It’s 5:10 am right now, and I’m sitting in a pitch-dark, no-wall-outlet foyer in a Manarola rooming house (laughingly referred to as a kind of “hotel” but not in my book), the only light coming from the unplugged Macbook Pro and with the Mediterranean surf smashing and churning outside.

With the exception of a delightful four-person, three-hour lunch with Call Me By Your Name director Luca Gudagnino at La Lampara, a coastal restaurant outside La Spezia, I spent almost all of Sunday driving and searching for parking and dragging suitcases up steep stone staircases, and then taking a brief nap at 8 pm only to awake six and half hours later.

Which is partly why, at this juncture, I’ve almost nothing to say about the forthcoming, four-night Putin Interviews (Showtime, 6.12, 9 pm). I’m racing to finish three or four posts before the computer battery dies, and the wifi sucks and my ass hurts from sitting on a shitty little plastic chair.

Will the always interesting Oliver Stone go easy on the authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin, a skillfully deceptive alpha male who — be honest — commands a thoroughly corrupt government, has almost certainly had journalists and enemies killed, has suppressed free speech and will continue to do so, still supports the fiendish Assad regime? Maybe or maybe not, but it’s safe to say Stone probably won’t be as flinty as Megyn Kelly was during her recent conversation with Putin. I’m presuming that the Stone-Putin thing will be somewhat more interesting, at least in terms of a potential cat-and-mouse dynamic, Stone asking or not asking certain questions and Putin dodging like a champ either way.