…is probably how the headline will read come February.

I expect Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln to be something of a 12-hour snoozefest wrapped around one or two astoundingly rendered set pieces and one great performance. (Fun supporting cast, though: Sally Field, Tommy Lee Jones, David Strathairn, and Bruce McGill, who’s gone from Animal House to one helluva effective character actor, even though he plays more or less the same character in every film.)

Day-Lewis will have competition, however, from Philip Seymour Hoffman (and possibly Joaquin Phoenix) in the eagerly anticipated and already well received The Master:

We Americans love our gurus, cults, sects, faith healers, health-and-wealth preachers, pseudo-psychologists, health-food hucksters, alternative medicators, and conspiracy theorists, who explain why all of the above have been kept from us all these years by the corporations, the Masons, the Jews, the banks, the Church, the AMA, the APA, and that guy who roams the subways at night selling D batteries and yo-yos. This should be good.

I am not particularly eager to see The Hobbit because the creatures look grotesque and no one wears shoes. But I am curious about this newfangled technology. (Moving pictures…yeah, right. What’s next? Little boxes we carry in our pockets and talk into as we zoom around vast glass cities in our flying cars fueled by Fresca?)

On a short, serious note, I was very sad to see this: the great Bob Hoskins is retiring from acting owing to Parkinson’s disease. I can still remember as clear as this morning’s police sirens watching The Long Good Friday at the Baronet/Coronet Theater on Third Ave., and being taken aback by this short stocky but terrifying Cockney gangster–who would go on to play Iago, a sad second-tier hood in Mona Lisa, J. Edgar Hoover in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, and a preternaturally creepy caterer in Atom Egoyan’s Felicia’s Journey (which manages to convey a subtle pro-life message). And on and on. Hoskins is only 70, which these days is not that old. (Clint Eastwood is still directing at 80!) Here’s hoping for the best for one of the best.

And as if that news wasn’t bad enough: something in popcorn may contribute to Alzheimer’s! What’s left? Next they’ll be telling us that those malted-milk balls with the water-bottle plastic melted into them will give you asthma or something.