To paraphrase Tom Waits, so that’s what they’re building in there.

Point Cinemas patrons, especially the early birds who have been chagrinned lately to see the west side theater not open until 3 p.m. during the week, have been wondering what Marcus Theatre has had in mind with its renovations going on over there.

Well, the company officially announced its renovation plans for the theater, and the one not surprisingly getting the most attention is the addition of a full-service bar, the Take Five Lounge, offering beer, wine and cocktails, as well as appetizers and Milwaukee-based Zaffiro’s pizza, from 11 a.m. to midnight daily. According to Wisconsin State Journal reporter Karen Rivedal, who broke the story late Monday, the theater will file an application for a Class B liquor license at Tuesday night’s Madison City Council meeting, from which it will be kicked to the Alcohol License Review Committee.

As I read the press release Marcus sent out late Monday afternoon, the theater is not asking to allow patrons to bring beer or wine outside of the lounge and into theaters, something you can do at Sundance Cinemas. The challenge for the theater will be making sure no overserved customers make a nuisance of themselves during screenings. I’ve never run into that as an issue at Sundance, but part of that may be that Sundance has many patrons for its second-floor bar (and especially the Rooftop Bar in the summertime) who never even go to a movie. Point’s location isn’t as friendly to the after-work-drinks clientele, so I’m guessing the vast majority of folks who drink there also plan on seeing a movie either before or after.

What this means, I think, is that Marcus has been paying attention to the success that theaters around the country have had in integrating alcohol and food sales into the moviegoing series, to get folks to arrive early to eat and stay later for a post-show chat over drinks. The challenge, I think, is making that work in a space as isolated as a suburban multiplex — most of the ones I’ve seen work in other cities tend to be in urban areas, or within walkable shopping areas or other mixed-use developments where it’s a little more natural for people to kind of move in and out.

Among the other renovaitons, Point will now have a giant tower marquee sign, similar to the one at Brookfield’s Majestic Cinema that you can see off Interstate 94 when you head into Milwaukee. Point was in dire need of a facelift, and losing the ’90s Santa Fe shopping mall exterior for something more classic (and classy) will be a welcome change. The Brookfield Majestic sounds like it will be a blueprint for the interior renovations that Marcus has in mind for Point, including an expanded lobby, recliming seats in the auditorums (except for the Ultrascreen) and a bigger box office.

Marcus plans to have all these renovations in place by May, just in time for the summer blockbuster season to kick off with “Iron Man 3” on May 4.

Movie theaters and studios are an interesting place right now. With less than three weeks to go until the Oscars, suddenly there’s a lot of interest from audiences in some very good films.

Which is great to see packed houses for “Zero Dark Thirty” or “Silver Linings Playbook.” But theaters don’t live on ticket sales alone — they need to move concession sales as well. The problem is that Oscar-nominated films tend to be downers, or at least about weighty subjects, so they don’t lend themselves to special tie-ins. Nobody wants a “Lincoln” commemorative cup to take home with them the way kids wanted a “Wreck-It Ralph” cup.

So I feel for whatever advertising executive at AMC Theateres thought this up.

First of all, this year AMC is continuing its tradition of having marathon showings of all the Oscar-nominated films at its theaters nationwide. Which is a fun idea — it’s a great chance for film fans who have had other priorities over the holidays to get caught up in a hurry for their office Oscar pools. In Madison, on Saturday, Feb. 16 at 10 a.m., for $30, you can settle in and watch “Amour,” “Les Miserables,” “Argo” and “Django Unchained,” then come back the following Saturday, Feb. 23, at 10 a.m. and spend $40 to watch “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Life of Pi,” “Lincoln,” “Silver Linings Playbook” and “Zero Dark Thirty.”

So that’s great. But then AMC took it a step further with their “Oscar Offer Mania” promotion, in which they tied special discounts to each movie. See “Argo” today through Wednesday and get a free small drink. Fine. Free small cheese pizza “pie” when you see “Life of Pi.” Cute.

Then we get to “Amour,” the incredibly sad French film about an elderly man watching his lifelong wife slip into illness, dementia and death. Which at AMC, you can watch with a a free Light Snacker popcorn and soda combo!

This is the actual ad copy with that offer:

“Celebrate a love that spans generations and share a popcorn and soda combo with someone you love.”

Wow. Sounds like a great date-night outing! Say, in the spirit of the movie, should I hand-feed my date the popcorn and spoon soda into her mouth while we watch?

I suppose it could be worse. The promotion connected to “Zero Dark Thirty” could have been “Waterboard yourself with our jumbo-sized soft drinks, now $1 off!”

Michael Haneke’s “Amour” opens with some police officers breaking into a locked Parisian apartment. They find one door sealed with duct tape. Unsealing the door, they enter a bedroom and find an old woman, Anne, (Emmanuelle Riva) lying dead on her bed, surrounded by flowers.

That might seem like a spoiler, but it is the first scene of the movie. And, really, the entire movie is a spoiler, the most massive spoiler of all time. This is our ending. We’re all going to die someday, and many of us will die badly.

Haneke subtly reinforces the universality of his beautifully sad story by next taking us back in time a few months to a concert hall full of people. We have a hard time picking out the woman and her husband Georges (Jean-Louis Trintignant) from the crowd. They could be anybody.

In the cab ride home, we get a sense of them — retired music teachers in their 80s, cultured, still in love, still full of things to say to one another. They’re living the last years of their lives in the way all of us would — together, and loved.

Then they enter the apartment, and never leave it again for the rest of the movie. Anne suffers a stroke, goes blank for a few minutes. Then she comes back to Georges, as if nothing as happened.

But this is the beginning of the end, a long, agonizing slow fall rung by rung down the ladder, slipping away from Georges. Anne’s mental lapses become more frequent, and her physical health starts to deteriorate. She hangs on to the things that give her pleasure — books, music, conversation — as long as she can, but then that fades. She continues to slip away.

Through it all, Georges is single-minded in his devotion to his wife, refusing to put her in a retirement home or a hospice. He does everything for her — everything — and anyone who has had to take care of a terminally ill loved one will feel the pain of recognition. It’s not just the physical chores that must be done day after day — it’s the gulf that widens between caregiver and patient. When Anne cries out “Hurts! Hurts!” over and over, she can’t tell him what is wrong, and he can’t figure it out.

“Amour” has been nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actress for Riva, but not Best Actor for Trintignant. That says a lot about how we view acting. Riva’s performance is undeniably magnificent, as she must chart every step of Anne’s physical and mental deteriorating with exacting precision.

It’s an external performance, but Trintignant gives an internal performance that’s just as worthy. He’s incredibly loving towards his wife, but his single-minded devotion shuts out the rest of the world, even their daughter (Isabelle Huppert) when she comes to visit. He’s frustrated and abrasive, choosing to bear the entire burden himself; describing what his wife’s life as an invalid is like to his daughter, he says, “None of all that deserves to be seen.”

But, of course, Haneke is showing us all of it, sparing us almost nothing. In the past, I’ve always thought Haneke made films to torment and his audience; “Cache” offered us a brilliant Hitchcockian thriller, but only if we were willing to be complicit in the actions of the unseen voyeur, and the sadistic “Funny Games” seemed to be a rebuke to anyone who buy a ticket to see a movie like “Funny Games.”

There’s definitely an element of that here, as we are shut into this apartment with Georges and Anne, sharing every bit of their misery with them. But it’s only by enduring that that we can understand what a great love story “Amour” really is, how everything Georges does for Anne — even the last thing — is done out of love.

Haneke wants his audience to face an uncomfortable truth about life, as he so often does. But this time, I think he means to celebrate how, if love can’t halt the inexorable march of time, it can make it a little easier to bear.

“Amour” starts today at Sundance. PG-13 for brief nudity and language; 2:07.

There are those actors who you’d watch in just about anything. They’re the ones who just seem to enjoy themselves while they’re acting, whether the movie around them is bad or not.

“Stand Up Guys” has three of them — Al Pacino, Christopher Walken and Alan Arkin — and just their presence goes a long way towards making “Stand Up Guys” a watchable movie. The movie itself doesn’t take it much farther, a sometimes ungainly mix of soft-boiled crime thriller and Viagra comedy.

But I enjoyed it well enough for the chance to see three old pros do their thing. “We’re all still here!” Pacino exults at one point, and their presence and vitality as performers is something to celebrate.

Val (Pacino) is a small-time criminal who has just gotten out of prison after a 28-year stint for murder and bank robbery. Meeting him at the prison gates is Doc (Christopher Walken), his old friend, who promises him a first day of freedom to remember. But if Doc is so happy to see Val, why does he have such haunted eyes, and a loaded gun?

“Stand Up Guys” is thin on plot, although I kind of wish the film had jettisoned the plot altogether and just had 90 minutes of the actors sitting around diners shooting the breeze. Instead, the movie labors through some wheezy setpieces, such as the old guys going to a brothel and showing the women there a thing or two, or stealing a new Dodge Challenger, mystified at the keyless ignition. The best part comes when Doc and Val bust their old getaway driver Hirsch (Arkin) out of a retirement home for some fun; Arkin’s presence adds a lot of zip to the film, but despite his equal status on the movie poster, he’s really just in the film for an extended cameo.

The pleasure of the movie comes in just watching the veteran actors volley lines back and forth, taking about past glories and present-day regrets. Pacino is his usual florid, outsized self, serving up raspy f-bombs like slices of prime rib. Walken is more contained and still, delivering serious lines as if they were funny and funny lines as if they were serious. They make a good odd-couple team, and if actor-turned-director Fisher Stevens pushes the geriatric comedy too hard at times, at others he’s wise to lay back and let the actors just work.

The film ends with a deeply dumb shootout — Stevens must have mistakenly thought that the audience, so used to seeing these guys play gangsters, wanted to see then back in action. But it’s when Pacino and Walken are back in inaction, chatting over surf ‘n’ turf or walking the streets telling old gangster stories, that “Stand Up Guys” lives up to the joy they so evidently still take in their work.

“Stand Up Guys” is now playing at Point and Star Cinema in Madison. R for language, violence, and sexuality.

Before he met her, he felt dead inside. Dead outside, too. And after he met her, he still felt dead. But he was in love.

That’s the wry premise behind the horror-comedy “Warm Bodies,” which goes light on the horror and heavy on the comedy. R (Nicholas Hoult) seems in some way like any awkward teen — uncomfortable in his own body, eager to connect with other people but unsure how. The catch is that that body is rotting away — R is a zombie, and keeps a running voiceover monologue of his woes in the film’s clever early scenes. “What’s wrong with me?” he bemoans. “I should eat better.”

While the humans are safely esconced inside a walled city, the zombies roam morosely around the local airport, perhaps because that was the place they felt the least human while they were alive, so it’s the place they feel the most human while they were dead? R’s days are spent grunting at the airport bar with his best friend M (Rob Corddry) and staying clear of another breed of zombies, the skeletal Boneys, who have ripped away their last vestiges of humanity.

On a mission to find some food (i.e. us), R stumbles across a band of humans, including Julie (Teresa Palmer), with whom he’s instantly smitten. He gets close to her the only way he knows how — by kidnapping her, and by eating her boyfriend’s brains, which contain all his memories of her. Not exactly a “meet-cute,” but writer-director Jonathan Levine (“50/50”) is sly about finding all the laughs in the idea of a human-zombie teen romance while still making it seem sweet and faintly believable.

By the way, if the names R and Julie don’t tip you off as to Levine’s source material for his tale of ill-fated lovers, perhaps the balcony scene will. Like the Montagues and the Capulets, both M and Julie’s father Grigio (John Malkovich) loathe the opposite side of the dead-undead line. And R and Julie have to overcome the prejudices of both their kinds to stay together, especially when they learn that the blush of romantic love might be enough to reverse the zombie apocalypse.

The film barely earns its R rating, and horror fans might be disappointed that “Warm Bodies” is almost gore-free; you see much worse every week on “The Walking Dead.” On the other hand, “Twilight” fans looking for the next supernatural teen romance might be bummed out that the film’s romantic hero, although a cutie, has rotting flesh and a little brain matter caught between his teeth.

But for the rest of us, “Warm Bodies” hits an appealing sweet spot, sending up what we know about zombie movies while still being awfully sweet, with Hoult’s halting zombie and Palmer’s jaded human making for a very likable couple. This is a quirky, fun film that lives for moments when Corddry, trying to console R after a romantic setback, shakes his decaying head and grunts, “Bitches, man.”

“Warm Bodies” opens today at Point, Eastgate and Star Cinemas in Madison. R for violence and language, 1:37.

When I dutifully turned in my Worst Movies of 2012 list last December, I couldn’t help but feel a little bit of a pang. It felt incomplete somehow.

I had limited the list, as always, to movies that had played theatrically in Madison. And there were some bad movies, certainly. But there was one elephant in the room, a movie I had watched a screener of in slack-jawed wonder months before, half-hoping and half-dreading that it would play someday in Madison. But it never did.

But now it’s out on DVD. Now, finally, I can write about it.

I give you “The Paperboy,” the worst movie of 2012.

On paper, it looks solid. A fine cast (Nicole Kidman, John Cusack, Matthew McConaughey in the midst of a banner year), an acclaimed director (Lee Daniels of “Precious”), adapting a good book by a fine writer (Pete Dexter, who co-wrote the screenplay with Daniels.) It seems like it has to be at least watchable.

Holy geez. “The Paperboy” is can’t-turn-your-eyes-away terrible, like that YouTube link you wish you never clicked on. It’s a campy, trashy, pulpy disaster, a thick slice of Southern noir that’s been left out to rot in the Florida sun.

Start off with McConaughey and David Oyelowo, playing a pair of hotshot Miami reporters who have come back to McConaughey’s swampy Florida hometown to investigate a murder. The local sheriff has been offed, and a slack-jawed hillbilly thug (Cusack) has been convicted of the crime. Only a prison groupie (Kidman) insists he’s innocent, and the reporters are in town to check her story out. They hire McConaughey’s younger brother (Zac Efron) to chauffeur them around town.

Now, from that description, an audience member might fairly assume that at some point, the murder will be solved, or another culprit will be fingered, or the reporters will move in any way forward in their investigation. But no. No, Daniels could not care less about the investigation, and whenever he returns to the murder plot, you feel like he’s annoyed at having to do so. What he cares about is atmosphere, ladles and lades of humid atmosphere, of scene after scene of the characters sitting around, sweating magnificently, drinking profusely, while he experiences with blown-out colors, odd camera angles, bizarre jump cuts. There are scenes, I swear, where I don’t think the actors were even told where the cameras were, so ineptly are they framed.

When “The Paperboy” does rouse itself from its sozzled stupor, it’s so Daniels can get supremely icky. A rough sex scene, intercut with shots of rotting dead animal carcasses? Check. Mutual masturbation in a prison visitors’ lounge? Check. And the I-can’t-believe-I-just-saw-that apex, a scene in which Efron’s characte gets stung by a jellyfish, and Kidman has to fight off other women at the beach for the chance to urinate on him. Efron is dreamy and all, but I can’t imagine demand is that high to pee on him that women will fight for the privilege. (Although I’ve never seen “High School Musical.”)

It would have been one thing if this was just garbage, and there were honestly times when I thought this was some kind of “Grindhouse”-like meta experiment where  Daniels was trying to mimic the cruddy look and craft of early ’70s Southern B-flicks. But then he insists on also making “The Paperboy” a treatise on how horrible race relations were in the South in the ’60s, just in case anybody wasn’t clear on that. The movie is narrated not by any of the main characters, but by Efron’s family maid (Macy Gray, and there’s a voice you want to spend two hours with), who seems to be there only to be humiliated again and again by Efron and his family.

Daniels gets the actors to emote up a storm (Kidman actually got a Golden Globe nomination for this, although I assume it’s more for solace than for appreciation, the award-season equvalent of a cup of hot soup and a blanket) but most of them don’t seem to know what they’re doing from scene to scene. Efron plays a college-age student like he was a sniveling five-year-old, and Cusack is severely miscast as a racist, sexually brutal pig (Lloyd Dobler, no!)

“The Paperboy” is one hot mess, the sort of fiasco that could have a second life as an unintentional camp classic. It’s that terrible. If you’re a connoisseur of bad cinema, treat yourself.

I wrote a short story for the Capital Times about Phil Johnston, a native of Neenah and a UW-Madison graduate, who has quickly become a successful screenwriter. His first film, “Cedar Rapids,” was a very funny film that gave Midwestern rubes a certain nobility, almost.

It didn’t do much at the box office, but his second film was “Wreck-It Ralph,” which has been a big animated hit for Disney and, not entirely expectedly, a big critical hit as well. It’s up for an Oscar for Best Animated Feature, and what’s kind of funny is that Johnston seems fairly blase about it. There are five slots for animated film, which basically means if your film makes any kind of splash, it’s going to get nominated.

Also, whether the writer of an animated film actually gets an Oscar if it wins, or if its the producers and director who collect the statuary, isn’t clear to me. Which may contribute to Johnston’s sanguine outlook.

I actually think “Ralph” has a pretty good shot at winning; the perennial favorite Pixar’s “Brave” was underwhelming to some (although I thought it was both vastly entertaining and a surprisingly nuanced look at mother-daughter relations), and some critics really liked the unpredictability and poignancy of “Ralph.”

I was a little disappointed, honestly; I thought the film went to painstaking lengths to establish its video game universe, only to basically abandon it halfway through in favor of the geopolitics of the “Sugar Rush” world. I may need to see it again before fully passing judgment, and, having two young daughters, I’m sure I’ll get the chance.