Just offering my appreciation to the New York Weinstein Co. publicists for having a screening yesterday of John Hillcoat‘s The Road (opening 10.16) yesterday and not inviting yours truly. This despite urgent pleas on this end to please allow early looksees of Toronto Film Festival selections in order to allow more time to see as many films as possible. I’d like to catch over 35 films in Toronto, but I realistically expect to see, at best, 25 or so.

Thanks also to the good samaritans at Warner Bros. for blowing off repeated requests to see a 2 pm screening today of Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant! It’s been shown a few times on both coasts and isn’t faring too badly. One guy quite liked it. It reportedly exudes a sort of arch and jocular tone with a kind of robust, attitude-conveying score by Marvin Hamlisch, of all people. In any case the deal in seeing pre-Toronto films is usually “hold your water until you get to Toronto,” which is fine with me. I don’t break my word on this stuff.

The bottom line is that smiles and courtesies are easy and productive because they tend to encourage reciprocity in kind, but that walking around with an attitude chip on your shoulder is its own self-fulfilling karma. Life is always more difficult when certain personalities enter the room. Despite a peace-pipe overture from WB’s departing marketing guy Don Buckley last December, I felt obliged to contact Clint Eastwood directly at the same time in order to somehow wangle an opportunity to see Gran Torino in a timely fashion because the gracious WB p.r. staff wasn’t reaching out. Clint did me a solid and good for him, but wouldn’t it be loverly if certain people could pop a Xanex and learn to chill down?