HE’s Alamo Albuquerque rental, currently speeding north on 550. Looking at an 11 pm Telluride arrival, at best.

4 am update: I quit last night around 9:45 pm. Rented an Eisenhower-era motel room in Dolores, Colorado — 75 minutes south of Telluride. I could’ve hardcored it but I was feeling fagged and shagged, and couldn’t stand the monotony of driving on winding roads in pitch darkness. Not to mention missing all that visual Rocky Mountain beauty.

You can’t write if you’re not under the ice. Very thick ice. I was around 75 feet from my gate, headphones on, tapping away, half-listening for announcements, etc. 50 minutes ago I emerged from my Honore de Balzac membrane and noticed that the crowd around me had vanished. The gate had been moved (not cool!) and it was now too late to board.

No biggie — I’m now waiting for another Albuquerque flight, leaving at 3:30 pm.

Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman: “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is no Beetlejuice, but in the end it’s got just enough [Tim] Burton juice.

“The movie is just a lightweight riff on Beetlejuice — a piece of fan service, really. It doesn’t give you the full monster-kitsch jolt that the original film had. Yet there’s good fan service and bad, and as stilted and gimcracky as it can sometimes be, I had a pretty good time [with it].

“Burton’s once-skewed way of looking at the world long ago got baked into ours (that’s one reason he has struggled, at times, to give his movies that same buzz). But if Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is mostly a lark, kind of like the current hit Broadway version of Beetlejuice, part of what the new movie delivers is honest nostalgia for the moment when Burton’s clown-spirit-from-hell sensibility still had a frisson of shock value.”

And yet BBC.com’s Nicholas Barber is creaming all over the sequel — “surpasses the original in almost every respect.”

I’m sorry but I don’t trust Barber, not for a second.

Earlier today Venice Film Festival Life Achievement Award recipient Sigourney Weaver was asked if there might be a relationship between the heroic inspiration generated by Weaver’s Ripley character in Alien and Kamala Harris‘s current political campaign for the White House.

Woman Journalist: “To what extent are movies…[to that extent can] cinema make it possible that a woman like Kamala Harris could become President of the United States.”

Weaver: “I love that question. Because we’re all so excited about Kamala…to think for one moment that my work would have anything to do with her rise makes me very happy actually…it’s true that so many women come and thank me [choking up]….sorry. Give me my vodka. It’s been difficult since 2016.”

“I’m leaning more right now towards writing for theater…in a comedy play, the audience is a character in the room, and [when] you say this, the audience laughs, the actors kind of wait for a moment until the laugh dies down, then they get to pick up the pace and it’s a rhythm…it’s almost like the audience is almost like a live animal in the room.” — Quentin Tarantino to Bill Maher during 8.25 Club Random chat.

This immediately reminded me of a 20-minute Four Seasons sit-down I did with Tarantino nine years ago, and particularly an idea I shared about his writing an Iceman Cometh-like play that would focus on Kurt Russell‘s “Stuntman Mike” character from Death Proof.

Here’s the WAV file, ands here’s what I posted on 12.8.15:

Airport lounges are not inherently interesting places in which to hang. They’re imbued, however, with feelings of anticipation, expectation.

Flight #1 (LGA to Dallas/Ft. Worth) leaves at 7:35 am. Flight #2 (Dallas to Albuquerque) leaves at 1:45 pm. Then I’ll drive from Albuquerque to Telluride (290 miles, 5 and 1/2 hours) — a great, eye-filling journey.

“I’ve been used, screwed, abused, sued, subdued and tatto’ed.”