Awards Daily ‘s Sasha Stone, Boxoffice.com‘s Phil Contrino and myself, at it again. Michael Caine, Taxi Driver, Natalie Portman, Sucker Punch, IKEA moving guys, Don’t Look Now, annoying hums, Notorious, Win Win, cats, etc. Here’s a non-iTunes, stand-alone link.

I guess I’ll be signing up for the $35-a-month hit, dammit, so I can get all-device access to the N.Y. Times starting tomorrow. But I resent being asked to pay that much. I’d be much cooler with $20 or $25 a month. That I could handle without a hiccup.

I was surprised by the results of a 3.24 poll, published by Awards Daily‘s Ryan Adams, revealing his readers’ favorite gay-themed films. It’s a respectable list, but the absence of William Friedkin and Mart Crowley‘s The Boys in the Band (’70) — arguably the most groundbreaking-in-its-time gay film ever made — tells me Adams’ voters weren’t interested in films that weren’t about them, or which failed to provide comfortable and/or stirring self-images.

It’s common knowledge, of course, that the gay community turned its back on The Boys in the Band almost immediately after it opened in March 1970. That was nine months after the June 1969 Stonewall rebellion, and the sea-change in gay consciousness and values that happened in its wake — pride, solidarity, political militancy — had no room for a satiric and rather acidic drama about a group of Manhattan gay guys, gathered at a friend’s birthday party in the West Village, grappling with various forms of frustration, misery and self-loathing due to their sexuality.

Mart Crowley‘s revolutionary stage play, which opened off Broadway in April 1968, was a culmination of decades of frustration with straight society’s suppression and/or intolerance of gays mixed with the up-the-establishment freedoms of the late ’60s, but the film didn’t fit the post-Stonewall mold. Obviously. And it hasn’t aged well at all.

When Boys was re-released in San Francisco 12 years ago, Chronicle critic Edward Guthmann wrote that “by the time Boys was released in 1970…it had already earned among gays the stain of Uncle Tomism…[it’s] a genuine period piece but one that still has the power to sting. In one sense it’s aged surprisingly little — the language and physical gestures of camp are largely the same — but in the attitudes of its characters, and their self-lacerating vision of themselves, it belongs to another time. And that’s a good thing.”

But Boys deserves respect as a revolutionary play of its time, and, as a film, as a kind of landmark presentation for its candid, amusing, sad and occasionally startling presentations of urban gay men and their lifestyles during those psychedelic downswirl, end-of-the-Johnnson-era, dawn-of-the Nixon-era days, made all the more entertaining and memorable by several bottled-lightning performances (particularly Cliff Gorman‘s).

And it’s just not right on some level that gays (whom I’m presuming represent most of Adams’ respondents) haven’t included Boys on their list at all…not even down near the bottom, for Chrissake. That’s uncaring, disrespectful, short-sighted, shallow.

I guess I’m extra-mindful of Crowley’s play/film because a couple of months ago I saw Crayton Robey‘s Making The Boys, a longish but mostly absorbing account of (a) Crowley’s life, (b) the writing of the play and (c) the making of the film. It reminded me of what a singular accomplishment Boys was in its day, and that the play, at least, really was a kind of gay earthquake…before anyone called anyone else “gay.”

My favorite gay-themed (partially or completely) films, in this order:

(1) Brokeback Mountain, (2) The Times of Harvey Milk, (3) Angels in America, (4) The Opposite of Sex, (5) Prick Up Your Ears, (6) A Single Man, (7) Gods and Monsters, (8) The Kids Are All Right, (9) Milk, (19) Longtime Companion, (11) Kiss of the Spider Woman, (12) The Boys in the Band, (13) Priest, (14) Maurice, (15) The Hours and Times, (16) The Crying Game and (17) Philadelphia.

Albert Brooks has a book, “2030: The Real Story of What Happens to America,” hitting shelves and Kindles on 5.10.11. A few hours ago he was complaining that recent tweets haven’t resulted in online sales. I wrote him and offered to read the book and do an interview, etc.

There was a morning bike ride and breakfast followed by an hour-long Oscar Poker chat, and then the IKEA guys deivered the couch…not a single piece but in sections inside big boxes and plastic cases with wing nuts and screws and slipcovers, etc. So I had to put it together — not any kind of a problem but it took about 90 minutes. Time flew.

God, these guys were perfect in 1950 or ’51! Why can’t they invent a drug that prevents you from physically aging beyond the age of 22 or 32 at the oldest for the rest of your life while allowing for the usual gathering of intellectual knowledge and spiritual wisdom? It wouldn’t be for everyone and perhaps not for most, but…

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.