HE verdict (11 pm): Kamala Harris put Donald Trump in his place tonight. She passed the test, more than held her own — she came out ahead. She’s going to win in November — no question. Van Jones: “She whupped him…she baited him and then she spanked him.”

Harris: “I intend to be a president for all the people. The future, not the past.” Trump: “We’re laughed at all over the world. What these people have done is destroying our country.”

10:25 pm: “Lets move forward…I have a plan…instead of constant demeaning and name-calling” or something close to that. “We’re not taking anyone’s guns away so stop lying.” Also: “Health care is a right, not a privilege. Remember what it was like before the Affordable Care Act?”

Harris to Trump #1: “You’re not running against President Biden — you’re running against me.” Harris to Trump #2: “You adore strong men instead of caring about democracy. Putin would eat you for lunch.“ 9:58 pm: Harris says many foreign leaders have called Trump a “disgrace.” Trump says Harris “hates the Jews…hates the Arabs.” Anything that comes to mind, however dubious or fraught with imagination, Trump says it. Harris is definitely keeping it more real.

9:52 pm: Trump sounds unstable, relentless, obsessive…he can’t stop himself. Harris: “We cannot afford to have a President who tries to up-end the will of 81 million people…that’s deeply troubling.” Trump quotes Viktor Orban — “We need Trump back in office.” 9:48 pm: Harris recounts her Jan. 6th exoerience, the Charlottesville hate demonstration…”Let’s not go back to this.”

9:38 pm: Trump: “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things they’ve said about me.” Harris, clearly the more sensible and practical-minded of the two, is conveying a subdued reaction of puzzlement at Trump’s torrent of blathering lies. 9:28 pm: More with the “millions and millions of immigrants…eating the dogs, eating the cats…millions of criminals…migrant crime.” Obviously appealing to racists.

9:15 pm: Trump: “She’s a Marxist…her father is a Marxist.” Harris narrows her eyes, shakes her head, rests her chin on her right hand…aghast. Trump is going on and on…a hailstorm of horseshit. 9:07 pm: Trump bloviating about illegal immigrant hordes surging in and destroying the country, etc. Harris smirking, shaking her head, stating that Trump’s economic intensions “will explode the deficit,” explains her plan for investing in the middle-class…”an opportunity economy.”

8:37 pm: We live among morons…among millions of rural, red-state yokels who are actually intending to vote for a proven liar and sociopath who has no apparent investment in the democratic process…a power-hungry beast who is basically Viktor Orban, Kim Jong Un, Vladmir Putin…a swaggering pig in a Brioni suit and a red tie.

Sasha Stone has posted what seems to me like a reasonably perceptive montage of ten likely Best Picture Oscar contenders. I don’t agree that the respectable, earnestly acted Sing Sing belongs in this group and all the indicators suggest that Blitz doesn’t quite get there, but there’s no question that Anora and Conclave are, presently speaking, at the top of the list. I won’t be seeing The Brutalist, Hard Truths, The Room Next Door or Queer until later this month.

Matt Walsh’s Am I A Racist? isn’t quite as compelling or is slightly less guns blazing that What Is A Woman?, which I also streamed and wrote about with a certain fairness of mind. But it makes some fair points. The HE commentariat can hiss and howl all they want, but any documentary that gives the spiritually suffocating race-relations grifter Robin DiAngelo a hard time is doing something right. Walsh’s Christian dude principles are a bit of an issue, but he wouldn’t squeal like a falsetto bitch and might even nod with a certain low-key appreciation when reminded that back in the old hippie days “spade cat” was a term of sincere respect — a subterranean term that cool cosmic dudes and Bhagavad Gita hepcats might use to loosely refer to Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, Dick Gregory, etc.

David Fincher: “Directing is really three things. You’re editing behavior over time. And then controlling moments that should be really fast and making them slow. And [taking] moments that should be really slow, and making them fast.

“If you think that you can hide what your interests are, what your prurient interests are, what your nobler interests are, what your fascinations are…if you think you can hide that in your work as a film director, you’re nuts.

“Alfred Hitchcock was one of the first guys who said, ‘I’m gonna go with it.'”

The forced-deck plotting in which all kinds of seemingly impossible problems have to be resolved before the debut episode goes on the air feels…forced.

Gabriel LaBelle‘s performance as SNL producer Lorne Michaels has no snap, no bite, no eye-gleam, no inner furnace…LaBelle’s performance as young Steven Spielberg in The Fablemans was reasonably decent, but his Michaels is about as bland as it gets.

Overhead lighting crashing to the floor is an overly emphatic metaphor for on-set chaos…too heavy-handed.

The most engaging performance or presence comes from curly-haired Rachel Sennot, who plays Michaels’ former wife and creative partner, Rosie Shuster. They were married between 1967 and 1980, and you can feel odd flirtatious vibes between them….vibes that go nowhere. On the downslope of their marriage Shuster began fucking Dan Aykroyd in 1979. If I was Reitman I would have cheated the timeline and used Shuster’s infidelity as a plot point.

Matt Wood plays John Belushi as some kind of submental, subverbal psychopath…why?

The Richard Kiel-sized Nicholas Braun is way, way too tall to play Andy Kaufman.

Saturday Night opens on 9.27=.24,

One way or another, tonight’s Harris-Trump debate is going to be a humdinger.

Because Harris really and truly needs to put her cards face-up on the kitchen table…frankly, honestly, no word-salad answers…and if she equivocates or tap-dances she’ll be in trouble.

And there can be no mincing words about the obvious fact that Donald J. Trump is a totalitarian, foam-at-the-mouth animal.

N.Y. Times reporters Reid J. Epstein and Jonathan Swan: “With no other debates scheduled between Ms. Harris and Mr. Trump, the face-off figures to be one of the highest-stakes 90 minutes in American politics in generations.”

Hollywood Elsewhere will begin the bingle-bangle sometime around 9 pm eastern.

Here’s the thing: There’s a lesson in the fact that Hubert Humphrey‘s 1968 candidacy never caught on until he separated himself from LBJ’s Vietnam War policies. The lesson is this: A vice-president looking to succeed a sitting president has no choice but to man up and say “I am my own person with my own vision, and not a carbon copy or a ‘me too” version of the president.”

In order to persuade heavy-lidded, low-information, couch-slumping, fence-sitting voters to trust or at least take a chance on a Kamala Harris presidency, the sitting vice-president needs to at least partially throw droolin’ Joe Biden under the bus. She needs to admit what everyone knows, which is that a vice-president is primarily obliged to back up the president, but her own Presidency, moving forward, will be first and foremost about fufilling her own goals and policies.

“Did Harry Truman model his presidency on the legislative goals and governmental philosophy of Franklin Roosevelt?,” Harris could rhetorically ask. “Yes and no, but within a very short period he set his own course. Did Lyndon Johnson model his presidency on what John F. Kennedy attempted to do? Intially, yes, but Johnson very quickly and aggressively formulated his own domestic agenda — civil rights legislation, war on poverty, Medicare — as well as his own self-destructive instincts about the Vietnam War.

“For better or ill, every vice-president-turned-president has gone his own way and charted his own path.”

N.Y. Times columnist Thomas L. Freidman has said it best — “23 Words Harris Needs to Say to Win“:

“’Joe and I got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong, too — and here is what I have learned.’

“For my money, uttering those 23 words, or something like them, is the key for Kamala Harris to win Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump, and the election.