So many folks I know and/or read have cast strong votes on this one that I almost wish I could vote Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down and be done with it. With me, it's more like Thumb Sideways. Glad I saw it. Liked a lot of it. Zero urge to see it again and even less to own the rumored DVD/Blu-ray with an hour (?) of deleted footage.

My pal Ken Levine gave it a pretty good review but said something like Tarantino should have cut 45 minutes out of it. This didn't surprise me coming from Ken. You could show Ken a 30-second commercial you'd produced and he'd say you should have cut 45 minutes out of it…but in this case, I think he's right. And a bit more forgiving of the length than I was.

A lot of my friends who grew up where I grew up absolutely loved the re-creation of Hollywood in 1969…and yeah, I liked the KHJ soundtrack, the reappearances of buildings in Westwood Village and on Hollywood Boulevard that are no longer there, bus signs for George Putnam and so on. I couldn't help but grin at the video clip — I didn't think there were any — of Larry "Seymour" Vincent, a local horror movie host back then who I knew. After so many articles about how Tarantino had those sections of town painstakingly redressed, I was expecting to see more of that than there was.

Someone wrote that the film captured the way people talked and acted in Hollywood back then. Well, not around me, they didn't. (And hey, what's the deal with all the shots of feet? And of POV shots of people driving around with you, the viewer, in the back seat?)

I dunno. I liked so many things about this film, many of them spinning around Brad Pitt's performance, that I can't be negative. I guess I didn't care a lot about the sad predicament of poor, deprived Rick Dalton who doesn't have a TV series at the moment and tragically hasn't quite made the leap to being Steve McQueen.

And I just started and deleted a paragraph about other things I didn't care about but a lot of them would have required a Spoiler Alert here. Me, I think I enjoyed this film more than I might have if I'd read more reviews and seen more clips. I liked all the times I was surprised that the movie seemed to be going one way and then pulled a one-eighty and went in another. And that's about all I want to tell you about it.

So here's my one-paragraph review: Didn't love it. Didn't hate it. Glad I saw it. Don't get all the feet. Could have done with less violence. Liked seeing it at the New Bev with an enthusiastic audience. Might not have liked it as much at home and if I'd read or seen more previews. Brad Pitt deserves an Oscar and not a supporting one. A little too long. I don't blame Bruce Lee's family for being pissed at his portrayal but as I have no particular feelings for Bruce Lee, that didn't bother me. And isn't it nice that a filmmaker with a strong style and approach made a movie that so many people are talking about?

Just back from a midnight screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood at the New Beverly Cinema. For those of you who don't know, the New Bev is a classic cinema that tries to function like a movie theater of yore by actually projecting film. The place is owned or maybe controlled — one hears different things — by Quentin Tarantino so it was the perfect place to see his new movie.

What did I think of it? Liked a lot of it…was bored by large chunks of it…thought Brad Pitt walked away with the movie…didn't find the violence as thrilling as the folks sitting behind us did…

…and beyond that, I think I need to sleep on it. Good night.

My favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World will be screened — one show only — at 7:30 PM on Sunday, September 29 in its natural habitat. I'm speaking of course of the Arclight Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood, which is where the movie debuted and where I first saw it in 1963. The theater was built to show this movie and the rumor is that they plan to run it every year there. They'll also be running around the same time this year, a lot of great old films best seen on a big screen including How the West Was Won, Grand Prix, 2001, Battle of the Bulge, Lawrence of Arabia, Mad Max, Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Tickets for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World are available at this moment despite the fact that I just bought a bunch of them. Here's the link.

If you've never seen this film before, this is the place to see it. It's so much less on a small screen in your den. Some movies need a big screen and a big audience and I'm sure we'll have one that night at the Dome. In fact, it will almost certainly sell out so if you're thinking of going, don't dawdle.

And no, I don't know if there will be any special guests or speeches or anything. You can count the number of surviving cast members on one hand and still have enough fingers left to make a peace sign. I'm just going to enjoy the film for the I-don't-know-what-the-heck-number time. Won't you join me?

Graphic novelist Art Spiegelman — who I know but not all that well — was asked to pen a foreword to a collection of Golden Age Marvel comics. He was a curious choice since Art has long made clear his disdain for super-heroes and the kind of thing the book contained…but write it, he did. When asked to delete a somewhat-subtle reference to Donald Trump, Art instead withdrew his intro…and in this piece, he notes that the billionaire former CEO of Marvel, Isaac "Ike" Perlmutter, is a friend of Trump and a deep-pocketed campaign donor. I don't know if there's a connection and neither, apparently, does Art.

I like Art and find his views on comics worth listening to, even though I agree with few of the ones he holds about the super-hero variety. I think he fails to notice tongues-in-cheeks and overestimates how much of those comics are really about various people punching each other. He sees as fisticuffs what some of us see as ballet, but his views are hardly unique to him. You might want to give his essay a look-see.

New York Times obit for our friend Ernie Colón. Notice all the quotes from Ernie's friends saying what a terrific guy he was. They're right.

You may not see a whole lot o' new content on this blog for the next few days as I have a truckload of stuff to do. Some of it involves helping to get this book off to the printer…

We're looking at a release date in November so it would make a lovely Christmas present for a loved one, an unloved one or, best of all, yourself. The strips reprinted this time span 1959 and 1960…really a time of change and not just from one decade to another.

This volume of The Complete Syndicated Pogo is entitled Clean as a Weasel.  In the interest of what Daffy Duck once called "sheer honesty," I should admit that I don't think there are any weasels in this book, clean or otherwise but so what?  I have a lot of Walt Kelly's doodles and notes, and I found that phrase in one of them and knew it had to be a book title.  Authors everywhere will be so resentful they didn't get to it first.

Other deadlines await so I shall tend to them.  Bye for now.

• Near as I can tell, Trump's position on Gun Control is that there should be background checks and we should keep guns out the hands of the mentally ill…but there should be no laws passed to make either of those things happen.

Bernie Sanders has been…well, maybe "attacking" is too strong a word but he has some problems with the Washington Post. At times, he sounds like Trump going after any source of news anywhere that does not praise Donald Trump. But as Matt Taibbi explains, it's different with Bernie.

Could Simone Biles be any more amazing?

There's a new poll out that is nothing but bad news for Donald Trump. It shows the top four Democratic contenders — Biden, Sanders, Warren and Harris — all beating him in the popular vote by between twelve points (Biden) and six (Harris). The poll says that 59% of Registered Voters think the Trump Administration is "tearing the country apart," that people are much more worried about mass shootings by American citizens than they are about Islamic terrorists, and that an awful lot of folks are just getting tired of political battles and want it all to go away.

This sounds like the kind of poll that Republicans and Trump supporters would dismiss as biased and "leftie" but it happens to be the Fox News Poll. No wonder Trump is losing his love for that channel.

As always with polls, we remind you that a lot can happen before Election Day, that Democrats would be very stupid to get complacent, and that Democrats are sometimes very stupid.

This is Voiceband EXIT with a Disney medley. You now know as much about them as I do…

One way I'm hoping to not spend the next year obsessing about the election is to come fully to realizations like the following. Friends keep asking me who I'm going to support for President. My answer — until such time as I come up with a better one and I doubt I will — is the person who's least like Donald Trump. If Trump's the Republican nominee then it would, by definition, not be him. It will be the person who can beat him.

At this moment, that would seem to be Joe Biden and I'm fine with that. I think others — Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, in that order of slight preference — might make better presidents but that's subject to change and of course there's plenty of time and there'll be plenty of reasons for it to change.

There are two considerations here and I don't like that I have to put "Who has the best chance of beating Trump?" ahead of "Who'd make the best president?" But this is a unique situation. Trump is so bad and he'll only get worse once he never has to stand for office again and takes his re-election as an absolute American endorsement of every single thing he's said and done. He may even say he has a mandate to fan the flames of racism.

I can't recall a time since I first registered to vote when I was so sure who I was going to vote against. When it was G.H.W. Bush versus Dukakis, I didn't decide until the day before I went to the polls. But this time's different and I have the feeling everyone who'll wind up voting for Trump already knows that, too. Can you imagine the difference between any two Democrats mattering to someone wearing a red MAGA hat? Someone chanting "Lock her up!" or "Send them back!" just because they don't like someone's politics and/or ethnicity?

So I hereby do not care which Democratic nominee would make the better Chief Exec as long as they become Chief Exec. Any one of them would be a whole lot better than what we have now.

This will save me endless hours of debating the candidates with myself and others…and we'll probably wind up with the exact same names on the ballot so I can vote for the Democrat. You might want to try it.

Remember Roy Moore? The former judge who ran for an Alabama Senate seat and lost because of all the evidence that he liked underage girls? Right…him. He was at a Republican breakfast gathering and he was explaining why he was against transgender military service. Of course, he had a real-life example…

Do you know what transgender is? That's not biblical. If that's biblical, God created man and woman. And when men want to be women? I was watching M*A*S*H the other day — talking about Korea, Vietnam. I was watching M*A*S*H, talking about what's his name — Klinger? He wanted to get out of the Army, because they didn't accept transgender. Now, I guess he would get a promotion.

I don't know how anyone could watch M*A*S*H and not understand that Klinger was 100% straight. He wanted to get out of the Army because he didn't want to get killed in combat. In the Korean War, if he'd started talking about transgender, they probably would have booted him out. But that was the premise of the character, that was the joke: A totally straight guy putting on a dress, trying to convince someone he was looney and nobody believed there was anything queer about him. Roy Moore didn't get it.

That's the trouble with so many people who claim we have to live our lives according to The Bible. They don't understand the Bible or care to understand the Bible. Whatever they want to believe is in it, they say is in it…and if you argue with them, their comeback is that you're arguing with God. They have to try that because they can't defend their views any other way.

If Ray Moore can't understand a sitcom, he sure can't understand The Bible.

Hello. Not long ago here, I asked you to send in suggestions for blog posts that were in no way about current politics and many of you did. You will begin seeing posts based on those suggestions shortly.

A lot of you reminded me that when Steve Ditko passed away, I said I would at some point write a long piece about him. I have decided that I will but not for quite a while and I've also decided that I'm not going to tell you why I'm not doing it now.

I've also decided that I'm not going to talk about my own career more than I already do, which I think is the right amount of attention to give to that kind of thing. And I've already said here that I have nothing to say at this time about the Viacom company acquiring Garfield…which since they've merged with CBS means The Cat is controlled by an even larger corporation.

But we have plenty of other good topics, some of which will yield long, hopefully-interesting essays here and some of which can be handled with short answers. For instance, Kevin Juaire wrote to ask…

I was wondering if you ever came close to applying for a "normal job." Since you wrote for television many times and those jobs probably often ended abruptly with little notice, did you ever find yourself with an extended period of unemployment which had you contemplating employment other than writing to fill the gap?

Nope. See how easy that was?

Also, a lot of you asked what comics I read these days or what I think of certain current books. The answer is that I don't read many, just as I don't go to a lot of movies. (I do have tix for a Midnight show this weekend of the new Tarantino film so I'll probably be writing about that shortly, assuming I think of anything that seems worth sharing.)

I also find it somehow unbecoming for a person who writes comic books to speak ill of the work of another person who writes comic books. I've never seen anyone else do it and not look petty and jealous and I don't expect I could be the first. It's even awkward to write about what you do like because if I praise Friend A's current comic, Friend B gets some part of his face outta joint at the non-recommendation of his book.

This is going to sound odd to some…and yes, there are times when I get enthused over something and want to throw what little clout I have behind it. But for the most part, I don't think the world needs every one of my opinions.

Recently, I read a collection of some Batman stories that were critically-acclaimed by…well, someone. They left me absolutely cold, especially in their interpretation of the title character. I love Batman as done by some people…but nothing I love about Batman was present in this particular work by this particular writer and this particular artist.

Some folks I guess loved it, which is fine. We are now seeing so many interpretations and "takes" on Batman that I'm sure everyone stares at some of them and wonders what the hell their makers thought they were doing. My inclination when I'm disappointed as a reader is to move on, rather than spend more time thinking about the comic, which is what I'd have to do to write about it with any clarity and value. I'd probably run into the writer of this particular Batman series at some convention and based on my past experiences with him, my sense is that would not have been a pleasant encounter.

It's not that I'm scared. I just don't care enough about this comic to want to fight about it. "A bad Batman comic? My God, we need to do something about it. There's never been a bad Batman comic before!!!"

Once in a while, I think the discussion may be worthwhile but in some cases — make that most) cases — I think not. In the next day or two, I'll be tackling some of the topics you folks asked for that prompted me to say, "Oh, I should come up with something worthwhile to say about that." Hope you'll agree.

I'm not clear where and when we're going to see them here in the states but Sir Michael Palin has dug out and narrated a lot of old 8mm home movies of the Monty Python crew at work. Here's a very brief excerpt of scenes from the writing and filming of Life of Brian…