Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff was beaten up badly during a Morning Joe segment this morning. It was over an inference, first mentioned on Real Time with Bill Maher, that President Trump may have had a sexual relationship with a woman in his administration. Wolff told Maher that the woman’s identity is indicated by “reading between the lines” in a section near the end of the book. Nobody knows anything, but as far as I can tell Wolff never hinted that the party in question might be U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. Nonetheless, Haley has strongly denied the alleged inference, and Wolff got hammered this morning on Morning Joe (and was interrogated yesterday on TheSkimm) for vaguely or indirectly floating this notion. The bottom line, as one of the Skimm co-hosts said, is that this is the wrong thing to hint about during “a watershed moment for women, especially in the workplace.” Correct — Wolff should have let well enough alone.

It’s been 63 and 1/2 years since the debut of Alfred Hitchcock‘s Rear Window, and it’s still the greatest film about voyeurism. (Right?) For me the second best is Steven Soderbergh‘s sex, lies and videotape, followed by Michael Powell‘s Peeping Tom, Francis Coppola‘s The Conversation, Brian DePalma‘s Body Double.

There’s one more that I’ve mentioned a couple of times but has all but disappeared — Jeannot Szwarc and Michael Crichton‘s Extreme Close-Up (’73), which you can’t rent or stream or anything. (There was a VHS version available in the ’80s under a different title, Sex Through A Window.) Not a top-tier film, but a smart, intriguing, well-written one.

I’m trying to decide if I want to spend $6 bills to stream Aaron Harvey‘s The Neighbor. It’s obviously a B-level thing, but maybe. To me William Fichtner will always be Roger Van Zandt in Heat.

Old story: During an early ’70s visit to The Dick Cavett Show, Jack Klugman told a story about watching his wife try on different evening outfits in their living room. No underwear, he said, so every time she changed she was Venus di Milo. And she was near a large window. And Klugman thought to himself, he said, “Gee, I wish I was across the street with a pair of binoculars.”

Jeremiah Zagar‘s We, The Animals, based on a 2012 Justin Torres novel, “is trippier and more affecting than Moonlight ever dreamed of. Adolescent queer stirrings aside, the analogy is not Moonlight but magical realism, Beasts of the Southern Wild, flying above the trees, animated drawings, Malick-like impressionism a la The Tree of Life, family conflict, dreamscapes.” — from 1.22 HE Sundance review. The Orchard has acquiredWe, The Animals for theatrical distribution later this year.

Sometime this afternoon (and hopefully before 3 pm), Hollywood Elsewhere will be driving up to the Santa Barbara Film Festival. The festival is operating under some spiritual duress, as recent trade stories have made clear.

There’s been much hand-wringing over the recent Montecito mudslide tragedy, which has caused the Four Seasons Biltmore to close until April 1st. No debris is littering Santa Barbara’s State Street, but the mantra of SBIFF director Roger Durling has been “never say die,” “let’s stand together” and “sticks and stones may break our bones, but mudslides will only make us stand taller.” Or something like that.

Actual Durling quote: “People want to be together and the festival is a way to do that. It was essential for us to get our act together.”

All I know is that the Montecito region of the 101 freeway has been open for about ten days now. I’ll probably encounter delays, but perhaps not hellish delays. Update: I couldn’t get it together in time. Driving up tomorrow morning.

A 1.31 N.Y. Times piece by “Carpetbagger” Cara Buckley asks, “Why Didn’t Steven Spielberg Get an Oscar Nomination for The Post?” I thought that question had been answered earlier this month. In this space, I mean.

“In some views, the failure to gain much awards traction is an indicator of a shifting Oscars landscape,” Buckley writes, “where Moonlight, a small independent film with an all-black cast, won Best Picture over the white-on-white spectacle of La La Land.”

Bullshit — Moonlight eeked out a win because a sufficient number of Academy members wanted forgiveness or better yet erasure on the #OscarsSo White thing, which peaked in early ’16.

“In this awards season especially, one distinguished by underdog stories and diversity in Lady Bird, Get Out and other pictures, The Post felt out of place,” Buckley explains. “For all of its important messaging, it remains a very white, very upper-middle-class film.”

Lester Friedman, author of “Citizen Spielberg,” tells Buckley that ‘this isn’t the year for a middle-of-the-road Hollywood drama.'”

Or, as I said in a 1.13 post called “Oscar Bait Movie Is Over,” “Oscar-bait movies are regarded askance by younger industry types plus the new guild and Academy members. This is probably why Steven Spielberg‘s The Post never caught on. People smelled Oscar-bait calculation from the get-go, and they don’t like the mindset (an “important” story or theme done classy, aimed at 50-plus types, bucks-up stars and screenwriters) and the “game” of it all.

“The 45-and-unders looked at this well-written, respectably made prestige flick with two boomer superstars (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks) and said, ‘Where is it written that we all have to stand up and salute traditional Oscar-bait movies like little toy soldiers every fucking November and December?'”

The fact that Sally Potter‘s The Party (Roadside, 2.16) runs a mere 71 minutes is, in itself, a fascinating selling point. For me at least. Most dramas of this sort are mining their second acts at the 70-minute mark. People often complain about longish running times, but I wonder if the average ticket-buyer feels vaguely shortchanged if a film is too short, whatever that might mean.

Last year Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan, Nate Jones, Kevin Lincoln and Jada Yuan ran a list of 50 films with running times under 90 minutes, but how many well-regarded films have run less than 80? I can think of exactly one — Woody Allen‘s Zelig, which ran 79 minutes.

Not to mention The Party‘s 93% and 74% scores from Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively.

Respect for Party costar Cherry Jones, who also appears in Woody Allen‘s A Rainy Day in New York, for saying the following to the N.Y. Times: “There are those who are comfortable in their certainty. I am not. I don’t know the truth. When we condemn by instinct our democracy is on a slippery slope.”

Filming on the sixth and final season of House of Cards resumed yesterday, with the newly-added Diane Lane and Gregg Kinnear playing (according to the N.Y. Times‘ John Koblin) a brother and sister. In a 1.31 post, Vanity Fair‘s Yohana Desta wondered if Lane and Kinnear will play “a pair of elite D.C. spin doctors ushered in to smooth out the kinks of [President Frank] Underwood’s disappearance.”

Have I missed something? Where has it been hinted that Kevin Spacey‘s chief executive might vanish? That would be an odd way to go, no?

If I were running House of Cards, I would keep it simple. Just as Spacey became an instant dead man last fall in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations, Frank Underwood needs to succumb to a heart attack. Nothing tricky or complicated — he just drops dead. (An act that can’t be performed, of course.) Start the season with a funeral procession down Pennsylvania Avenue. Flag-draped casket, muffled drums, the clop-clop of horses.

I for one would love to see House of Cards continue beyond a sixth season. The saga of the presidency of Robin Wright‘s Claire Underwood, and whether or not she can put forth a vision and a way of governing separate from her late husband’s. Priorities, finaglings, battles and challenges. What does she have to hide, and what do her enemies have on her?

The final hour of Black Panther really nails it. It delivers the same kind of junkie fix that Marvel fans are accustomed to paying for, but it’s escapism fused with social vision and progressive identity politics — African pride, honor, heart, nativism, community. The last hour saves the day, but the first 75 is mainly about set-up and diversion — hidden Wakanda, vibranium, action detours (including a mad car-chase scramble in South Korea) but mostly set in a kind of tribal, primal heaven-on-earth.

Best Stormy-to-Jimmy quip: “I thought this was a talk show, not a horror movie.” Second best: “Define true.” Stormy Daniels has a seven-year-old daughter, born in January 2011.

And A24 won’t open Ari Aster’s horror film, in which Toni Collette is said to be phenomenal, until 6.8

If David Lynch‘s Wild At Heart is so great, why can’t I remember a single scene or shot from it? Okay, I remember a closeup of Laura Dern‘s crazy feet on top of her bed, excitedly “running” without moving. But literally nothing else.

I didn’t actively dislike Wild At Heart. I remember sitting there and saying to myself, “Yup, this a Lynch film, all right.” I vaguely recall feeling underwhelmed and letting it go as soon as I left the theatre, but that was 27 and 1/2 years ago.

Nic Cage‘s Sailor Ripley is a southern outlaw borrowed from mid ’50s Elvis mythology, Dern’s Lulu Pace Fortune is constantly anticipating sex or panting about something or other, and they both embody the title.

I can’t honestly say I have the slightest urge to check it out again. I certainly wouldn’t buy this Bluray. Okay, I might stream it someday to remind myself which aspects I didn’t care for 27 and 1/2 years ago. I’d watch a Bluray of Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man or The Straight Story without a moment’s hesitation.

Early this morning a post by Brent Budowsky, opinion columnist for The Hill, stated that he “now strongly believe[s] that President Trump will soon fire Robert Mueller.”

Trump will “use the upcoming report of the Justice Department inspector general as a pretext to fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,” Budowsky warned, which would pave the way to fire Mueller, which would guarantee the most extreme constitutional crisis in American history.

“With an 85 percent probability, I now believe that President Trump will never agree to be questioned by Mueller and his special counsel team. The fast-moving time schedule to resolve whether Trump does or does not agree to be questioned by Mueller will be a precipitating event for Trump firing Mueller if indeed this occurs.

“I assign a probability to these warnings because they may not be proven correct. However, because there is a significant prospect they are, and because the consequences for America would be so dangerous and dramatic if they are, it is time to issue a warning in the strongest possible terms that a great constitutional crisis may be imminent for the republic.”