So I finally saw Lincoln yesterday, and I found it pretty great. I hadn't read any reviews, so I had no idea what it was going to be about, except, you know, Abraham Lincoln, but what I mean is that I came in expecting something that was at least a semi-biopic and instead found something that took place in just one month of his life and really should not have been called Lincoln at all but something like Lame-Duck Session, but I suppose that wouldn't have tested very well.

Anyway, it was interesting politically, but the movie really got its momentum from the performances. Day-Lewis of course, but many others. Sally Field was just amazing. If Oscar should be calling anyone first, I think it's her. Kudos to Kushner on that front, because her character was extremely well written, too. I don't think I'd seen her in anything since Soap Dish. She was just phenomenal. Also Tommie Lee Jones and the awesome David Strathairn and James Spader, playing a character not unlike his oleaginous Office character, Robert California.

Even the minor actors were fantastic. This guy Jackie Earle Haley played the vice president of the CSA, Alexander Stephens, and he was just perfectly reprehensible. Watching him, almost half-man, half-snake, hiss out his imprecations against Lincoln and union and black people and rights, he looked and sounded exactly like some of these egregious hate-mongering nincompoops we have to deal with today, which I'm sure Spielberg intended. The pro-slavery people look so small. Some years from now, someone will make a movie about same-sex marriage, and today's bigots will look just as tiny.

Yes, it showed that Lincoln and Thaddeus Stevens understood that you have to compromise your principles in order to advance them, and yes, that's a useful thing for people to see. But it's not a world historically profound political insight. For all these dimestore pundits trying to write about how Lincoln applies to today's situation, I think it really doesn't. That was a pretty unique situation in American history. Entitlements don't quite compare to war and slavery. (UPDATE below the fold!!)

The celebrated musical Les Misérables, adapted from the 1862 novel by Victor Hugo, has penetrated the cultural zeitgeist in ways few other theatrical productions have.

Millennials still cringe at the thought of Joey Potter (Katie Holmes) belting out the tune “On My Own” on the cult TV series Dawson’s Creek, while homely Scotswoman Susan Boyle became an international phenomenon after performing a towering rendition of “I Dreamed A Dream” on the TV competition show Britain’s Got Talent. The song “One Day More,” meanwhile, was used by both Bill Clinton during his 1992 presidential campaign and by Obama supporters during POTUS’s 2008 White House run.

Now, interest in the musical has reached a cultural confluence of sorts, with Les Misérables, the movie-musical directed by Oscar winner Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech). 

Joe Wright is either bookish to a fault or the best literary agent working today, representing such new voices as Leo Tolstoy and YA sensation Jane Austen. He is the most determined refuter of the claim that film and literature don’t mix, starting with Ms. Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (2005), which includes the pleasant surprise of Donald Sutherland amusing himself as Mr. Bennet. Then Wright further shored up his literary credentials by locking into place Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2007), showing how Briony Tallis is and never will be “just a dim old biddy in a chair” thanks to his recruitment of Vanessa Redgrave. To anyone paralyzed by the thought of a movie director who reads, Wright now has taken on the mother of all novels, Leo’s Anna Karenina. What a goody! The scene when Anna and Vronsky first consummate their affair should make every surrealist's mouth water:

But, despite all the murderer’s horror before the murdered body, he had to cut this body into pieces and hide it, he had to make use of what the murderer had gained by his murder.

And, as the murderer falls upon this body with animosity, as if with passion, drags it off and cuts it up, so he covered her face and shoulders with kisses. She held his hand and did not move. Yes, these kisses were what had been bought by this shame. Yes, and this one hand, which will always be mine, is the hand of my accomplice.

You'd think this was straight out of Psycho (an adaptation of a book by Robert Bloch, by the way). But if you don’t recall a murder in Anna Karenina, you are not wrong. Anna is feeling criminal and guilty as she commits  adultery, and Vronsky, as if having a conversation with his lover about what metaphors to compound, is imagining sex with Anna as murder. It is a moment the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein thought completely unexpected in its compositional structure, something directors can learn from in its complex possibilities. But Wright flubs it by applying it only to Anna's consciousness, thus depriving Vronsky of any inner life—and more importantly, his Adam-and-Eve-like conspiracy with Anna.

When the House of Representatives finally, dramatically votes to approve the 13th Amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery, Washington erupts in celebration. Members of Congress weep, throw themselves into each other’s arms, and begin singing “Battle Cry of Freedom.” Men parade through the streets and church bells chime.

And then, at least according to Steven Spielberg’s new film Lincoln, the widely despised old liberal lion of the House, Thaddeus Stevens, limps home through the throngs on his malformed club foot, serenely enters his house, removes an extravagant black wig to reveal a shiny bald dome, and then crawls into bed with his African-American housekeeper—clearly, we are meant to infer, his mistress—where they kiss and exult in the historic events of the day. Spielberg’s Thaddeus Stevens summarizes the extraordinary events of the day with this remarkable quote: the most liberating constitutional amendment in history, he alleges, had been “passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America”—meaning Abraham Lincoln.

With the widely praised film overflowing with such startling scenes, it is little wonder that scholars, nitpickers, trivial pursuit pursuers, and history buffs have all been crowding their local movie theaters this week, many armed with legal pads, in a massive competition to unearth and report every factual error that has crept into the film.

To be sure, there is no shortage of small historical bloopers in the movie. First Lady Mary Lincoln, for example, never planted herself in the House Gallery to observe the final tally on the amendment. (Michelle Obama may routinely attend the State of the Union address each year, but such a visit would have been unthinkable in 1865.) Nor did congressmen vote by state delegations—a device that conflates the traditions of national political conventions with those of the House of Representatives. (Until the advent of machine voting, the House voted alphabetically by name; this I know from experience—I once worked for Representative Bella Abzug, number two on the roll call, and it was always a challenge to move her considerable frame from her congressional office to the House floor in time to answer the roll right after James Aboureszk.) 

Spoiler Alert: This article reveals major plot twists in Life of Pi.

Based on the award-winning novel of the same name by Yann Martel, Life of Pi follows the amazing story of a young man named Piscine “Pi” Molitor Patel who finds himself lost at sea after his family’s cargo ship sinks in a storm. But Pi is not alone on this journey and must survive in a crowded life boat with four animals from his family’s zoo—A hyena, an orangutan named Orange Juice, an injured zebra, and worst of all, an adult Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.

In breathtaking 3D and featuring stunning visuals, director Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain) brings the story to life on the big screen. Although Lee does his best to stay true to the story, there are clear differences between the film and the novel.

On the big screen, Jennifer Lawrence is as tough as they come. But meet her for dinner, and you’ll quickly learn the truth—she’s a lightweight. After a single glass of wine, she’s already starting to feel tipsy. “I’m going to need to eat,” she says. “Or take my clothes off.” She orders a hamburger with bacon and truffle fries. No, wait, she tells our waitress, hold the bacon. And hold the burger. She eyes the strip steak, before deciding on what she really wants—the chicken, with fries. “Hang on. Sorry, I’m so annoying.” Pause. “The mashed potatoes! Yeah, instead of the fries.” She tops it off with bacon, because evidently she loves bacon (along with Domino’s pizza, bubble gum, Sour Patch Kids, and pretzels dipped in avocado). Should we share some fries? “No,” she insists. “Order what you want.” When I do, she interjects: “You’re making a huge mistake!” The truffle fries it is.

If this sounds like a scene from When Harry Met Sally, it’s because Lawrence, 22, is an eccentric spirit. You’d never know that from her roster of serious roles—Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Mystique in X-Men: First Class, and her Oscar-nominated debut in Winter’s Bone. Lawrence grew up in Louisville, Ky., where she worshiped Lucille Ball. “My No. 1 priority in life is laughing,” she says. Now audiences are about to see that comedic side in David O. Russell’s latest, Silver Linings Playbook. Lawrence plays Tiffany, a widow, who romances her bipolar neighbor (Bradley Cooper). Lawrence is so great in the role, she’s already a frontrunner for next year’s Best Actress Oscar.

In a candid two-hour conversation over dinner in Atlanta, Lawrence spoke to Ramin Setoodeh about a variety of ridiculous—and a few serious—subjects.

Many times when you make a movie, it feels like your biggest mistake. But even if a film isn’t a hit, you shouldn’t view it as a mistake. My mistake is having two sides to my character. When I’m not working, I get very down, but when I am working, I get very immersed in it.

For six years, from 1985 to 1991, I felt pretty weak and useless. I was at home, working on scripts and cooking and taking care of the kids, while my wife, who’s a very strong woman, steady and pragmatic, really stabilized the family. She was working as a medical researcher. I didn’t have much self-esteem, because I’d pitch so many scripts and get back rewrites. It was just endless frustration. I got moody and fell into a near depression. But then I became an older, more mature person who was much more prepared to direct a feature-length film.

Years later, when I was making Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hulk, I was hardly at home. I spent two years on Crouching Tiger and then another year promoting it all over the world. After the Oscars, I went right into working on Hulk, which took two years. This meant that during my son’s teenage years, I didn’t spend a lot of time with him. I grew up in Taiwan, where those years are all about academics, so I didn’t feel as though I had a lot of life experience to share with him while he was in high school. American high schools are psychologically more complicated. When your children are little, you educate them and share your experiences, but when they’re older, it’s harder, and I wasn’t home enough to give him guidance. There was a level of detachment and a lot of sparse phone conversations. “Work?” “Fine.” “Girlfriend?” “No.” By the time I finished Hulk, he was 17 and already preparing for college, so I had missed out on a lot. I should have made more of an effort.

After that, I tried to be there more for my second son. My next film, Brokeback Mountain, involved just two months of shooting, and I did the editing in Rye, N.Y., near my then-hometown of Larchmont. I also did postproduction on my next film, Lust, Caution, near my home, so my son would come to the editing room and watch. He wanted to play football, and I tried to talk him out of it because he was so small, but I was there for every game. When he made his first catch, I was so beside myself, I screamed louder than when I won my Academy Award. Once he got to high school, it seemed suicidal to play football, so I finally talked him out of it, and he went into drama. I went to every performance and came home every night to cook dinner. He had a good time working as a production assistant on my film Taking Woodstock and then played Teddy, the boy who gets lost in Bangkok, in The Hangover Part II. He recently graduated from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, just like I did.

On the big screen, Jennifer Lawrence is as tough as they come. But meet her for dinner, and you’ll quickly learn the truth—she’s a lightweight. After a single glass of wine, she’s starting to feel tipsy. “I’m going to need to eat,” Lawrence says. “Or take my clothes off.” She orders a hamburger with bacon and truffle fries. No, wait, she tells our waitress, hold the bacon. And, actually, hold the burger. She eyes the strip steak, before deciding on the chicken. “Hang on. Sorry, I’m so annoying.” Pause. “The mashed potatoes! Yeah, instead of the fries.” She tops that off with bacon, because she loves bacon (and Domino’s pizza, bubble gum, Sour Patch Kids, and pretzels dipped in avocado). Should we share some fries? “No,” she insists. “Order what you want.” When I do, she interjects: “You’re making a huge mistake!” The truffle fries it is.

If this sounds like a scene from When Harry Met Sally, it’s because Jennifer Lawrence, 22, is an eccentric spirit. You’d never know that from her roster of serious roles—Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, Mystique in X-Men: First Class, and her Oscar-nominated debut in Winter’s Bone. Despite gravitating toward dramas, Lawrence, who grew up in Louisville, Ky., worshiped Lucille Ball and wanted to make people laugh. When she met with director Drake Doremus in 2010 before shooting Like Crazy, the two bonded over one-liners from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. “She’s so funny and goofy and vulnerable,” he says. “She’s so carefree and fun when she’s comfortable.” Now audiences are about to see that side in Silver Linings Playbook.

This isn’t a screwball comedy as much as a dark one. Lawrence plays Tiffany, a widow who falls for her neighbor Pat (Bradley Cooper), a bipolar guy pining after his adulterous ex-wife. To help him move on, Tiffany enlists Pat in a local dance competition. Originally, Anne Hathaway was supposed to play Tiffany, but after she bailed, director David O. Russell narrowed his sights on other actresses, and Lawrence auditioned for him over Skype. He knew she had a chameleon’s way of blending into a room. During the 2010 awards season, “she was going around with Winter’s Bone and we were going around with The Fighter,” Russell says. “I never recognized her. She would be standing next to me—who is this tall blonde that looks like a model from the Valley? Someone would say Jennifer Lawrence. That’s Jennifer Lawrence? I just met her! How is that Jennifer Lawrence?!”

To get into Tiffany’s skin, Lawrence knew she’d need to perform another disappearing act. She dyed her hair darker and spoke in a deeper octave to make herself sound older. “I was too young for the part,” she says. “I was way wrong. There was this fear at first. Am I going to ruin this for everybody?” The hardest part, though, was the film’s dance finale. Cooper was a natural, but Lawrence admits a lack of coordination. “I can barely walk across the room,” she says. To improve her skills, she studied old Gene Kelly videos. “That made me want to kill myself.” The hard work paid off. Lawrence is so good in the role, critics are touting her as a frontrunner for Best Actress at February’s Academy Awards.

This weekend pits two damsels in distress against one another at the multiplex. There’s Kristen Stewart’s vampire-loving teen, Bella Swan, in the final Twilight film, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2, and Keira Knightley as the aristocratic title character in Anna Karenina, the latest movie adaptation of Tolstoy’s classic novel. But which film is better ... or more awful? Our critics, Anna Klassen and Marlow Stern, debate.

Marlow: Let’s kick things off with The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 2—say that five times fast!—the final entry in the emo-teen-vampire blockbuster franchise based on Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling YA novels, since it’s fresher in our minds. Whereas the last Twilight film was a colossal bore that spent the majority of its running time tracking Bella (Kristin Stewart) in a fancy condo struggling with losing her V-card, and her subsequent baby vampire pregnancy, the final Twilight revels in its own absurdity. The worst films in the series were the ones that were too somber and self-serious (Twilight, New Moon, Breaking Dawn—Part 1), whereas the best have recognized that these films are pure camp and milked that for all it’s worth (Eclipse, with its Brokeback Mountain tent scene). Part 2 is a fun lil’ romp, with the Cullen clan—and Bella—rounding up a motley crew of ridiculously costumed vampires from around the globe, including Amazons, a Middle Easterner who can control the elements, two Italians who talk like Super Mario and Luigi, and Lee Pace deliciously overacting as a N’awlins vampire. They’re assembling the Vampire Avengers because the vampire high council, the Volturi, wishes to destroy Bella and Edward’s (Robert Pattinson) gifted vamp/human daughter, Renesmee, whom they believe to be immortal—apparently a huge no-no in vampire circles. All-in-all, it’s a gay ol’ time.

Anna: A gay ol’ time, it is not. If it wasn’t for a handful of enjoyable cameos (Taken’s Maggie Grace, The Master’s eternally cheery Rami Malek, and Pushing Daisies’ Lee Pace) I would have been asleep before the Volturi snapped off its first vampire head. But aside from the unimproved CGI and cheesy dialogue (or lack thereof), the plot itself is absurd: after Bella gives birth to a seemingly demonic child that nearly destroyed her from the inside out (as we saw in many graphic, unnecessary sequences) in 2011’s Breaking Dawn: Part 1, the child is transformed into a miniature protagonist in Part 2. Renesmee, the almost entirely computer-generated spawn of Edward and Bella’s violent, unintentionally S&M bang sesh in Part 1, poses as the love interest for resident werewolf Jacob Black (Taylor Lautner). While Bella may have blossomed from her doe-eyed wallflower status of the first four films, her daughter, fresh from the womb, has already been “imprinted on” (read: claimed) by a man who is sometimes a wolf. Jacob’s usual testiness in the first four films has been traded for a (creepy) protectiveness over the newborn baby of the woman he once loved (Bella). Because he wants to make babies with her one day. (We are of course supposed to assume that the feeling is mutual, and Renesmee is totally cool with bestiality). Ugh.

President Obama has given the new film Lincoln a thumbs-up, the film’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, said Thursday night at Newsweek and The Daily Beast’s Hero Summit in Washington, D.C.

Kushner would know. Just before arriving at the summit, he had dashed across town from a private screening he attended with Obama and the film’s director, Steven Spielberg, among others, at the White House.

Kushner joined moderator Tina Brown on a summit panel about the making of the film, saying he thought Obama “really liked it." The president's entourage also "seemed to like it," he said. "They all stood up.” Then he joked, “Maybe they do that every time.” Clearly having an unusual evening, he added with a laugh, as if to explain his somewhat harried state, “I just literally walked out of the White House. I couldn't find the limo.”

The rise of Chris Tucker from Burger King janitor in rural Georgia to Hollywood’s highest paid actor is just as astonishing as his fall, epitomized by a report in February claiming he owed a whopping $12 million in back taxes to good ol’ Uncle Sam. 

Yes, you read that correctly. 

Back in 2006, Tucker, the comedic actor known for his shrill voice and manic energy, negotiated the highest base salary in Hollywood history: $25 million for Rush Hour 3, the third installment in the cross-cultural action-comedy franchise that paired him with Jackie Chan. The first two Rush Hour films, helmed by renowned over-sharer Brett Ratner, had grossed close to $600 million worldwide, but Tucker’s fee was a major head-scratcher considering he hadn’t starred in a non–Rush Hour film since 1997’s Jackie Brown. 

As Hollywood enters the final two months of the year, with awards season on the horizon, there’s something missing from the crop of Oscar hopefuls scheduled to campaign at private dinner parties and screenings in New York and Los Angeles. Where are the women?

This isn’t a new criticism. Strong male roles have always dominated the male-centered movie industry. But this year, the gap between actors and actresses is perhaps as wide as it has ever been. Even the No. 1 blockbuster of the 2012 so far, The Avengers, treated its lone woman superhero, the Black Widow, as an afterthought. The actress who plays her, Scarlett Johansson, hasn’t headlined her own movie since 2007’s The Nanny Diaries.

On the other hand, there are already enough strong male performances to book several Academy Awards ceremonies. Among the top of that list are Daniel Day-Lewis as the 16th president in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Joaquin Phoenix as a scenery-chewing war veteran in The Master, Denzel Washington’s addict pilot in Flight, and Bill Murray as another president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Hyde Park on Hudson. Anthony Hopkins is terrifically spooky in Hitchcock. Earlier this year, Richard Gere received plenty of kudos for his shady CEO in Arbitrage. Ben Affleck is the CIA agent who makes Argo fly. In The Sessions, John Hawkes delivers his best performance yet as a virgin with polio. The same goes for Jake Gyllenhaal, in the cop drama End of Watch, and Bradley Cooper, as a bipolar but lovable nut in David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. And those are just the best great performances.

In the coming weeks, historians and political pundits will pore over the similarities between the subject of Steven Spielberg’s latest historical epic, Lincoln, and the trials and tribulations that have faced newly re-elected President Barack Obama ad nauseum. Two former lawyers from Illinois. The gift for mellifluous oration and gallows humor. A nation—and Congress—divided. Racial disharmony. The ethically murky steps each man took in stretching the bounds of presidential power for what they felt was the greater good of the nation (for Obama, see: the debt ceiling.

Spielberg, by his own admission, made the admirable decision to schedule the release date after the presidential election to depoliticize the film.

Lincoln also represents the third entry in Spielberg’s slavery triptych, following The Color Purple and Amistad. It is loosely based on historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals, penned by Pulitzer-winning playwright Tony Kushner , who also wrote the screenplay to Spielberg’s last good film, 2005’s Munich, and stars two-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis as the eponymous Great Emancipator. The movie is one of the best-reviewed of the year and as such, has emerged as an Oscar frontrunner.