John Ortiz to Tom Hardy: “No one ever sees you comin’…do they, Bob?” Perfect and even legendary as this line is, it didn’t quite ignite when I first saw The Drop a little more than a year ago in Toronto. I didn’t feel it until I saw it the second time in Los Angeles, and now it’s considered one of the greatest end-of-the-flick kicker lines in history, right up there with “Nobody’s perfect” and all the others.

Bill Maher: “I don’t want to sound like Donald Trump, Hillary, but your campaign stinks and your numbers are terrible…and that laugh…the one that makes people think you’re the Wicked Witch of The West Wing.” (And eye bags! I know they’re not funny because too many people have them and they’re not a criminal offense, but eye bags are a very pungent metaphor.) Best line in whole riff: Scott Walker “looks like a drunk in a silent movie who’s just been punched by mistake.”

For whatever reason nobody has commented much about F. Gary Gray‘s Straight Outta Compton, which I saw and liked in late July (“A tight, satisfying, straight-ahead telling of the N.W.A. saga…quite an indictment of police racism and brutality past and present”). It opened yesterday, of course. It may earn as much as $59 or $60 million by Sunday night, according to Boxoffice.com. (As of noon today a piece by Boxofficemojo’s Keith Simanton was predicting a $40 million weekend.) So what’s the verdict? Presumably a decent-sized portion of HE regulars caught it last night. I respect this film. It does a lot of things right. It’s not an award-calibre deal but so what? It’s well made and feels honest as far as that goes. It’s a hit for the right reasons.

“I’m aware that my ass looks like a bag of flapjacks. But I’m not trying to be the best-looking broad in the world. At a certain point you start asking yourself, ‘What really is sexy?’ It’s not just the elevation of your boobs. It’s being present and having fun and liking yourself enough to like the person that’s with you. If I believed that sexy was trying to be who I was when I did Basic Instinct, then we’d all be having a hard day today.” — Sharon Stone, 57, talk to Christopher Bagley for a Harper’s Bazaar piece that (a) is about promoting Agent X, a forthcoming TNT series in which Stone will play the vice-president of the U.S., and (b) includes three attractive black-and-white nude shots. She looks pretty great.

Sharon Stone as photographed by Harper’s Bazaar‘s Mark Abrahams.

Except, as usual, she doesn’t look like herself. Her face, I mean. Four and a half years ago I noted that she’d obviously had transformative facial work done, and the photographs by Mark Abrahams reiterate that. I’m all in favor of tasteful touch-ups but getting Zellweger-ered is surreal — surely one of the creepiest indulgences of the well-to-do-class in world history. We’re living in a Terry Gilliam movie. They look like a certain someone for two or three decades, and then they go under the knife and they’re someone else entirely. Not internally, of course, but what a metaphor!