Jeffrey Ressner, a Los Angeles-based entertainment journalist pal whom I first met when we worked together at the Hollywood Reporter back in ’83 and ’84 and whom I considered an actual, real-deal friend, has died of a heart attack. He was only 56, for God’s sake. I’m sure his friends would like to gather and share stories and raise a glass. Update: A memorial service for Ressner will be held on Tuesday, 7.8 at 11 am at the Burbank branch of Forest Lawn Mortuary.

The late Jeffrey Ressner, probably sometime in the late ’80s.

Jeff would call every so often or I would invite him to a screening or we’d do an occasional lunch. He was cautious, a stay-at-homer. He never wanted to drive east of the 405 and I started to give up inviting him to screenings because of this. But he read the column all the time, and we would talk about women a lot. The last time we met he slipped me some prescription pain pills. Jeff travelled to Asia quite a lot. After my initial trip to Vietnam in 2012 we compared extensive notes on the region. The last time I went to Vietnam (i.e., eight months ago) he asked me to buy him some coffee and cigars and bring them back. I told him to flat-out forget it — I wasn’t going to lug boxes of coffee and cigars through customs for him.

The great Paul Mazursky has died at the age of 84. For eight or nine years Mazursky’s films seemed to understand the half-comedic, half-bittersweet backwash of the ’60s and ’70s better than any other filmmaker except perhaps Robert Altman. Mazurksy was the reigning Woody Allen figure — the guy whose films were connected with the moods and meanderings and what modern hipster relationships were really about back then — before Allen found his voice and took the crown away from Mazursky with Annie Hall in ’78. Mazursky’s New York roots went into Next Stop, Greenwich Village (’76), An Unmarried Woman (’78) and Moscow on the Hudson (’84) but there was always something more knowing and intimate about his Los Angeles-based films. From ’69 to ’78 Mazursky held mountains in the palm of his hands, or something close to that.

Uh-oh…another Melissa McCarthy movie! I’d better say the right things or, more to the point, not say any bad things or Judd Apatow and the armed Sunni p.c. police squad will kick the shit out of me, especially on Twitter. I need to get my attitude adjusted and crank up the denial or I’ll be in big trouble. Okay…go! McCarthy’s schtick of playing a coarse, angry, under-educated, junk-food-inhaling, lower-middle-class instinct animal is…hilarious! And it’s totally common when thin, nice-looking guys (in this instance an ex-hubby and a possible new boyfriend) are depicted as being (or having been) sexually interested in her. One reason for this curious state of affairs is an understanding that morbid obesity isn’t a life-shortening affliction but…kinda cute! And a drop-dead hilarious comic device. When McCarthy tries to leap over a fast-food counter during a robbery but can’t manage it…gasping for breath! Did I mention that morbid obesity has become a kind of metaphor for serenity and self-acceptance?

Wait…should I run this by Apatow first before publishing? Maybe I haven’t expressed my views in the right way? Aaahh, too late now.

Tammy (Warner Bros., 7.2) is a husband-and-wife enterprise — directed by McCarthy’s husband, Ben Falcone, and co-written by Falcone and McCarthy. Creative collaborations between married or otherwise intimately entwined couples often don’t work because they’re not blunt with each other. If an idea is shit or not quite good enough, you have to be able to effing say that instead of “yeah, honey, that’s a really good bit except…well, it’s not that I don’t respect your idea or you for that matter but I just think if we massaged it a little bit more and doubled down on the love we might have something a little bit better.” Do you think Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond talked that way to each other?

For the last five years Melena Ryzik has been writing the N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” column, having inherited it from David Carr. But now Ryzik is bailing and handing the torch to Cara Buckley…congrats! It’s all a hustle for Oscar ad dollars anyway, but I’ve always found it irksome the way Carpetbagger columnists always jump into the award season in early December and go “tah-dah!…here we are!…let the games begin!” I wrote the following in response to Melena’s 12.4.13 piece called “Eyes On The Prize”: “Hardcore awards-tracking watchers and handicappers like myself and Sasha Stone and Scott Feinberg have been riding the rails for over seven months now (i.e., since the 2013 Cannes Film Festival) and humping it extra-hard since Telluride, Venice and Toronto (or for the last 13 weeks), and then Melena comes breezing into the room with her video crew and writes, ‘The Oscars are not until March but the jockeying for position has already begun.’ Early December is ‘already’?”

New N.Y. Times “Carpetbagger” Cara Buckley…tah-dah!

While watching The Leftovers last night I was thinking it was a shame that Pope Francis, the first truly compassionate, Franciscan-like good guy Pope in many a decade, had to be raptured along with Gary Busey, Jennifer Lopez and Vladmir Putin. I nonetheless decided that Francis Bacon‘s “Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X,” painted 61 years ago, was no longer just a perfect image in its own right. It was also, suddenly, a perfect capturing of a Pope being “taken.” I’ll probably never be able to look at this painting again without thinking of The Leftovers. Is that a good thing? You tell me.

What is Joe Popcorn supposed to do with this downer attitude and grim-thug vibe? Channing Tatum looks like an ape here, and his bee-stung nose makes him look like Shrek, for God’s sake. The critical quotes from Kenneth Turan and Stephanie Zacharek praise his performance, but the guy he’s playing (real-life former wrestling champ Mark Schultz) is mainly just clenched and sullen. Plus he doesn’t have much of a character arc. I’m guessing this a contractual gimme from Sony Classics to Tatum’s managers. The acting awards and nominations are all going to Steve Carell, guys. You know this, of course, but I’m just saying.

This is what I was talking about earlier in my review of The Leftovers. A bitter or drunken authority figure needs to deliver a hard-nosed assessment of the big cataclysmic event that drives the story of the film around…oh, the 30-minute mark. Leftovers co-creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta probably decided they’re too cool and cutting-edge to follow in Stanley Kramer‘s footsteps, and that’s fine. But one result of this mindset is that some people aren’t feeling the love for this pain-in-the-ass miniseries as we speak.

“Bill Hader‘s angry, vulnerable, hurting-guy performance in The Skeleton Twins is a career-changer. He’s no longer the SNL smartass who delivers zingy movie performances on the side. He’s now a real-deal actor who can bore into a character as deeply as any other gifted performer.” — from 1.20.14 Sundance post.

Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta‘s The Leftovers, which I watched last night on HBO, is about a community of sad, numbed-out souls in a small New York State town experiencing something between a stasis of the spirit and a combination slow-motion freakout and behavioral meltdown over the sudden disappearance of 2% of the world’s population, or roughly 140,000,000 people. I didn’t like it that much. The show, I mean. Or the premise, for that matter. I felt intrigued from time to time, but mostly I felt irritated and underfuckingwhelmed.

It’s not so much that relatively little is “explained” or even discussed in any kind of half-comprehensive way, although it’s a standard technique for a drama about a cataclysmic event (The Day The Earth Caught Fire, On The Beach, The Rapture, Godzilla) to have an authority figure arrive around the 30-minute mark and deliver a bitter or drunken assessment of the whys and wherefores. But all we’re given along these lines is a CNN glimpse of a Congressional hearing with one guy claiming that “God sat this one out” — obviously a questionable assertion.

All we’re told is that a lot of characters are feeling rather sullen or nihilistic about being left behind. A lot of people are smoking and drinking and unshaven and saying “fuck it” in various ways. Packs of feral dogs running around and being shot by gun nuts. And a lot of Godhead types and visionary eccentrics are enjoying a newfound power.

I was just reading a ten-year-old review of Sam Raimi‘s Spider-Man 2 this morning, and in so doing I asked myself, “Is there anyone in the world right now who would rent or stream this film now, ten years after? What kind of soul cancer would you have to have to say to yourself, ‘Hmmm, what should I watch tonight? Something I haven’t seen in a while. I know — Spider-Man 2!'”

Does it bother anyone in 2014 that within the CG-driven, comic-book-adaptation realm, almost nothing has changed since ’04? If anything the things that were underwhelming or dispiriting or soul-suffocating about Spider-Man 2 have metastasized. One reason is that some of the kids who were 16 or 17 when Spider-Man 2 came out have grown up to be zombie development guys, agents, producers and studio execs.

If the tag line for the Deliver Us From Evil poster used “New York Police Department” instead of “NYPD,” the copy would read “Inspired By The Actual Accounts Of A New York Police Department Sergeant.” So why does this version say “…An NYPD Sergeant”? Am I missing something? Writing and grammar are what I do for a living, and this isn’t right. On top of which I don’t particularly want to see or know about Scott Derrickson and Jerry Bruckheimer‘s horror film, which opens on 7.2.

“If you’ve ever done any independent filmmaking, you might have heard a producer say: ‘Good, on time, on budget: pick two.'” — from Da7e’s 6.27 Latino Review piece called Star Wars: December 2015 or Bust.” The origins are…I don’t know what they are but there’s a Wikipedia topic called the Project Management Triangle. I could spend hours going through all these links.