I’m in a small Virgin America jet somewhere over Colorado, and somehow I was able to stream this Fareed Zakaria interview with Bill Maher (posted today) without too much difficulty. Everything Maher says is precisely what I’ve been sensing, observing and thinking all along. Nothing more than that.

Reactions to last night’s Melanianade short on SNL? I’ve watched it three times now, and while it’s pretty good it’s…let’s leave it there. What I like most is the decision to shoot black-and-white and particularly go with a 2.4:1 aspect ratio. Tip of the hat to Cecily Strong (Melania Trump), Emily Blunt (Ivanka Trump), Kate Mckinnon (Kellyanne Conway), Sasheer Zamata (Omarosa, an early Apprentice contestant), Vanessa Bayer (Tiffany Trump) and Alec Baldwin (Donald Trump).

I love the way the New York subway system will occasionally double-fuck riders. One, a train will arrive really late and thereby make you late for whatever appointment or event you’re trying to get to. Two, the lateness means that the crowd waiting for the train will be quite large and the train cars will be heavily crowded to begin with, and then even worse once everyone jams their way in. This never happens in Paris, but it happens in Manhattan and Brooklyn a lot. Plus there’s still no wifi in several smaller station stops while wifi is virtually everywhere in the Paris metro system. I can’t recall what the wifi situation is in the London Underground, but I have no memory of lateness and overcrowding being an issue except during rush hour.

I was naturally assuming that Criterion’s forthcoming His Girl Friday Bluray (streeting on 1.10.17) would be a 4K digital restoration, but for whatever reason the Criterion website notes are merely calling it a “new high-definition digital restoration“…meaning what exactly? When they announced their inky-squiddy Only Angels Have Wings Bluray they didn’t hesitate to call it a 4K job. I’m sorry but until they clearly specify that Friday is a 4K upgrade, I’m not putting this on my “buy” list. I will not be taken for granted. They can’t just say “here’s another one!” and expect me to drool. I have to be wooed and sold, and the best way to do that is to promise a Bluray “bump.”

A seven-episode HBO series from producer David E. Kelley and director Jean Marc Vallee with Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley…fine. But they can’t say when it’ll air in 2017? I’m guessing February or March but why don’t they just blurt it out? Based on a 2015 airport-lounge book by Liane Moriarty, it involves three moms living in a “sleepy beach community” blah blah. Somebody dies. Costarring Alexander Skarsgard, Zoe Kravitz, Laura Dern, Adam Scott. Just a razmatazzy teaser.

It took forever for Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (’05) to be released on Bluray, but now’s a good time for those who never saw it or never really absorbed the legend, especially given Dylan’s just-announced Nobel prize for literature. (The Bluray doesn’t actually street until 10.28.)

I remember watching this 208-minute doc with 18-year-old Jett in the summer of ’06, and his saying around the 70- or 80-minute mark, or roughly where Dylan’s career was in ’60 or ’61, “I don’t get it” — i.e., what was the big deal about this guy? That’s because Dylan didn’t really come into full flower until ’62 or even ’63, and because Part One of No Direction Home (roughly the 110-minute mark) ends with Dylan’s performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. That’s when the heavy journey really began, and when the earth began to move. 

People forget that Dylan wasn’t fully free of his lefty-social-protest folk troubadour chapter until Another Side of Bob Dylan. And for many, he didn’t really hit the brass-ring zeitgeist jackpot until Bringin’ It All Back Home.

Today is Angela Lansbury‘s 91st birthday — born on 10.16.25. So the scheming communist agent mother in The Manchurian Candidate wasn’t shot on that stage in the old Madison Square Garden but went on to a great career on the Broadway stage. Good for her!  Lansbury was 36 or 37 when she portrayed the 33-year-old Laurence Harvey‘s mom, Eleanor Shaw Iselin, in that John Frankenheimer classic, which opened on 10.24.62 but was shot, I think, in early ’62. Lansbury has always been the spry, spirited type on stage, but Hollywood began casting her in middle-aged parts when she hit her late 20s and certainly by her early 30s.

Incidentally: In Richard Condon‘s 1959 novel of the same name, Mrs. Iselin has sex with her son Raymond (Harvey’s character). The film omitted this, of course, but the clip below ends with Lansbury giving Harvey a mouth-to-mouth kiss — a clear hint. This was probably the first time that incest was specifically alluded to in a mainstream Hollywood film.