One question: where did Lewis Black get that ’70s tie? It’s like a satin shawl.

Listen to this fascinating discussion of the impossible-to-swallow, fantasy-projection finale of Martin Scorsese‘s just-restored Taxi Driver by Slate‘s Dana Stevens and John Swansburg. It feels like a two-character play about a gap in comprehension among two extremely bright observers, and how they can absorb every detail of a classic film and still miss something really obvious.

Stevens and Swansburg list all the incredulous stuff during the film’s final minutes — tabloid news stories describing Robert De Niro‘s East Village whorehouse shootout as “heroic,” Jodie Foster‘s parents writing to thank him for saving their daughter, Cybil Shepard getting into his cab out at the very end and giving him admiring looks, De Niro’s Mohawk haircut completely grown out two or three months later — and they still can’t accept and in fact half-dismiss that the dreamlike coda is fantasy. Why? Because there hasn’t been any “precedent” or “cue” for a fantasy sequence. Swansburg actually calls it “a little bit of a false note.”

If I never see another movie about fierce and growly Asian guys leaping around and fighting each other with swords, it’ll be too soon. I’m serious. If powerful forces were to sent a rep to my door with this message — “You will never again see another Asian-machismo sword-fight movie in your life” — my answer would be, “Okay…I can live with that.” And I’m saying this as someone has has three real-deal swords in his apartment, including a samurai sword.

I’ve always respected and admired director Todd Haynes, and I realize that Mildred Pierce (Sunday, 9 pm) has been well-reviewed, and I accept that I’ll be seeing all five episodes…but I just can’t get it up so far. I respect James M. Cain but I don’t relate to women-suffering-in-the-’30s atmosphere. Plus I didn’t get any screeners or screening invites and…I don’t know. I just don’t feel involved.

President Obama will explain the Libyan adventure early Monday evening. Most people support limited military action to take out the bad guy and prevent the killing of civilians, especially if it doesn’t drag on for years and cost hundreds of billions. It seems to me that for the first time in I-don’t-know-how-many-decades, U.S. military action is actually up to something half-good.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules will be the weekend champ by Sunday night with a likely $22 million and change, according to boxoffice.com’s Phil Contrino. And the deeply loathed Sucker Punch, which made $8 million yesterday, will come in second with about $20 million, and possibly a bit less than that.

The Lincoln Lawyer — a nice score for all concerned and particularly Mathew McConaughey — will come in fourth with approximately $10,300,000 and a two-week cume of $28,267,183, give or take.

And Tom McCarthy‘s Win Win, by far the best film out there right now, is in limited release and doing well given the potential audience, but is basically making nickels. It’ll gain ground as it expands, of course.

$150 for the used bike (Craigslist, used as a prop on a TV show) and $180 for the front light, the horn, the rear blinking light, the rear-wheel rack, the black basket, a three-pronged bike wrench and a snake lock with two keys. My last bike was stolen; good to have one again.

I know what this sounds like (i.e., “aah, the good old days!”), but I really can’t imagine someone making a more satisfying, better-photographed, delightfully performed and tonally spot-on Three Musketeers than Richard Lester‘s 1973 version…or versions, I should say, since a not-quite-as-good Part 2 installment was released the following year. Plus you have to assume that 3-D will degrade things.

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So in addition to buying stand-alone, multi-region Blurays of Stanley Kubrick‘s Barry Lyndon and Lolita as well as a French-language-only Bluray of Rififi during a half-week stopover in Paris following the Cannes Film Festival, I’ll also be visiting the Stanley Kubrick exhibit (now through July 23rd) at the Cinematheque.

You have to laugh at Universal Home Video’s smirking chutzpah in announcing a $999 Bluray of Brian DePalma‘s Scarface, out on 9.6, which will include a specially designed wood-humidor packaging and other pointless perks. They’re obviously pitching this to the music industry’s rapper-gangsta culture. There will also be normally priced Blurays of same for those of us who just want to watch the film.

During an LA visit in 1982 I snuck onto the Universal lot. I literally climbed over a fence, and after some wandering around found a soundstage where Scarface was shooting. The huge set was Tony’s Miami mansion where the final shootout with the Columbians takes place. I walked right onto the stage like I belonged there, and nobody said anything. I remember a nicely dressed Michelle Pfeiffer and a couple of assistants leaving as I was arriving. There was a huge 12-foot-high oil painting of Pacino and Pfeiffer on the main floor, and I remember standing in front of it and thinking to myself, “Wow…nicely done.” And you can see the painting for about a second in the film.

This is a coward’s way to get shot:

And this is how a man does it:

I was assured by a director friend earlier today that Donald Sutherland‘s version of the Don’t Look Now “did they or didn’t they?” dispute is the more reliable. That doesn’t settle anything, of course. But my source knows a thing or two about the shooting of intimate scenes and the odds of a non-essential visitor somehow sneaking a peek, and is persuaded that Peter Bart‘s memory might be a wee bit sketchy.

There was one couple that definitely didn’t pretend, he added: Sienna Miller and Hayden Christensen during filming of a sex scene in George Hickenlooper‘s Factory Girl. It’s also been long rumored that actual couplings occured during the shooting of Monster’s Ball (Billy Bob Thornton and Hallie Berry), Angel Heart (Mickey Rourke and Lisa Bonet) and 9 1/2 Weeks (Rourke and Kim Basinger)…not that anyone knows or has said for sure.

I would presume that none of these stories are true except for the Factory Girl one. Miller and Christensen were seeing each other at the time.

Movies usually try to conceal the size of extremely tall or short actors. You can’t tell from watching Black Swan that Mila Kunis is unusually tiny (I’ve stood next to her); ditto Emma Watson in the Harry Potter films. But there’s no missing the fact in Sucker Punch that Emily Browning (.a.k.a, “Babydoll”) is roughly the size of a typical eight- or nine-year old.

Ellen Page, Natalie Portman, Kunis, Jessica Alba, Snooki, Lil Kim, Eva Longoria, Watson, Hilary Duff, Rachel Bilson, Elisha Cuthbert, Isla Fisher — there’s something a bit queer about so many super-short actresses (5’3″ or below) being at the top of the heap these days.

If you ask me this has a lot to do with the appetites and attitudes of 40-and-under guys. A sizable percentage of GenX/GenY seems to worship that little-hotpants, gooey-lipped, boop-boop-pee-doop aesthetic, and seems (emphasis on that word) to have decided that women the size of pre-tweener children are…what? Forbidden stuff? Perverse? Can sexual fantasies get any sicker than imaginary grade-school diddling?

I’m not that tall (6′ 1/2″) and I’ve never had the slightest interest in going out with anyone who isn’t at least or 5’5″ or 5’6″. (Okay, I’ve been with one or two who were 5’4″.) I know there’s something more than little bit icky about a guy being significantly taller that a woman he’s with (like Vince Vaughn and Isla Fisher in The Wedding Crashers), and I think there’s something about the under-40 erotic dreamscape that doesn’t just enjoy this little-schoolgirl aesthetic, but openly hungers for it. And the proof is that so many younger actresses these days are kewpie-doll sized.

“Tall…and that’s not all” — that’s me. Or at least semi-tallish. 5’7″ or 5’8″. I’ll even go 5’9″ or 5’10”.