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.

Everything that the loathsome Donald Trump says or has said, thinks or has thought, or does or has ever done is almost certainly evil. I understand that. But in the rush to reveal everything sleazy or odious he’s said about women, it was recently discovered that something he said to Howard Stern in 2004 always will be true, and it’s this: eccentric, manic or otherwise crazy women are usually astonishing in bed.

Yes, the man is crude, grotesque and short-sighted in more ways than you can shake a stick at, but he was right about this one thing.

I personally know this to be a dead-cold fact — I have the memories and the scars. In Husbands and Wives (’92), Woody Allen delivered a riff about kamikaze women [see below] in one of the interrogation scenes, and any guy who doesn’t understand exactly what Allen is talking about needs to get out more. Now we know that Trump (and I take no pleasure in acknowledging this) said more or less the same thing when he spoke to Stern in 2004:

“How come the deeply troubled women, you know, deeply, deeply troubled, they’re always the best in bed? I have a friend, Howard, who’s actually like a great playboy [and] he will only look for crazy women. [Because] for some reason, what I said is true. It’s just unbelievable. You don’t want to be with them for long term, but for the short term there’s nothing like it.”

The Trump quote was pointed out yesterday by Esquire‘s Megan Friedman.

I’m sorry but a stopped clock tells the correct time twice a day.

I went into last night’s 6 pm screening of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk with high expectations for the 120 frames-per-second, 4K 3D photography (I’ve been a general fan of HFR for decades) and a slight sense of caution and uncertainty about the basic bones of the thing, which all along had sounded to me like an Iraq War rehash of Clint Eastwood‘s Flags Of Our Fathers (the gap between hollow patriotic pageantry and the harsh realities of war) and therefore nothing new.

And then I saw it and the cards got all shuffled around. The tech aspect impressed but also underwhelmed in certain ways. My eyes became used to the hyper-clarity after a while, and as the acclimation took hold I began to search for the usual nutritional stuff, and to my surprise Billy Lynn gradually sank in and delivered — not in a rock-your-world sense but in quiet, unforced terms. The story, acting and plain-dealing emotion bring things to a mid-level boil.

It finally hits home, I’m saying. Not so much from the easy-lay observations about hollow patriotism and pageantry and the atmosphere of official delusion but from the general feeling of bonding and, yes, fraternal love between combatants. The transitions between American celebration and Iraqi desperation grow in intensity, and the peripherals recede as the fundamentals apply. Your brothers in arms are all you can count on. I’ve felt this current in dozens of war films before, but it got me again.

So as I walked through Times Square station on my way to the Brooklyn-bound R train, I told a colleague in Los Angeles that “it’s a good film…not an audaciously original, blow-your-socks-off type of thing but a modestly good film…the material is the material (i.e., Ben Fountain’s 2012 novel), and the delivery is understated and effective.

“Is it a blindingly brilliant thing?,” I said. “No, but it’s not a wipe-out or a burn, and anyone calling Billy Lynn that” — my friend had been passing along some snarly-sounding Twitter reactions — “just isn’t paying sufficient attention…they aren’t letting it in.”