And an industry friendo agrees with Scott Mantz: “First half lame. Second half launches.”

…is better than outside the tent pissing in.

Posted on 4.25.15: An assortment of Los Angeles-based film bloggers and print journalists are presently enjoying a gratis, all-expenses-paid visit to the 2015 Riviera Maya Film Festival. The seven-day event is based in Playa del Carmen, the Yucatan beach town 30 miles south of Cancun and 200 miles north of Belize City.

I tried to offer my…uhm, “promotional” services to Sunshine Sachs publicist Brooke Blumberg, who did the inviting, but she decided to invite every name-brand columnist in town (Sasha Stone, David Poland, Scott Feinberg, et. al.) except me…thanks!

Brooke apparently doesn’t like me or suspects I’d be more trouble than I’m worth or something along these lines. Not true! I am perfectly willing to shill for any film festival that will fly me there and put me up, etc. I write really well and can give the same kind of handjobs that other journalists give when they visit places for free.

This morning I got a message from Stone, who’s down there now and staying at the Hotel Platinum Yucatan Princess, which offers the exact same kind of luxurious decor and feelings of well-tended splendor offered by every other luxury hotel in the world. (I stayed in a place almost precisely like this in Hoi An, Vietnam in 2013.)

May I ask something? What is the point of travelling to an exotic location if you’re going to stay in a place that’s a carbon-copy duplicate of every other luxury habitat around the world? It’s the Club Med approach to travel…the Kardashian way. Has anyone read Conde Nast Traveller lately? With slight variations every luxury hotel in the world looks exactly the same.

The body snatchers have branched out — they’re now designing hotels.

I’ve been through the heartbreak of losing cats to disease and cruel fates (a beloved Siamese named Mouse died from pancreatic cancer in ’01, and two others, Ricci and Mouse 2, were run over by careless drivers) and I’m truly, deeply sorry for what recently happened with Sasha Stone‘s poor unfortunate cat.

But while my reaction to The Banshees of Inisherin may have bled into the sad passing of Sasha’s pet (and I’ve felt these sadnesses in my own life, trust me), it actually had nothing to do with it. Martin McDonagh‘s film is its own realm, its own turf…nay, its own blend of folksy melancholy Irish rage and despondency + McDonagh-ass weirdness and perversity. My heart aches for Sasha’s furry friend and lover but not for Brendan Gleeson’s bloody stumps.

I for one have never once shut anyone out because they disliked a film that I’ve loved. I’ve been hurt, disappointed or saddened that a friend didn’t share my love for a film, but I’ve always shaken that shit off. Sometimes people love and hate films for odd reasons. There’s no figuring it.

If you’ve just seen Raoul Walsh’s They Died With Their Boots On, which opened on 12.21.41, you’re allowed to love or hate it for reasons that have only to do with the merits or demerits of the film. Your feelings about your father or kid brother having been killed during the bombing of Pearl Harbor two weeks earlier…well, you can conflate or separate these disparate events as you see fit, but they’re really not related.

Carl Foreman’s The Victors opened in the vicinity of 11.22.63. Some might have seen it that day or during the weekend (11.23 and 11.24) and they might have said “Dear God, the blood and horror and absolute cruelty of war as imagined by Foreman is forever merged with the blood and horror of what happened in Dealey Plaza during lunch hour!” And they wouldn’t be wrong to have this reaction, but if a person wanted to express a reaction to the film and ONLY the film, they would be within their rights. And I certainly wouldn’t fault them for this, even if I was Robert F. Kennedy.

Yes, sad or traumatic events have a way of bleeding into each other or into films that we’ve just seen or music that we’ve recently been touched by…I know all about that bleeding-through process. But you have to show a little discipline in these matters, and sometimes you have to be hard.

Last night Quentin Tarantino, who divides his time between Tel Aviv and the U.S. of A about “60-40,” talked about his 30-month-old son Leo with Jimmy Kimmel, and called him “the audience member I’ve waited for my entire life.” Great stuff. Tarantino was plugging his next book, “Cinema Speculation,” which pops on 11.1

It’s possible that the person who broke into the Pacific Heights home of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this morning and assaulted her husband Paul…it’s possible that the attacker wasn’t a rightwing nutter, but what are the odds that he/she was just a boilerplate felon? 

Obviously the facts need to emerge, but this feels analogous to the matter of Nicholas John Roske, the 26 year-old California man who threatened the life of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh with a gun early last June. Citing an affadavit, The Washington Post reported that Roske “decided to kill the justice and then himself, thinking it would give his life purpose.”

Throw in the attempted kidnapping of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer in late 2020 and you’re left with a suspicion that acts of anti-left or anti-right violence have almost become par for the course, certainly since 1.6.21. From a certain perspective these are the isolated provocations that may lead to an actual woke wackos vs. militant righties Civil War. Some believe this is right around the corner.

Four days before the Donald Trump-incited assault on the U.S. Capitol, Pelosi’s San Francisco home was vandalized (on or about January 2, 2021).