I’d be comme ci comme ca if there was an option to retain the old design, but of course there isn’t.

I didn’t see Alejandro Landes‘ Monos (Neon, 9.13) during last January’s Sundance Film Festival, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Special Jury Award. Right away you’re thinking “okay, this guy has it.” Compositionally, impressionistically. William Golding‘s Lord of the Flies meets jungle-ritual cruelty and perversity. That line of country.

From Keith Uhlich’s Hollywood Reporter review: “The hands of fate have bestowed a raw deal on the young protagonists of Landes’ bleak, rather ghastly Monos.

“Sporting names like Rambo (Sofia Buenaventura), Lobo (Julian Giraldo), Bum Bum (Sneider Castro) and Patagrande (Hannah Montana alum Moises Arias, hard-left-turning into gun-toting psychopathy), these youths and barely-teens are beholden to a mysterious rebel force known only as The Organization, which is conducting terrorist strikes against some ill-defined powers-that-be in South America.

“This President constantly attempts to distract by flame-throwing…by lighting fires around race and ethnicity. How low can he go? He needs to go back from where he came from” — Queens — “and leave that office.”

Kamala Harris is a fully considered, well-measured adult, which President Trump has never been. And a more thoughtful and articulate speaker than he. Which isn’t difficult. And when riled up, she can be just as combative and jabby. Which is good and necessary.

But the tone and timbre of her voice, conversationally or in the delivery of speeches, isn’t especially transporting, much less soothing. Which isn’t a problem for me, but it may be for some.

Who among the current Democratic contenders has the rousing oratorical command that President Obama had? No one, but the best among them — certainly the catchiest phraser and arguably the most eloquent — is Pete Buttigieg.

Put another way, who’s Mr. King Shit in terms of 2019/20 Democratic Presidential campaign funding? Oooh yeah.

“…and the other four are fucked.”

Two nights ago I watched “The Bad Mother,” or the sixth episode of the second season of Big Little Lies. The tension levels are definitely intensifying. The critical setting was a courtroom dispute in which Meryl Streep‘s Mary Louise Wright, mother of the late Perry Wright (Alexander Skarsgård), is hoping to gain custody of the two children of Nicole Kidman‘s Celeste Wright, whose erratic, heeby-jeeby behavior (principally characterized by her guilt, Ambien dosage and sexual promiscuity) is cause for basic concern.

The best moment happened when Streep’s attorney Ira Faber (Dennis O’Hare) interrogated Celeste with one zinger question after another.

The season finale (“I Want To Know”, #7), in which Kidman will interrogate Streep in some kind of go-for-broke fashion, happens this Sunday.