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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.

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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.”

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It’s 5:10 am right now, and I’m sitting in a pitch-dark, no-wall-outlet foyer in a Manarola rooming house (laughingly referred to as a kind of “hotel” but not in my book), the only light coming from the unplugged Macbook Pro and with the Mediterranean surf smashing and churning outside.

With the exception of a delightful four-person, three-hour lunch with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Gudagnino at La Lampara, a coastal restaurant outside La Spezia, I spent almost all of Sunday driving and searching for parking and dragging suitcases up steep stone staircases, and then taking a brief nap at 8 pm only to awake six and half hours later.

Which is partly why, at this juncture, I’ve almost nothing to say about the forthcoming, four-night Putin Interviews (Showtime, 6.12, 9 pm). I’m racing to finish three or four posts before the computer battery dies, and the wifi sucks and my ass hurts from sitting on a shitty little plastic chair.

Will the always interesting Oliver Stone go easy on the authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, a skillfully deceptive alpha male who — be honest — commands a thoroughly corrupt government, has almost certainly had journalists and enemies killed, has suppressed free speech and will continue to do so, still supports the fiendish Assad regime? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s safe to say Stone probably won’t be as flinty as Megyn Kelly was during her recent conversation with Putin. I’m presuming that the Stone-Putin thing will be somewhat more interesting, at least in terms of a potential cat-and-mouse dynamic, Stone asking or not asking certain questions and Putin dodging like a champ either way.

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Last night Tatyana and I dropped by Pierluigi (Piazza de’ Ricci, 144, 00186 Roma), a pricey, world-class eatery that attracts elite natives and travellers. We had no reservation but were graciously seated right away, and as I unfolded my napkin I realized we were 30 inches from Michelle Williams and novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who’ve been going out for a couple of years.

Right away I started calculating what my next move should be, if any.

Michelle Williams, Jonathan Safran Foer.

A go-getter movie journalist of the first order would have definitely said hello, chatted them up for 45 to 60 seconds and asked Michelle (a) how The Greatest Showman is shaping up and (b) what’s up with the Janis Joplin biopic that, unless I’ve missed something, she’s supposed to begin shooting fairly soon.

Has this Amazon-funded project gone south? I was asking myself this because Michelle doesn’t look like Joplin right now. Like, at all. Her tennis-ball-length hair is snow white (just like Kristen Stewart‘s) and she’s also rail-thin. If she were going to play The Jop anytime soon wouldn’t you think she’d be a tiny bit fuller and fleshier (Joplin wasn’t heavy but she drank a lot and was no health-club Nazi) and rocking a longish ’60s do?

But I also feel that couples who are simply together in a four-star restaurant in a beautiful city like Rome should be left alone. Or at least part of me believes this. They were just eating and chatting and love-birding. Toward the end of their light meal they were holding hands. The bottom line is that I wimped out and said nothing. On one hand I feel funny about this, but on the other I feel good.

Texts to Tatyana about 90 seconds after we sat down: “Don’t turn around.” “Don’t react.” “You remember Manchester By The Sea?” “Don’t look” “To your left.” “Michelle Williams.” “A sideways glance is okay — just don’t turn in your seat.”

Kenneth Branagh‘s Murder on the Orient Express is, of course, set aboard an elegant, first-class train chugging through Europe but also, like the original Agatha Christie thriller, in the early 1930s. Among the elite, well-heeled travellers is an African American doctor (i.e., “Dr. Arbuthnot”), played by Hamilton Tony Award-winner Leslie Odom Jr.. This is a completely accurate and representative bit of casting for the time period, of course. I can’t imagine why Alfred Hitchcock didn’t include a black physician character when he cast The Lady Vanishes (’38). As I understand it early ’30s Europe was teeming with wealthy, refined, richly educated black dudes.

Seriously: Just as Hamilton reimagined America’s 18th Century founders and architects as non-white and non-European, Branagh has decided to reimagine the Christie realm, at least in this one respect.

Amir Bar Lev‘s Long Strange Trip, which I’ve tried to persuade everyone to see, is now streamable as a six-part series via Amazon. From 4.13 riff: “Long Strange Trip is more about what happened within — creatively among the band members, managers and hangers-on, and particularly among the Deadhead throngs in the ’80s — than any kind of rote, surface-y rundown of their performing and recording history (this happened, that happened). Act One (’65 to ’71 or thereabouts) is a good, comprehensive mid-to-late-’60s history lesson — efficient, amusing, well-honed. But Act Two (or the last two hours) really brings it home. This is where the heart is, what turned the light on — the thing that told me what Amir Bar Lev is really up to.”

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Until this morning I’d literally never heard of Running Out Of Luck, a 1987 Julien Temple film starring Mick Jagger, Rae Dawn Chong (as a”slave girl”), Dennis Hopper, Jerry Hall and Jim Broadbent. Co-written by Temple and Jagger; music by Jagger and Luis Jardim. (Jagger’s “Lucky At Love” had popped a couple of years earlier.) The fact that you can’t stream it or watch on DVD — it’s only on VHS — tells you how good it is. But this clip is fairly decent.

A little more than a month ago a N.Y. Times piece, reported by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, assessed a list of possible contenders for the 2020 Democratic Presidential nomination. It boiled down to an oldsters vs. youngsters thing — the well-branded, 70-plus trio of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders and former vp Joe Biden vs. the 40ish fraternity of California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom (my favorite) plus Senators Kamala Harris (my first runner-up), Cory Booker (the closet thing shouldn’t matter but will come up), Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (who?) plus Massachucetts Congressman Seth Moulton (his look and demeanor scream “affable vp pick”).