Film critics rarely hear back from filmmakers after the posting of a negative review. However disapproving your assessment might be, filmmakers (especially big names) never dispute or push back. Certainly not in these crazy times.

Way back in ’93 an irate Bruce Willis called me at home after I’d reported that he’d irritated colleagues during the making of Striking Distance, but that was a different universe.

Anyway, yesterday afternoon Facebook contributor and college instructor Lizzie Finn bitchslapped George Clooney‘s The Tender Bar something awful. Synthetic and unengaging, she said. Cliched. Not much dramatic tension. Too much of a casual white-male perspective.

Very soon after, however, Lizzie heard back from Lysa Heslov, wife of Clooney’s producing & writing partner Grant Heslov. And Lysa pretty much tore Lizzie a new asshole.

Lizzie replied to Lysa with a kind of “whadaya whadaya?” riff. I just wrote what I felt and thought, she said. I didn’t expect to hear back from anyone inside Team Clooney. I figured George and Grant wouldn’t give a shit one way or the other. Plus they’re rich and famous so who cares?, etc. To which Lysa replied as follows:

Here’s Lizzie’s poison-pen review:

From Jeff Giles‘ “When Neon Owned the Night — glitz, grit and the vintage glow of urban America,” posted on 5.10.19:

“Before evolution hit a snag, and we reverted to slouching and staring at our phones, human beings walked with their eyes up, looking at things. In the countryside, people contemplated church steeples, maple trees, clouds. In cities, they gaped at neon — and it was everything.

“In 1898, the Scottish chemist William Ramsay was collaborating with an English colleague, Morris Travers, when he discovered an inert gas, naming it ‘neon’ after the Greek word for ‘new.’ He went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work, though it did not occur to him to use his discovery to sell theater tickets or beer.

“It was the French inventor Georges Claude who sensed a new industry in the offing. Mr. Claude unveiled a neon light at the Paris Motor Show in December 1910, and went on to create all manner of signs for clients.

“By the 1930s, New York was ablaze with color, and Times Square was an enormous flame toward which countless moths fluttered.

“‘Visitors, too, arrive in New York to witness the nightly Vesuvius-like eruption of light,’ Richard F. Shepard wrote in the N.Y. Times in 1987. ‘They may patronize the theaters, movie houses, restaurants and bars, or they may not, being content merely to walk between 42nd and 47th Streets taking in the brilliant show only a tilt of the head above them.'”

The below was shot by N.Y. Times photographer Sam Falk and published 12.11.48:

This bare-bones “Drive My Car” track, recorded on 10.13.65, was just posted on YouTube (1.14.22). McCartney’s bass track is heaven.

Due respect but the Toronto Film Critics Association (and I do mean this respectfully) have very little sense of their own identity or vision, at least seemingly…they’re just joiners, followers, Kool-Aid drinkers…”we’re on board too!…please include us!” Imagine at this stage of the game just toppling over like a bowling pin for Drive My Car after all the other elite snooties have done the same…imagine!

I’m not cheering the deaths of tens of thousands of unvaccinated idiots who’ve willfully put themselves in harm’s way. At the same time I can’t honestly say that I’m sorry they’ve gone to heaven (or possibly, if God was a judgmental Old Testament hard-ass, to hell). No offense but I regard these no-longer-with-us folks as dead weeds. The grassy lawn is better for their absence. They were too dumb to survive, and nature has had its way.