Is Kamala Harris charismatic and razzle-dazzly enough to serve as the nation’s 47th president? She doesn’t need to be. What matters is that she’s a decent, ethically grounded, steady-as-she-goes and obviously intelligent politician.

Harris can memorize and repeat the necessary talking points and can project sincerity and conviction as far as it goes, but she isn’t much for thinking on her feet and verbally tap-dancing like some wowser wordsmith…she’s no Bill Clinton, no improvisational dynamo…generating occasional breakthrough moments and special political poetry seems to elude her for the most part.

Harris was pretty good during tonight’s CNN Town Hall but she’ll never be gifted at this stuff. We all understand this, I think. But you know what else?

Within the personality and basic approach of a hard-working, carefully constructed operator, she comes off as a serious, sensible, focused, practical–minded and fundamentally moral person who isn’t into fooling around or playing games or lowering the colloquial so the rubes can have a little fun…she is who she is, and Lord knows she’s a much better human being than Donald Trump, who is clearly dangerous and insane.

I’m going to repeat this: Harris is a much better person than Trump — more sensible, more mature, a believer in regulated thought. The woke thing burns within her and that’s unfortunate, but at heart she sees life in steady, practical terms. She’s no Gavin Newsom-level orator, but she won’t generate storms of madness and chaos.

“It doesn’t cost $60,000 to bury a fucking Mexican…don’t pay it!”

In the wake of news about Harvey Weinstein facing eradication by cancer, Paul Schrader was recently admonished for posting that given the fact that the upper reaches of the film industry was a poon paradise when Harvey was young and trying to hustle his way in…perhaps a little context is in order, Schrader said.

It wasn’t a club atmosphere that necessarily looked the other way at rape and sexual assault (although sexual criminality no doubt infected the quiet corridors of power back then) but an atmospehere in which wealthy, over-40 industry dudes had the license and wherewithal to dip their wicks without fear of being sentenced to a career gallows…a long-ago time in which picking flowers in the garden of eros wasn’t necessarily regarded as evil and assaultive and deserving of severe punishment.

You had to be there, I guess, but the late ’60s, ’70s and early ’80s constituted the greatest era for nookie since the heyday of the Roman empire.

Harvey’s problem was that he wasn’t at all attractive and knew it, and that he was fairly enraged that life and circumstance had dealt him such shitty sexual cards. This made him very angry, and somehow that anger made him go a bit nuts in a certain way. He got it into his head that women he was helping career-wise owed him a boink or two — obviously a crude, gangsterish attitude. Harvey tried to finagle and muscle and bully his way into their pants, and now he’s paid the price.

Michael Keaton “Beetlejuice” says don’t vote for Trump! pic.twitter.com/kpGBNbhiyz

— Tim Burton Daily (@TimBurtonDaily) October 22, 2024

I’ve posted this Times Square photo before. Snapped sometime prior to the 6.3.55 opening date of The Seven Year Itch, it’s about old, working-class, overall-wearing guys regarding a super-powerful, unreachable, untouchable sexual icon…zero opportunity…their youth and vitality gone with the wind.

Itch was the second of five ’50s films directed by the once-great Billy Wilder during his house-director phase, so-called because these films represented a creative hibernation for Wilder…a retreat from his usual cynical characters and stories, acid-tinged dialogue, third-act emotional turnarounds, etc.

The house phase also included Sabrina (’54), The Spirit of St. Louis (’57), Love in the Afternoon (’57) and Witness for the Prosecution (’57). Wilder finally returned to form in ’59 with Some Like It Hot.

The house phase began in the wake of the success of Wilder’s Stalag 17 (’53). It’s been speculated it may have partly been prompted by the failure of Wilder’s bitterly caustic Ace in the Hole (’51).

Wilder called The Seven Year Itch “a nothing picture because the picture should be done today without censorship…unless Tom Ewell, left alone in New York while the wife and kid are away for the summer, has an affair with Marilyn Monroe there’s nothing. But you couldn’t do that in those days, so I was just straitjacketed. It just didn’t come off one bit, and there’s nothing I can say about it except I wish I hadn’t made it. I wish I had the property now.”