If I had to catalog all the moronic plot turns in The Day After Tomorrow, we'd be here until the next ice age. It's just so very bad. You can have a pretty good time snickering at it-unless, like me, you think there's something to this global warming thing, and you shudder at the irony of a movie meant to warn people about a dangerous environmental trend that completely discredits it. Is it possible that the film is a plot to make environmental activists look as wacko as anti-environmentalists always claim they are?

The English have a wellspring of comedy that will never be exhausted: the combination of bestial urges and excellent manners.

What can you say about a man who leaps from a helicopter over Manhattan without a parachute in the hope that by increasing his heart rate he'll transform into an iridescent lime-green behemoth so he can take on an even bigger behemoth? That he knows he's living in a computer-generated universe in which gravity is a feeble suggestion and nothing is remotely at stake, and that when he hits the ground he'll be replaced by a special effect. The Incredible Hulk is weightless-as disposable as an Xbox game.

My fears are the obvious ones: that marketplace-minded publishers - all four of them - will shy further away from literary fiction, international authors, poetry, and the other marginal but hugely important regions of the book world.

Despite some standout events, 2012 was demoralizing. The Met felt adrift, and New York City Opera couldn't claw its way back to artistic health.

The rise of video on demand will make it possible for small movies to earn back costs via $9.95 24-hour rentals and for people in cities without independent cinemas to see the kind of movies they never have before. That's great - but on the other hand, that's TV.

I'm more encouraged by the saplings: new music groups, tiny new venues, entrepreneurial musician-composers who aren't waiting to be discovered but are instead building their own Establishment.