A friend and I took a longish walk through Bel Air early last evening. The Bel Air Hotel on Stone Canyon (portions of which are getting a little too Kardashian for my tastes), winding west on Chalon Road, up and down steep hills, up Funchal Road and then south on Bellagio down to Sunset, and then back to Stone Canyon. A quiet, settled vibe.  Most of Bel Air is Neverland.  Immense calm, a sense of the past. I don’t care about the wealth — I care about feelings of serenity, the sound of crickets, the proliferation of nature. Hundreds, thousands of old, well-trimmed trees. Gates, gates and more gates. Ivy-covered brick walls, adobe walls, ivy growing everywhere, the wonderfully calming fragrances, the subtlety of the lighting outside dozens upon dozens of handsome Old Spanish homes. It smells like Tuscany, like the hill country of Vietnam. And there’s very little of the vulgar, over-lighted, nouveau-riche homes you see here and there in Beverly Hills, homes that are mostly owned by clueless types (people of Middle Eastern ancestry are certainly among them), people who will never understand that the homes of wealthy folks with a touch of refinement always exude a submission to history…old-world, low-key, pre-WWII stylings. The only unpleasant aspect was the traffic — people in a hurry, driving 35 or 40 mph around sharp curves, areas where 25 or 30 mph would have been more like it.

I’ll be visiting the Guillermo del Toro: At Home With Monsters exhibit at LACMA on Tuesday evening. The invitational press preview was…what, last night? The exhibit represents about 10% of GDT’s “Bleak House” creations, roughly 580 objects, all of which are based in a large mansion in Thousand Oaks. After the LACMA exhibit the monsters will visit Minneapolis, Toronto, Mexico City, Barcelona, Paris and New York. Four years ago Guillermo was good enough to honor me and HE’s own Svetlana Cvetko with a private tour — unforgettable.

The classic complaint against The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is the fact that Ransom Stoddard and Tom Doniphon should ideally be played by guys in their late 20s, and in their mid 30s at the oldest. Instead they’re played by James Stewart and John Wayne, who were 53 and 54, respectively, when the film was shot in 1961. With his full-head-of-hair wig Stewart could pass for a guy in his mid 40s, at least by the standards of the early ’60s, but the creased and pot-bellied Wayne looks like he’s pushing 60. Which makes it all the more difficult when he talks repeatedly about wanting to marry Vera Miles, who at the time was 32. When a supporting player asks the Duke if wedding bells are around the corner, he grins slightly, shakes his head and says “Don’t rush me…don’t rush me.” At his age?

Steven Zallian and Richard Price‘s The Night Of is good — interesting, well written, attention-holding — but Zallian and Price are in no hurry. The Night Of is mostly a grim procedural. The main order of business isn’t about revealing who butchered the pretty girl as much what it feels like to be accused and powerless in the maze of New York’s criminal justice system — an apparently innocent guy (Riz Ahmed) arrested for murder, booked, grilled, counselled, kept in cells, moved to Riker’s Island, etc.

I say this having only seen episodes #1 and #2 (The Beach, Subtle Beast). I’ll need to catch episode #3 (A Dark Crate) on HBO Now before episode #4 (“The Art of War’) tomorrow night. The adaptation of Criminal Justice, an eight-year-old British miniseries, began on 6.24 via HBO on-demand.

It reminds me a bit of Alfred Hitchcock‘s The Wrong Man. That 1956 movie was all about slow procedure and acute frustration by way of mistaken identity. It runs 105 minutes but feels like two hours plus. After Henry Fonda is arrested at the 18-minute mark nothing happens until ten or twelve minutes before the end, when the real thief — a Fonda look-like — is caught.

Donald Trump actually said all this stuff at a 7.28 rally in Davenport, Iowa (where Cary Grant died). Excellent dubbing by Peter Serafinowicz. A catty Trump is an incongruent concept, to put it mildly, but if he did speak like Richard Simmons he’d seem (I hate to say this) less odious because of the tone of mincing irony. The object of Trump’s scorn was former New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who of course trashed Trump brilliantly last Wednesday night from the Democratic National Convention podium.

Herein is a spiritual lithmus test for Sasha Stone and the hardcore Hillary brigade. If they hiss and arch their backs and go into their usual accusations against male heirarchy, well…there it is. But if they laugh a bit and take the bounce, that’s something else. Key phrase: “Since half the country will believe an evil cartoon version of Hillary Clinton, no matter what she says or does…” Second key phrase: “They don’t want kindly grandma…they want the wolf.”