Yesterday Lysa Heslov, wife of The Tender Bar producer and co-writer (and longtime George Clooney pally) Grant Heslov, broke industry protocol by rebuking a couple of Facebook contributors who had posted negative assessments about the film.

Heslov’s main point was that the naysayers were mean and unconstructive, especially about an unpretentious small-town film that had been made from the heart. Last night I summarized what had happened. This morning I posted a thought about the difficulty of making even a mediocre film.

“It’s very hard just to make a decent or passable film that isn’t too bad,” I wrote. “Art isn’t easy, and it’s very difficult to cobble together even a moderately decent dramatic screenplay.

I know this from having struggled to write scripts in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. I also know this from having been a mediocre drummer in a no-great-shakes blues band. It’s very hard and uphill in a grueling sort of way to make a film that most would call moderately appealing.”

Seriously — the next time you catch a so-so or mildly disappointing film, you need to say to yourself “man, it took a lot of blood, sweat and tears just to make that thing watchable…the filmmakers deserve at least a modicum of respect for that effort.”

Imagine that I’m Ben Affleck, and that I’m doing an interview with some obsequious junket journalist, and that the journalist has just asked which performance I’m most proud of…which single performance has, by my standards, hit the mark in a more incisive and commanding way than any other before or since?

I would say without hesitation that my finest performance is the young, go-getter, fortunate-son, guilt-stricken attorney in Roger Michel‘s Changing Lanes (’02).

The Paramount release was filmed 20 years ago, when I was roughly 29.

My “alcoholic basketball coach in San Pedro” performance in The Way Back is my second favorite in terms of all-around pride, subtle technique and emotional revelation, followed by my “husband under suspicion of murder” performance in Gone Girl. My fourth-place would be my action-commando turn in J.C. Chandor‘s Triple Frontier.

I would refuse to answer a follow-up question about which performances I’m most ashamed of, if any. I have a few failures under my belt, sure, but I wouldn’t discuss them with some mealy-mouthed junket whore.

My favorite non-performative performance was on Real Time with Bill Maher, way back in 2014.

Earlier today Rachel Zegler performed a passionate reading of a portion of Britney Spears‘ recent angry letter to her younger sister, Jamie Lynn Spears. (Nobody cares about the particulars.) Almost immediately Zegler was kicked, gouged and lashed by woke Twitter for showing a lack of sensitivity. And of course she apologized for this.

What Zegler was doing, of course, was seizing upon an acting opportunity, which is what actors often like to do. I happen to feel that she showed more range and angularity and emotional intrigue in this reading than she showed in all of West Side Story, which limited her to playing a willful Puerto Rican innocent. Seriously — Zegler reminded me of Faye Dunaway in Network or Mommie Dearest. I am now more impressed by Zegler’s acting chops than I was before today.

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.

Two years ago I posted a nice monochrome snap of a Times Square wraparound billboard for Robert Siodmak and Mark Hellinger‘s The Killers (’46). The odd thing was that The Killers, which opened in late August, wasn’t showing at the Mayfair but at the legendary Winter Garden theatre. United Artists had briefly turned the decades-old venue into a movie palace between ’45 and ’46.

Last night I happened upon a somewhat blurry if richly colored snap of the same Mayfair Killers billboard along with a shot of the RKO Palace marquee, which had recently opened Orson Welles‘ The Stranger, a Nazi-hunting drama that costarred Welles, Edward G. Robinson and Loretta Young. It opened on 7.11.46.

Decent color snaps of 40s-era Times Square marquees are very hard to come by.