Neil Young has written the most visionary, sharply focused and concisely written manifesto about how to save the Big Three car companies that I’ve seen anywhere.

“Hillary Clinton is probably ready to ankle out of the Senate,” N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd writes in her 11.16 column, titled “Team of Frenemies.” “The point of the Senate was to be a staging area for her presidential race, and that’s done.

“She’s not a player there. Her bid to get the health care issue away from Ted Kennedy was stymied recently when Kennedy refused her request to create a special subcommittee that she would head.

“And why should the woman who made 18 million cracks go back to being junior to Chuck Schumer, if she could be toasted from Dublin to Dubai?

“On the down side, Hillary would be taking over a big and demoralized government bureaucracy, after proving with her campaign that she does not know how to run a big and demoralized group of people.

“On the up side, she would never have to exaggerate her foreign policy résumé again; this time, she really would be brokering peace and flying into places where they’d try to fire at her.

“And if she worked hard enough — and she would — she could restore clarity to Foggy Bottom, the striped-pants center of diplomacy so maligned and misused by W. and Dick Cheney on their Sherman’s march to war in Iraq and in their overwrought bid to become the only hyperpower.

“If Barry chooses Hillary as secretary of state, a woman who clearly intimidated him and taught him to be a better pol in the primaries, it doesn’t signal the return of the Clinton era. It says the opposite: If you have a president who’s willing to open up his universe to other smart, strong people, if you have a big dog who shares his food dish, the Bill Clinton era is truly over.

“Appointing a Clinton in the cabinet would be so un-Clintonian.”

Asked by the N.Y. Times‘ Deborah Solomon about Barack Obama‘s choice of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff, Karl Rove replies as follows: “I raised a question as to whether this would be the best use of Emanuel’s talents. If you’re trying to work through a big legislative priority, it is sort of hard if you have a guy who has a reputation as a tough, hard, take-no-prisoners, head-in-your-face, scream-and-shout, send-them-a-dead-fish partisan.”

Slumdog Millionaire‘s Danny Boyle narrating a N.Y. Times still-montage piece about the shooting of his film last year in India.

Taped to ticket window in lower Manhattan’s Angelika Film Center — Saturday, 11.15, 7:15 pm.

Australia’s website has been revamped and re-launched. It may be the most fluidly visual and eye-candy-ish movie site I’ve ever laid eyes on. Some 200 pics from the film, 20-plus short clips, interactive, whistles and bells.

The weather, I mean. An excellent museum and movie-watching day.

There’s a certain distinction in being the absolute last Hollywood-feeding site to post the new Watchmen trailer. The truth is that I was too lazy to get around to it until now.

I’ve seen Matteo Garrone‘s Gamorrah twice now and could easily roll with a third viewing. That’s a signification admission for a film as pointedly verite and rigorously un-“dramatic” (in the Godfather sense of that term) as this one. But I’ve fallen for the immersive, un-performed, you-are-there atmosphere that Garrone has fastidiously chosen and created, and my respect for it (and the film, obviously) has grown with each new refresh.

I spoke with Garrone last Monday on the phone. He was in a car somewhere in Los Angeles. The big American Cinematheque screening and after-party at Ago happened the following night. Sorry I wasn’t there.

The film is about the Camorra, or the Italian mafia, which is based in and around Naples. I got within shouting distance of this rancid city during an Italian trip I took with Jett in late May ’07. Talk about a scuzzy environment. The piles of rotting garbage, a result of a ridiculous longtime strike as well as organized crime’s influence upon the situation, were everywhere. I couldn’t get out of the region fast enough.

Gamorrah is based on a best-selling book by Roberto Saviano and Virginia Jewiss.

So far it has a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It opens sometime next month.