It’ll be midnight in Paris in about two hours, so I guess it’s time to post my usual “the hell with New Year’s Eve” sentiments. 2010 was a very good year movie-wise, and a fairly terrible one politically. But I have few complaints, and I hope that others are feeling as good these days, or are feeling at peace. This is the best era of my life. It’s a good time to be happy. Raise a glass, hug someone, smile, etc.

That said, there’s nothing fills me with such spiritual satisfaction as my annual naysaying of this idiotic celebration of absolutely nothing.

I love clinking glasses with cool people at cool parties, but celebrating renewal by way of the hands of a clock and especially in the company of party animals making a big whoop-dee-doo has always felt like a huge humiliation to me. Only idiots believe in the idea of a of a midnight renewal. Renewal is a constant. Every morning…hell, every minute marks the potential start of something beautiful and cleansing, and perhaps even transforming. So why hang back and celebrate a rite that denies this 24/7 theology, and in a kind of idiot-monkey way with party hats and noisemakers?

I would feel differently if I was in Paris or Prague or Rome. It’s another thing over there. Three years ago I wrote that “my all-time best New Year’s Eve happened in Paris on the 1999-into-2000 Millenium year — standing about two city blocks in front of the Eiffel Tower and watching the greatest fireworks display in human history.

“And then walking all the way back to Montmartre with thousands on the streets after the civil servants shut the subway down at 1 a.m.” That couldn’t have happened eleven years ago. Must be a mistake.