Two days ago we did our big Cinque Terre hike — Monarola to Volastra to the medieval village of Corniglia. The Manarola-to-Volastra phase was rough — a 45-degree uphill trek that came close to killing me. (I had to laugh when I saw the “arresto cardiaco” sign at the end of it.) But this led to a mile-high vineyard path between Volastra and Corniglia that was visually to die for — probably the most stunning sea vista my eyes have ever beheld.

It was reported yesterday in the Washington Post that director of national intelligence Dan Coats “told associates in March that President Trump asked him if he could intervene with then-FBI Director Comey to get the bureau to back off its focus on former national security adviser Michael Flynn in its Russia probe.” The Last Word‘s Lawrence O’Donnell: “There are now three people who we know about” — Coats, CIA director Dan Pompeo, former FBI director James Comey — “who can testify that President Trump tried to interfere with the FBI investigation.” Given that proof of obstruction of justice is precisely what sank President Nixon, the Russia thing is now Watergate chapter and verse. And yet it isn’t because the grotesquely corrupt mindset of Congressional Republicans assures they won’t stand up for the rule of law. The only way Trump goes down is if Democrats win a majority in both houses.

It took me a month to read Geoff Edger‘s 5.11 Washington Post piece about Richard Goldstein‘s “scathing” pan of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, which ran in the N.Y. Times on 6.1.67.

As it turned out Goldstein’s stereo system at the time had a busted speaker, so he hadn’t really heard the album fully or properly. But Goldstein’s primary complaint was that the album wasn’t proper rock ‘n’ roll, that the posturing tone and lack of raunch felt “precious” and cloistered behind the “electric sanctity” of the studio. (Where’s the hurly burly?) This complaint was tied, Goldstein now admits, to a strong affinity for masculine-sounding rock, which was tethered to his then-suppressed (or at least not publicly admitted to) homosexuality.

But if you re-read Goldstein’s 21-paragraph review, you’ll discover that nearly half of it — ten paragraphs — praises “A Day In The Life”, the album’s final track. If a so-so or underwhelming movie delivers a great, earth-shaking ending, a review that acknowledges this can’t be a “scathing” pan. Goldstein’s is a mixed-bag response that nonetheless urges a buy.

“The Beatles have produced a glimpse of modern city life that is terrifying,” he wrote. “It stands as one of the most important Lennon-McCartney compositions, and it is a historic Pop event.” Goldstein was particularly enthralled by the song’s mad orchestral crescendos — “an extraordinary atonal thrust which is shocking, even painful, to the ears [and yet] parallels a drug-induced ‘rush.'” The only odd part is Goldstein twice misquoting the “I’d love to turn you on” line as “I’d like to turn you on.” (Significant difference!)

I’m not happy with the in-and-out, fuck-you wifi aboard moving trains.  No one is.  The signal is so spotty that the iPhone’s hotspot signal is all but worthless as far as the laptop is concerned.  

So I’m basically doing the old first-class lounge potato routine, surfing and browsing (it took me 90 minutes to read summaries of the history of Salo and the life of Benito Mussolini, which would have taken 20 minutes with a half-decent connection) and staring at the ravishing French countryside, basking in boredom and taking the occasional stroll.

If I wasn’t restricted to my iPhone and two thumbs, I would express regret at Bill Maher’s unfortunate use of a term that only guys like Chris Rock and Quentin Tarantino are allowed to use in a smirking, mock-nervy context.  

A few years ago I was speaking to a couple of Paramount publicists on the lot, and while making a point about Sydney Poitier‘s status among Hollywood producers from the late ’50s to late ’60s I used a term that starts with “house” and ends with a word I dare not repeat, and the publicists recoiled in horror.  One of them moaned.  They looked at me like I’d suddenly turned into a lizard.

We all know what the term means — an affable black guy whose behavior is regarded by other blacks as overly obliging or obsequious.  But that’s not what Maher was alluding to.  He was joking about working in the fields vs. being a house worker.  He just blurted it out.  Wrong blurt, of course, but he’s always had a rapier manner.

Obviously he shouldn’t have said it, but it wasn’t a “gaffe,” which means some kind of foot-in-mouth Freudian truth slip — he was being his usual brutally candid self.  Maher’s liberal-progressive credentials are impeccable,of course, so I don’t understand why this story is still bring kicked around.  Because of Al Franken, I suppose, on top of the p.c. banshees and harridans.  Give them the slightest reason to call for your head, and they always will. 

Maher blundered, plain and simple.  Has any HE regular ever gotten into trouble by deliberately using the wrong term to (a) provoke a somewhat cautious, mild-mannered friend to gasp or (b) to demonstrate that you’re insouciant or brash or unintimidated by the rules?  We all have at one point or another.

By the way:  We trained from Manarola to La Spezia just after 7 am, and then drove for something like four hours (five with detours and cappuccino pit stops) back to Nice Airport, where we dropped the rental car. We took a cab to downtown Nice and caught a 3 pm train to Paris.  It’s now 7:30 pm (10:30 am in Los Angeles) — 70 minutes remain before we pull into Gare de Lyon.

Posted by New Republic‘s Alex Shepard on 6.6.17: “[Donald] Trump will exploit (and lie about) a crisis for perceived political gain. We’ve been fortunate so far that Trump has created most of the crises that have defined the first four months of his presidency. But not every disaster that happens over the next four years will be of Trump’s own making and we should be terrified — and should start preparing — for what Trump will do when a terrorist attack occurs in America.”

“Just Around The Corner,” posted on 11.20.16: “Serious jihadists surely understand that an optimum time to strike the U.S. with a major terrorist act will be after Donald Trump takes the oath of office. Optimum because there’s a high likelihood that Trump will strike back all the harder, that he and his hardline advisers will go ballistic, and in so doing they will greatly intensify the U.S.-vs.-Islam divide that terrorists have been hoping for all along.

“For the Jihadists, Trump will be the gift that keeps on giving. You know this is what the ISIS guys are telling each other now. A blustery, trigger-happy loose cannon in the Oval Office? Allahu Akbar!”

“I’m afraid the adversaries overseas see us as a sitting duck of provocation…with a person who will lash back,” Ralph Nader told The National‘s Wendy Mesley. 

Great Nader quote about Trump not really wanting to be president when he launched his campaign:

“Along comes a failed gambling czar who’s a corporate welfare king and cheats his suppliers and workers, and lo and behold, he was surprised like all of us — he’s suddenly on his way to the presidency, even though he lost the popular vote. When he came out of the White House, after the meeting with President Obama, I looked at him and said ‘here’s one of the most scared men in the country.'”

Bluetooth has nothing on Mentadent toothpaste, which I bought and used last night. It covers your teeth in blue dye, and if you spit some of it out it stains the sink with little blue globs. You have to keep brushing and brushing before the blue gradually subsides, but what a horrible innovation.

Now that Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant has more or less tanked domestically (a pathetic $67 million so far), will any of the learned fanboys who creamed in their pants when reviews popped in early May admit that they over-sold it to their trusting readers, and that they basically didn’t have the balls to call a spade a spade?

Of course not, but 71% of the Rotten Tomatoes gang gave it a thumbs-up. For whatever fickle reasons ticket buyers didn’t agree for the most part. Could this have been because this 20th Century Fox release more or less blows? I was looking like an outlier when I called it crap on 5.7.17, but it’s fair to say I’m looking a bit more sage now.

“I didn’t dislike Ridley Scott‘s Alien: Covenant — I hated it,” I wrote. “And I’m not saying that out of some lazy-wrath instinct or pissy posturing or what-have-you. I’m talking about serious stomach-acid sensations here. Then again I mostly despised Prometheus so it didn’t take a great deal of effort to come to this.

“If Prometheus rang your hate bell, you’re going to despise this one also. For Alien: Covenant, which runs 121 minutes but feels like 150, is truly a spawn of that awful 2012 film.

“Is it ‘better’ than Prometheus? All right, yeah, I suppose it is. Is it therefore worth seeing? Maybe, but only if you like watching films that make you resent everything on the face of the planet including yourself. I’m not going to tap out the usual story, character and actor rundown. All you need to know is that I didn’t give a damn about any of Alien: Covenant. Nothing. I was muttering ‘Fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyou’ the whole time.”

During an appearance on England’s Sunday Brunch talk show, Dan Aykroyd basically called Ghostbusters director Paul Feig an irresponsible asshole, claiming that Feig “spent too much on it and he didn’t shoot scenes we suggested to him…[when we mentioned] several scenes that were going to be needed, Feig said, ‘No, we don’t need them.’ And then we tested the movie and they needed them, and he had to go back — about $30 to $40 million in reshoots.”

From my own HE review, posted on 7.10.16: “It’s formula bullshit, of course — what else could it be? — but if you can lower your standards and just sit back and take it, it’s 80 minutes of silly ‘fun’ — fun defined as nodding submission to a super-budget presentation of a franchise concept that’s moderately amusing here and there and doesn’t piss you off. But after the first 80 minutes it eats itself, leaving us to endure 35 minutes of CG overkill — Zack Snyder‘s Man of Steel finale meets the Independence Day sequel meets the Pillsbury doughboy monster meets the end of the world.”

Using the oft-quoted standard of “simply making people laugh is the lowest form of humor,” the following are HE’s picks for the 30 best all-time film comedies. Inclusion doesn’t mean that each and every film is screamingly funny because, as I’ve just explained, mere laughter is for chumps. In my view the better comedies are often heh-heh funny or even no-laugh funny (i.e., Elaine May‘s Ishtar). A great comedy has to be on to something greater than itself (which means it could qualify as a dramedy), and it has to measure up as a first-rate, well-grounded, reality-reflecting film if you take out the humor. Or, failing that, it has to be completely, absurdly silly (i.e., Duck Soup or Woody Allen‘s What’s Up Tiger Lily). And it can never be twee (i.e., forget anything by Jacques Tati) or star Will Ferrell, Chevy Chase, Eddie Murphy or Robin Williams (i.e., forget Three Amigos, Mrs. Doubtfire, Anchorman) And even if it’s no-laugh funny, it can’t make you want to walk out or change the channel (i.e., forget Withnail & I).

That said and in no particular order…

(1) Three-way tie for #1: Harold Ramis‘s Groundhog Day, Stanley Kubrick‘s Dr. Strangelove, Joel & Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski; (2) Noah Baumbach‘s Greenberg; (3) Billy Wilder‘s Some Like It Hot; (4) Greg Mottola‘s Superbad, (5 & 6) Albert Brooks‘ Lost in America & Modern Romance; (7) Bobby and Peter Farrelly‘s There’s Something About Mary; (8) Howard Hawks‘ Bringing Up Baby, (9) Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate; (10) Woody Allen‘s Manhattan, (11, 12 & 13) James L. Brooks‘ Broadcast News, Terms of Endearment and As Good As It Gets; (14) Stephen Frears‘ High Fidelity; (15 & 16) Preston Sturges‘ The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Travels; (17) Larry Charles‘ Borat; (18) Wes Anderson‘s Rushmore, (19) Ben Stiller‘s The Cable Guy, (19) Charles Crichton‘s A Fish Called Wanda, (20) The early ’30s Laurel & Hardy films as an aggregate, (21) Armando Iannucci‘s In The Loop, (20, 21 & 22) Mel Brooks‘ Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles and The Producers, (23) Buster Keaton‘s The General, (24) Paul Feig‘s Bridesmaids, (25) Early ’30s Marx Brothers’ trio as an aggregate — Duck Soup, A Night at the Opera, A Day At The Races, (26) Ben Stiller‘s Tropic Thunder, (27) Sydney Pollack‘s Tootsie, (28) John Hughes‘ Plains, Trains & Automobiles, (29) the afore-mentioned Ishtar and (30) What’s Up Tiger Lily?.

A strange moment for me in Manarola, 3:35 am and unable to sleep, having woken at 2:30 am after dropping off for a 30-minute nap around 8 pm. I’m now sitting in a tiny stone foyer with no wall plugs, no lights….just a round plastic table and two plastic beach chairs. In the dark.

Manarola’s sea vistas are stunning and nourishing, of course, and I love the constant sound of crashing, pounding surf below.  But otherwise this is an amiable but second-rate, hand-to-mouth tourist town, and by that I mean catering almost entirely to under-30 types as older folks have apparently been scared off by the steep staircases. I for one bounded up via Belvedere like an antelope. Actually I’m lying — the stairs are a bitch.

Local merchants, their survival requiring a constant seduction of 20somethings and their modest incomes, have made Manarola into a tourist destination for this subset — young couples, backpackers, student groups, families on a budget. Our little place, located up high with a breathtaking view, cost me a couple of hundred per night, but most of the hotels are cheaper. 

The ristorantes, trattorias and osterias have struck me as nothing special (good enough, reasonably priced), but there doesn’t seem to be anything that even begins to resemble La Lampara. Plus there isn’t a decent small market in the area.

Whenever a vacation town has a great, drop-dead selling point that everyone will succumb to (smashing surf, an eye-filling horizon), the locals never try to build it into anything more.  Because they don’t have to and they know it. 

Ten years ago Jett and I visited Monterosso, which is larger with a few more resources and a small beach. I think I prefer that Cinque Terre town to this one.

A note to Luca Guadagnino, typed around 3:30 am: “Thanks to you and Guipy for the wonderful three-hour lunch, which Tatyana and I will never, ever forget. I’m very sorry we couldn’t manage to visit your palazzo in Crema. La Lampara was a truly perfect setting, homey and simple, an exquisite little family business, etc. Our lunch was private, of course, but I feel I have to at least minimally account for my whereabouts on Sunday. So I’ll be mentioning that we met and lunched, and that the great-looking Call Me By Your Name poster will be out soon, and also that great line about ‘family’ and perhaps a mention of how Rio, the Jake Gyllenhaal-Benedict Cumberbatch thriller you’ll be shooting next year, will actually be shot in Sri Lanka, etc. Thanks so much again. A truly lovely interlude. Thanks for everything. Catch you again during the early fall festivals.”

Luca Guadagnino at La Lampara — Sunday, 6.4, 4:15 pm.

During Sunday’s sublime outdoor lunch at La Lampara, Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino mentioned a kind of selling point about his brilliant film, which premiered to ecstatic raves during last January’s Sundance Film Festival and which Sony Pictures Classics will open on 11.24 — about as Oscar-baity a release date as you can get.

Call Me By Your Name is, yes, a first-love film, an early ’80s gay romance and a sensual, laid-back Italian summer dreamscape. But it connects in a more fundamental way, Luca said and which I fully agree with, with family values, which is to say father-son values, extended-family values, community values…we’re all together in this.

For the film is not so much about a one-on-one relationship (although that is certainly a central thread) as much as how the hearts and minds of a small, mostly English-speaking community in northern Italy (the film was primarily shot in Guadagnino’s home town of Crema) observe, absorb, feed into, comment upon and nourish in little affecting ways the central, slow-build love story between Timothy Chalamet and Armie Hammer. You could describe the basic dynamic along the lines of “you guys are engaged in an emotional adventure but we’re also involved in a sense because we’re family and we care.”

Posted by Esquire‘s Tyler Coates on 1.26.17: “First loves are the hardest to shake, as evidenced in the film’s closing moments. Never before has a movie treated an inevitable loss with such dignity and beauty, both through a stunning monologue delivered by Michael Stuhlbarg, who plays Elio’s father, and a final, several-minute-long shot of Elio’s face as he contemplates his summer romance and, surely, what it means for the future. We may know what happens next — Eliot will surely love again — but Guadagnino places the most importance on the present, an emotional limbo full of sadness and joy, grief and hope.

“It’s enough to erase all of the movies you’ve loved before, as it’s impossible not to feel seduced and broken by what Guadagnino pulls off. The film will leave you devastated, but the memory of its exuberant 130 minutes will last a lifetime.”