This isn’t just another lifestyle post as it was taken (in early August of 2012) in Monument Valley, which of course was a default scenic backdrop of almost all John Ford westerns from Stagecoach (’39) through Cheyenne Autumn (’64). I was just thinking as I re-watched this how badly I felt for my poor wheezing horse, humping it over those rocky uphill trails with my not-exactly-feathery ass on his back. Here’s that Firetree Inn story again, the one about the hosts with the bizarre personalities.

I’m really going to miss the general spirit, personality and vibe of Barack and Michelle Obama. They are the Kennedys of our era, and the idea of an older, grayer, Lyndon B. Johnson-type administration succeeding them…bummer. I’ll always love Bill Clinton, but I’m really, really not looking forward to eight years of that testy, snippy-mannered, baggy-eyed hag Hillary Clinton. I’ll have no alternative but to vote for her in 2016, of course, as she’ll be the only sane alternative to Jeb Bush or whatever ass-clown the Republicans nominate. But I don’t like her. Never have, never will. The only way I can handle the idea is to tell myself to grow up and forget about having a hip, likable, glamorous President and accept the notion of Clinton as the US of A’s Angela Merkel. I want Elizabeth Warren…please.

“It is a good deal,” President Barack Obama said on Thursday, after the framework of an agreement to keep Iran from getting a nuclear bomb was announced. If it is good — and that will depend on getting the final settlement done and signed between now and June — it will be in large part because the President avoided the temptations of resentment and self-pity. And Republicans in Congress will have failed to thwart it because they embraced [those temptations].

“The G.O.P. did everything that it could to scuttle this deal. Forty-seven Republican senators sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader that will go down in the annals of diplomatic sabotage, and made it harder for American negotiators to demand a deal that the White House itself would find acceptable. They did so even though their ostensible goal—keeping Iran from becoming a nuclear power—was the same as the President’s.

In a British Esquire interview with Miranda Collinge, Mad Max: Fury Road star Tom Hardy says he has “between four and 20 lines” of dialogue in George Miller’s film. (Why not just call it 12 lines?) Either way I love it. Hardy also states that he’s “contracted” for three more Mad Max films, presuming that Fury Road kicks ass commercially and critically. He’s seen Fury Road, of course, and calls it “fucking unbelievable,” but what’s he gonna say? “I’ve never been more excited and out of my comfort zone,” Hardy states.

HE to Hardy, Miller, WB: Four is too many. Just make a nice trilogy and be done with it. Calm down, exhale, don’t be greedy.

Here’s a clip from Dick Cavett’s Vietnam (PBS, 4.27. 10 pm), a 60-minute doc by John Scheinfeld. It blends a brief overview of the Vietnam War, discussions of that quagmire by guests on The Dick Cavett Show (John Kerry, Warren Beatty, I.F. Stone, Sen. Barry Goldwater, Daniel Ellsberg, Woody Allen, Jane Fonda, Vietnam veteran John Mueller, Sen. Wayne Morse, etc.) and some present-day hindsight from Cavett, Gen. Wesley Clark and historians Timothy Naftali and Fredric Logevall. It’s stirring, angering, well-ordered time travel — brings it all back. I only wish PBS had commissioned a two-hour show.

Deadline‘s Michael Fleming is reporting that Sony Pictures has acquired The Wells Initiative, a pitch for a sci-fi/action adventure in which Jeffrey Wells, owner and author of Hollywood Elsewhere, actually experiences the events, screenings, mood swings, wifi failures and occasional thought-quakes that turn up in his daily column. The pitch, Fleming reports, is by Ben Lustig and Jake Thornton, authors of Winter’s Knight, the Viking-mythology-tinged origin story of St. Nick and Christmas. The Wells Initiative will be produced by Trigger Street’s Dana Brunetti and Carter Swan. Seriously…this would be just as interesting if not more so than the actual Wells Initiative, which is about H.G. Wells. A reality show at the very least.

As degraded as film culture was when this SCTV bit was shot, it’s gotten much worse since. The idea behind this skit, remember, was not to appeal to film elites but to average Frito-eating, beer-drinking Joes, and yet SCTV producers decided that the name Michelangelo Antonioni as well as the films Zabriskie Point and Blow-Up would resonate with a fair-sized portion of the viewers. How likely is it that an SNL skit today would reference a director of arty-farty VOD films that only semi-serious, half-educated cinephiles have even heard of?

A fair number of famous, super-gifted 20th Century musicians have managed (or did manage) to age into their 40s and 50s and even beyond — Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, James Brown, Sting, etc. But to go by many Hollywood biopics the majority of them died young from drugs and alcohol abuse. Or certainly before their time. Or suddenly and tragically. Amy Winehouse, Hank Williams, Nina Simone, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Contrane, Charlie “Bird” Parker, Edith Piaf, Bix Beiderbecke. Same damn story every time — they grew up hard, found fame with their great gift, burned brightly for a relatively brief time and then keeled over. Where would the American musical biopic be without booze and drugs? Without a pot to piss in, that’s where.

When a big, stupid, assaultive franchise flick is about to open and break the box-office, as is the case with James Wan‘s Furious 7, most critics play it smart by “reviewing” with a light touch. Like smirking bullfighters, they toy with the beast rather than plunge a lance. “What’s the point of actually taking this one on?,” they seem to be saying. “A pan will just make me and my newspaper or website look old-fogeyish and out of touch with the megaplexers. What the hell…I’ll just ironically admire it and flick my frilly handerchief and make gentle sport of my real feelings.

“And what perverse fun it is, when you think about it, to give a pass to a corporate muscle-car movie that is totally and in fact purposefully opposed to the organic, real-world excitement of a classic fast-car flick like Bullitt or Gone in Sixty Seconds or Drive. The truth is that I don’t like real fast-car movies any more than James Wan does. So I’ll just tee-hee my way through the writing of this piffle of a review and then take a nice lunch…hey!”

Portugese director Manoel de Oliviera, who died today at age 106, lived a life that everyone envied — long, prolific, legendary. He was respected worldwide as a man of taste, cultivation and modest aesthetic accomplishment. He once described himself as an interpreter of the Bunuelian themes of romantic frustration and stifling societal mores, and that’s fine. But honestly? When I learned of his death this morning I respectfully couldn’t think of a single, stand-out default classic that he’d made. I went to his Wiki bio and scanned his films and went “uh-huh, yup, heard about that one, respected, missed that one, hmmm, yup.” But I love that he kept working decades past the usual age of retirement or slowing down. I love his oft-quoted remark about directing films for the sheer pleasure of it, regardless of how many critics went nuts for his latest. I adore the fact that de Oliviera was 103 when his last feature, Gebo and The Shadow (which I never saw), played the 2012 Venice Film Festival.