I’m in a small Virgin America jet somewhere over Colorado, and somehow I was able to stream this Fareed Zakaria interview with Bill Maher (posted today) without too much difficulty. Everything Maher says is precisely what I’ve been sensing, observing and thinking all along. Nothing more than that.

Reactions to last night’s Melanianade short on SNL? I’ve watched it three times now, and while it’s pretty good it’s…let’s leave it there. What I like most is the decision to shoot black-and-white and particularly go with a 2.4:1 aspect ratio. Tip of the hat to Cecily Strong (Melania Trump), Emily Blunt (Ivanka Trump), Kate Mckinnon (Kellyanne Conway), Sasheer Zamata (Omarosa, an early Apprentice contestant), Vanessa Bayer (Tiffany Trump) and Alec Baldwin (Donald Trump).

I love the way the New York subway system will occasionally double-fuck riders. One, a train will arrive really late and thereby make you late for whatever appointment or event you’re trying to get to. Two, the lateness means that the crowd waiting for the train will be quite large and the train cars will be heavily crowded to begin with, and then even worse once everyone jams their way in. This never happens in Paris, but it happens in Manhattan and Brooklyn a lot. Plus there’s still no wifi in several smaller station stops while wifi is virtually everywhere in the Paris metro system. I can’t recall what the wifi situation is in the London Underground, but I have no memory of lateness and overcrowding being an issue except during rush hour.

I was naturally assuming that Criterion’s forthcoming His Girl Friday Bluray (streeting on 1.10.17) would be a 4K digital restoration, but for whatever reason the Criterion website notes are merely calling it a “new high-definition digital restoration“…meaning what exactly? When they announced their inky-squiddy Only Angels Have Wings Bluray they didn’t hesitate to call it a 4K job. I’m sorry but until they clearly specify that Friday is a 4K upgrade, I’m not putting this on my “buy” list. I will not be taken for granted. They can’t just say “here’s another one!” and expect me to drool. I have to be wooed and sold, and the best way to do that is to promise a Bluray “bump.”

A seven-episode HBO series from producer David E. Kelley and director Jean Marc Vallee with Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman and Shailene Woodley…fine. But they can’t say when it’ll air in 2017? I’m guessing February or March but why don’t they just blurt it out? Based on a 2015 airport-lounge book by Liane Moriarty, it involves three moms living in a “sleepy beach community” blah blah. Somebody dies. Costarring Alexander Skarsgard, Zoe Kravitz, Laura Dern, Adam Scott. Just a razmatazzy teaser.

It took forever for Martin Scorsese‘s No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (’05) to be released on Bluray, but now’s a good time for those who never saw it or never really absorbed the legend, especially given Dylan’s just-announced Nobel prize for literature. (The Bluray doesn’t actually street until 10.28.)

I remember watching this 208-minute doc with 18-year-old Jett in the summer of ’06, and his saying around the 70- or 80-minute mark, or roughly where Dylan’s career was in ’60 or ’61, “I don’t get it” — i.e., what was the big deal about this guy? That’s because Dylan didn’t really come into full flower until ’62 or even ’63, and because Part One of No Direction Home (roughly the 110-minute mark) ends with Dylan’s performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival. That’s when the heavy journey really began, and when the earth began to move. 

People forget that Dylan wasn’t fully free of his lefty-social-protest folk troubadour chapter until Another Side of Bob Dylan. And for many, he didn’t really hit the brass-ring zeitgeist jackpot until Bringin’ It All Back Home.

Today is Angela Lansbury‘s 91st birthday — born on 10.16.25. So the scheming communist agent mother in The Manchurian Candidate wasn’t shot on that stage in the old Madison Square Garden but went on to a great career on the Broadway stage. Good for her!  Lansbury was 36 or 37 when she portrayed the 33-year-old Laurence Harvey‘s mom, Eleanor Shaw Iselin, in that John Frankenheimer classic, which opened on 10.24.62 but was shot, I think, in early ’62. Lansbury has always been the spry, spirited type on stage, but Hollywood began casting her in middle-aged parts when she hit her late 20s and certainly by her early 30s.

Incidentally: In Richard Condon‘s 1959 novel of the same name, Mrs. Iselin has sex with her son Raymond (Harvey’s character). The film omitted this, of course, but the clip below ends with Lansbury giving Harvey a mouth-to-mouth kiss — a clear hint. This was probably the first time that incest was specifically alluded to in a mainstream Hollywood film.

“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it. We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take…I would do whatever I can for my country.” — 50 year-old Trump supporter Dan Bowman, quoted by Boston Globe reporters Matt Viser and Tracy Jan in a 10.15 story.

Yesterday Deadline‘s Pete Hammond quoted producer Irwin Winkler saying that Martin Scorsese‘s Silence (Paramount, 12.23) is “Marty’s best movie.” Okay, fine, but what else is he going to say? “This is one of Marty’s better films…maybe not his best but definitely one of his standouts”? Or “trust me, this one out-Kundun‘s Kundun!”

Hammond allows that Winkler “is high on the film because he produced it, but [he] also produced Scorsese classics Raging Bull and Goodfellas, so this kind of praise is not to be taken lightly.” Except the exalted reputations of Raging Bull and Goodfellas are carved in stone while Silence‘s rep is yet to be determined. Winkler loses nothing at all by calling it a better film than the other two.

Winkler also told Hammond that Silence‘s running time is down to 2 hours and 39 minutes, or over 20 minutes shorter than that three-hour-plus cut everyone wrote about last August.

Every word Michelle Obama said during that New Hampshire speech the other day was inspirational. Arrogant, thoughtless, pig-like behavior towards women has to be slapped down and corrected, and the more decisively the better. But you know what else? There’s an atmosphere today that seems to discourage almost any kind of male-to-female flirtatiousness or come-ons in any environment outside of a bar. I’m not saying that all you have do is say (i.e., type) the wrong kind of politically incorrect thing in the wrong way and you’ll be a dead man on Twitter in a matter of hours if not minutes, but it’s almost come to that. I just have this sense of a lot of guys walking on eggshells right now.

Trump was correctly and righteously ripped for that 2005 Access Hollywood hot-mike moment with Billy Bush, but who hasn’t said something lewd at one time or another (especially if alcohol was part of the situation) or stepped over some behavioral line? I’m pretty sure I did a few times in my randy 20s, back when I often pursued a certain boozy exuberance. How many tens of thousands if not millions of guys are guilty of some kind of poor behavior at one time or another? If even half of these moments were to be hot-miked and fed to online militants, a lot of these same guys would be swinging from the gallows right now.