be these days...

...Meryl Streep is the slatternly sister with two teenage sons she is raising badly...

...At 11 p.m...

...When Marvin's Room ends, my father dutifully proffers a very well-deserved apology...

...I make a last-minute detour into The English Patient—and, again to my surprise, it is quite wonderful...

...spent much of my life...

...And just as believing Christians make their way to church to celebrate the Birth, Jews in New York seek the company of others in a different kind of congregation called a movie theater...

...All this comes out in a long scene at the movie's end that plays like a really bad depiction of a catharsis during therapy...

...The movie builds slowly and well until, at around the first hour, it grabs you by the throat and does not let you go until it is over an hour and a half later...

...For during Christmas week in New York City, Jews go incessantly to the movies, two or three times a day...

...We feel superior as we waltz ahead of the long line waiting in the bitter cold for the 11:15 showing of Mother...

...We right-wing nuts love to task liberals with being politically correct and praise ourselves for our incorrectness, but if you want to see the true faces of the politically incorrect, you need look no further than the animated visages of Beavis and Butt-head...

...Wednesday, December 25...

...Jaws inaugurated the era of the blockbuster— in our time, a hit movie makes more money than anyone ever dreamed a movie could, and that, in turn, has led to the systematic and systemic dumbing-down that makes going to the movies such a chore...