…for posting a takedown piece about the dying–on–the–vine Toronto Film Festival, and for posting the following three paragraphs in particular:

A couple of days ago a friend attended an early-bird screening of Halina Reijn‘s Babygirl (A24, 12.25), a B & D variation on the “Type-A cougar has it off with a hot young dude” genre. Costarring Nicole Kidman, Harris Dickinson, Sophie Wilde, Antonio Banderas, etc.

Last weekend’s CAA screening followed a TIFF showing on 9.10 and the Venice Film Festival debut on 8.30.

Friendo is calling it “a groundbreaking investigation of female sexuality by a female writer-director.” Kidman said afterwards it would have been a “completely different movie if a man had made it.”

Pic drew a “sensational response” from an elite audi4nce, he says. Attending were Brad Pitt, Olivia Wilde, Peter Dinklage, Catherine Hardwick, Rooney Mara, Charlie Hunnam.

There was q post-screening discussion between Kidman, Reijn and THR‘s Scott Feinberg, followed by a schmoozy wine gathering. Nicole stayed very late.

CAA honcho Bryan Lourd was there; ditto Nicole’s agent Chris Andrews.

Pic will gather multiple noms, he says — Best Actress (Kidman), Best Actor (Dickinson), Best Direction and Writing (Reijn).

“Don’t underestimate A24…at this time last year I had the same feeling about Poor Things. And previously about All Quiet on Western Front, Parasite, Cold War.

Another eccentric (older this time, nudging his 60s) apparently wanted to kill Donald Trump yesterday but this time didn’t even fire a shot.

Ryan Wesley Routh, 58, is the would-be Florida golf course shooter. Trump was untouched and unfazed and not even in the immediate vicinity. He’s extremely thankful for the attention, of course.

Sunday’s incident might have made for a semi-alarming story as a one-off, but it pales alongside the attempted Pennsylvania assassination of two months ago, which resulted in a bloody ear and a bandage on the stage of the Republican National Convention.

I’m presuming that most average Americans are unimpressed, and are most likely reacting with a “what, again?” Or, if you will, “been there, done that.” This tinderbox country is teeming with well-armed nutters. What else is new?

Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (Warner Bros., 9.6) not only screens tomorrow in Venice but opens domestically a bit more than a week hence. Where’s the buzz? I’m not feeling it. Nobody wants to sit through a cash-grab experience. I adore the 1988 original. Please don’t mess this up.

…but reviews of Todd Phillips‘ Joker: Folie a Deux won’t surface until Wednesday, September 4th.

Variety‘s Alex Hitman is reporting that Cooper Hoffman (Saturday Night, Licorice Pizza) will play a would-be “sexual muse” to an artist played by Olivia Wilde in Gregg Araki‘s I Want Your Sex.

Written by Araki and Karley Sciortino, pic is described as a “provocative thriller” that “blithely explores desire, domination and fantasy.”

I’m sorry but nobody wants to see a film in which Cooper (son of “Philly” Hoffman**) performs sexually in any way, shape or form. Nobody wants to see any freckly-faced, doughy-bod, tiny-eyed ginger guy with his shirt or, God forbid, his pants off. He’s just not sexy or good-looking enough….sorry.

There’s a reason why John Wayne, Paul Newman, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn used to get the girl but Walter Brennan, Andy Devine, Edgar Buchanan, Donald Meek, Ernest Borgnine and Rupert Grint didn’t.

In fact Paddy Chayefsky wrote a teleplay (and then a movie version of the same script) about a homely Brooklyn butcher (a guy roughly in Cooper Hoffman’s league) who had such bad luck with girls that we was on the verge of giving up. It was sad but 1955 audiences understood his predicament because the actor who played the butcher was Ernest Borgnine.

** I’ll allow that the late, great Phillip Seymour Hoffman was briefly shown slamming ham with Marisa Tomei in Sidney Lumet‘s Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, but that was a very fast and quick one-off.

…is the 1.37 aspect ratio. Debra Paget (still with us at age 91) may have been at her fetching peak in 1959, but boxy aspect ratios have always been and always will be mesmerizing. Look at all that head room…acres of it! And all hail director Fritz Lang, by the way — Metropolis, M, Fury, The Return of Frank James, Man Hunt, Scarlet Street, Cloak and Dagger, Rancho Notorious, The Blue Gardenia, The Big Heat, Human Desire, While the City Sleeps and, last and least, The Indian Tomb.

[Something has gone really screwy with WordPress coding. The first two words of the next sentence are supposed to read William Holden and not just William, but the coding won’t cooperate.]

William Holden didn’t have to end up dead in Gloria Swanson‘s swimming pool. And he really didn’t have to submit to self-loathing when he began to fall in love with Nancy Olson’s Betty Schaefer, a fellow screenwriter.

Don’t forget that the second half of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard was largely driven by self-revulsion — a young male screenwriter (Holden’s Joseph C. Gillis) feeling morally sickened by his willingness to sexually satisfy a 50 year-old former silent-era star (Swanson’s Norma Desmond) in exchange for a swanky lifestyle.

1950 was one sexually uptight year, you bet. It saw both the release of Sunset Boulevard and the widespread condemnation of Ingrid Bergman for having had Roberto Rossellini’s baby outside of wedlock. In the eyes of the general public there was nothing more odious than unsavory sexual behavior…any kind of hanky panky outside the usual proper, middle-class boundaries.

But Gillis could have have just laid his cards on the table as he explained to Schaefer, “Look, I was broke…the finance company was about to take my car away. I’m not evil…I’ve simply been using Desmond and living off her largesse while I figure out my next move.

“Plus I did what I could to finesse her awful Salome script. What’s so terrible about that? Okay, so I’ve been to bed with her a few times. I’ve laid there while she rides me like a stallion…big deal.”

Schaefer: “Don’t worry about it, Joe. You did what you had to do in order to survive. Now pack your things. You’re moving in with me.”

Gillis: “But we haven’t even been intimate yet. And what about your devoted fiancé, nice-guy Artie (Jack Webb)?”

Schaefer: “I don’t love him, not really. Largely because he’s too possessive plus he’s not from the creative side, and writing is my lifeblood. We’re not a great match. I’ve submitted to his sexual advances on occasion but he doesn’t turn me on. I’ve never once blown him and I’m sorry but that means something. This may sound cold but all’s fair in love and war.”

Did Steve McQueen‘s 12 Years A Slave (’13), which was filled with brutality and sadism, qualify as black misery porn?

No, it didn’t. Not once did I think to myself, “This is a real downer.” Partly because Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s “Solomon Northup” was and is a great character, and because McQueen’s film amounted to much more than subject matter — it was and is a masterful, deeply affecting human drama.

That said, read this Wikipedia page about Colson Whitehead’s “The Nickel Boys” (2019) and explain to me how RaMell Ross’s film adaptation (Amazon/MGM., 10.25), due to screen at Telluride and open the New York Film Festival a few weeks later…tell me how this doesn’t feel (from a distance at least) like Black Misery Porn in bold caps.

So why are the owners of Saugatuck Sweets trying to convert heathens and existentialists?

Friendo: “I agree with this a thousand percent. Very glad you wrote it. Something seismic has shifted. To the point that I don’t think comparing the Harris movement to the ‘High Hopes’ JFK campaign is at all out of line. As in 1960, this is about the candidate, but it’s also about something much larger than the candidate — a major pivot from the place we’ve been (the darkness of the Trump years, which absolutely include 2020-2024). You can feel the LARGENESS of the coalition. And the votes of women — of all stripes — are going to add up to a tsunami. Trump, the showbiz con man, suddenly looks like the old, dark, grim establishment.”

“When my mom got into her 80s, we had to deal with periodic medical issues. Fainting. Falls. Broken bones. Luckily, she was in good stead with the local rescue squad because she faithfully attended their crab feast fund-raisers.

“Each time, my siblings and I would move heaven and earth to get her home from whatever hospital she had landed in.

“In 2003, I tried to talk one emergency room doctor into releasing her after 11 hours.

“’I’ll let her out if she can tell me who the president is,’ the doctor said.

“We both looked at my mom, expectantly.

“’George,’ she said.

“I was thrilled; W., it was.

“’George Washington,’ she finished.

“After each episode, I’d proudly tell her internist, Dr. Simon, how we had nursed her back to health.

“‘You don’t understand,’ he said with exasperation. ‘Picture your mother hanging off a ledge, holding on by five fingers. After one of these incidents, she’s hanging on by four fingers. Another incident, three fingers. And so on. You think you’ve gotten her through and you’re starting fresh, but you’re not. It’s cumulative.’

“My mom was a stubborn old bird and she hung on with two fingers, and then one, until she was 97. We gave her morphine at the end, with a bourbon chaser.

“I know that octogenarians and nonagenarians can keep their wits about them. My mom was sharp and funny into her 90s.

“But I also know they begin losing threads of the narrative, and it’s as painful to them as it is to those who care about them.

“At some point, older people find themselves on that ledge. And, as Dr. Simon taught me, each traumatic incident you pull through just leads to another.”

— posted this morning (7.13) at 7 am.