“North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States. They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen. [Kim Jong-un] has been very threatening beyond a normal state and as I said they will be met with fire and fury and frankly power the likes of which this world has never seen before.” — President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters between golf swings at his club in Bedminster, New Jersey earlier today. The usual machismo, of course, but also driven by Trump wanting to divert attention from Robert Mueller‘s Russian-collusion grand jury, etc.

If the Guardian can ask for a little extra sugar from its readers, so can I. Hollywood Elsewhere is the same thriving, modestly-scaled site it’s been for the last 13 years, but things are a bit tight right now and so I’m asking for an injection of monetary lamb cells. Just a temporary thing, between now and the end of the year. Everything will be back to normal once the ’17 Phase One revenue kicks in.

Everything is jake on a general basis. The 2017 and early ’18 Oscar season will be just as much of a bread-and-butter provider as the previous years have been, although things have been a lot more competitive for the little-guy sites (which in the Mount Olympus realm boils down to myself and Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone) over the last four or five years. Ad budgets are finite, and the big sites are gobbling up all the apple pie and whipped cream. On top of which social media streams and swirls have gained importance in advertiser eyes. The banner ad will always be a viable anchor, but it ain’t what it used to be.

Plus HE’s off-season economic model has always required modest dough from a series of quickie, no-biggie, nickle-and-dime ad runs in the spring, summer and early fall. I used to be able to muddle through on this score without too much difficulty, but not lately. Now I have to beg and tap-dance and jump through hoops just to keep things steady.

Did the Guardian recently get married and in so doing incur added responsibilities along with a general life change? No, it didn’t. That’s on me and c’est la vie. But Guardian management did determine that normal revenue streams aren’t what they used to be and subsequently decide that a bit of community support would be in order. They’re still the Guardian but they’ve decided to pass the hat. Not a calamity but an adjustment. Same here only less so as HE’s situation is temporary.

I seem to recall asking for a modicum of reader support sometime around ’05 or ’06…something like that. It’s not crazy to reach out to a loyal audience for a little assistance, not as a permanent plead-athon but as a rough-patch, five-month campaign. I’m asking for minimum plunk-downs of $50, and $100 if you can swing it. And if you want to tell me to grim up and figure some other solution, fine. I’ll muddle through either way.

Yeah, I hate doing this but what do you want me to do? Go into a cave and hibernate? It’s not that crazy. I’ve been putting in 12- to 16-hour days for 13 years on this site, and I just need to put out the tip jar for a while. Oscar advertisers have paid the bills all along and nobody’s getting rich here, but…well, I’ve said it.

HE readership is just as buoyant as ever. The site is still a locked-in, must-read, go-to thing…an essential stopover for strong advocacy and provocative opinion. HE is perhaps the last idiosyncratic, personality-driven, culture-channeling, self-regardingly meta, tail-swallowing, Twitter-provoking, Oscar-whispering Hollywood website around…one that top-tier filmmakers follow the world over, and which is regarded as fairly essential read among cutting-edge journalists, industry elites, actors, agents & managers, below-the-liners, ubers, early adopters and granular film fanatics on all seven continents.

Hey, buddy…can you spare a Ulysses S. Grant?

The full slate of the 55th New York Film Festival (9.28 thru 10.15) popped this morning. I’ve only seen a few of the selections, but my insect antennae plus what I’ve heard fill in some of the gaps.

HE keepers (4): Richard Linklater‘s Last Flag Flying (haven’t seen it but it has to be at least half-decent), Woody Allen‘s Wonder Wheel (ditto but Kate Winslet‘s performance said to be quite the torrential heartbreaker), Luca Guadagnino‘s Call Me By Your Name (standing alongside Dunkirk at the top of HE’s best of ’17 list), Ruben Ostlund‘s The Square. Allegedly Essential (2): Sean Baker‘s The Florida Project, Greta Gerwig‘s Lady Bird. Good but Calm Down (3): Robin Campillo‘s BPM (Beats Per Minute), Noah Baumbach‘s The Meyerowitz Stories, Dee Rees‘ Mudbound. Jesus H. Christ (1): Todd Haynes‘ Wonderstruck.

NYFF selection committee chairman Kent Jones is a good, worldly fellow with commendable perceptions, and is capable of letting a little light into his soul as well as the room. But two of the other NYFF deciders, Film Society of Lincoln Center Director of Programming Dennis Lim and Film Comment and Sight and Sound contributor Amy Taubin, are regarded, however fairly or unfairly, as fickle, somewhat humorless snobs. I don’t know much about FSLC Associate Director of Programming Florence Almozini — for all I know she could have the personality and world-view of Sarah Silverman.

Boilerplate press release: “NYFF Special Events, Spotlight on Documentary, Revivals, Convergence, and Projections sections, as well as filmmaker conversations and panels, will be announced in the coming weeks. Tickets for the 55th New York Film Festival will go on sale September 10th. VIP passes and packages are on sale now and offer one of the earliest opportunities to purchase tickets and secure seats at some of the festival’s biggest events,” etc.

As far as I can guess or discern, mother! (Paramount, 9.15) is a movie about monsters consuming a victim. I don’t know anything, but it may be some kind of pervy, bloody-lightbulb descendant of Rosemary’s Baby. JLaw is Rosemary, Javier Bardem is Guy Woodhouse, and Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer are sexualized versions of Roman and Minnie Castevet. Could there be a vague relation to Edgar Allen Poe‘s “The Casque of Amontillado“?

Camille Paglia‘s trangender rap, taped last April, in a nutshell: Youthful alienation has been a constant in American culture for decades. In the late ’40s and ’50s it was being a Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg-styled beatnik. In the mid ’60s to early ’70s it was becoming a hippie taking psychedelic adventures or a political radical. Today you’re encouraged to think that your alienation is possibly because you don’t identify with your inherited gender, and so young people are being encouraged to surgically change genders. It’s all part of general leftist academic thinking about sexual fluidity, and it’s not only ominous but a sign of cultural collapse. 

If some rightwing guy on Fox were to say this, I would dismiss it. But because I’m a longtime Paglia worshipper, I feel differently.

I lived and struggled in Manhattan (mostly in Soho and the West Village) between ’77 and ’83, and I got around, trust me. In all those years I noticed exactly one prostitute on the street — a short, pretty Latina who gestured in my direction as I was walking out of the 96th Street IRT station around midnight. The only place where I’ve ever noticed several prostitutes in the same general location was in Prague in May of ’92 — honest. And the only sexual episode that happened on the old, sleazy 42nd Street was when I was 13 or 14, when a 40ish gay guy (an old-fashioned creepy predator) tried to put the moves on me. I gave him the stink-eye. HBO will premiere The Deuce on 9.10.17.

Clint Eastwood‘s Unforgiven will celebrate its 25th anniversary with special one-off screenings of a 4K restored version on Tuesday, 8.15. I’d like to attend one in Los Angeles at a decent venue, but Fandango isn’t listing a venue as we speak. I wanted to see the 4K version in Cannes last May, but I couldn’t fit it in.

Sometime in late ’18 or certainly by 2019, Amazon Studios’ Lucy and Desi, an Aaron Sorkin-written biopic with Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett playing Lucille Ball, will open in theatres. Obviously an Oscar bait thing for Blanchett and perhaps for the guy they get to play Desi Arnaz.

Married for 20 years (1940 to ’60), Lucy and Desi had a turbulent union from the get-go, largely due to the Cuban-born Arnaz being an incessant tomcatter. (Ball filed for divorce in September 1944 over infidelity, but they patched things up.) Desi’s hound-dogging when into overdrive during the incredibly successful 1950s run of I Love Lucy. She finally divorced him in ’60. Keep in mind that Lucy, born in 1911, was six years older than Desi, and that her sexy blue-eyed redhead years peaked between the early ’30s and early ’40s, and that she liked her highballs and smoked like a chimney. (As a result she developed one of the greatest female booze-and-cigarette voices in Hollywood history.) By the time she made The Facts of Life with Bob Hope, Ball’s hottie days were well behind her. Remember also that back in the prehistoric days a certain strain of Latin male considered rooster behavior to be a birthright if not a point of pride.

If you want to bask in the Lucy-and-Desi thing when things were truly hot, fresh, moist and bloomy, watch Too Many Girls.

Hollywood Elsewhere has never seen a Tommy Wirkola film (Dead Snow, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters), and the odds are greatly against seeing his latest, What Happened To Monday. In her Locarno Film Festival review, Variety‘s Jessica Kiang has described Wirkola’s film as “a ludicrous, violent, amusingly dumb sci-fi actioner…that casts Noomi Rapace as septuplets battling a dystopian regime.”

To which I replied, “There’s NO SUCH THING as ‘amusingly dumb’ in the context of movie attitude or tone. Certainly not if it’s also ludicrous and violent. There’s hilariously idiotic, of course, but…”

Kiang: “Not sure I get the fine distinction between those near-synonymous phrases, to be honest?”

HE reply: “Hilariously idiotic = stateroom scene in Night at the Opera, Woody Allen bits in What’s Up Tiger Lily, etc. Instances in which the filmmakers are definitely in on the joke. Amusingly dumb = lazy-ass fart fungus toenail dead-brain humor…open question as to whether filmmakers are in on the joke, or whether they’re defaulting to sloth-like sensibilities.”

Last weekend two manly, fully mature critics, Joe Leydon and Stephen Whitty, took Hollywood Elsewhere to task for expressing garden-variety hormonal enthusiasm over what I carefully chose to describe as a “hot lesbo” scene in Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate, or more precisely an erotic third-act scene between two lesbian nuns. Echoing the tedious viewpoint expressed last January by Glenn Kenny, Leydon lamented the adolescent associations with the term and more or less said that seasoned, worldly fellows with gray hair and commendable accomplishments should never go there. Whitty said roughly the same, arguing that “thinking like a man” means “not thinking and feeling like a boy.”

They don’t get it. When a truly erotic scene suddenly happens in the midst of an otherwise “decent but no great shakes” film, the blood warms up and the viewer is suddenly awake, alive and attuned. This is what happened when the Sundance audience saw Novitiate at the Eccles last January, and why everyone was talking about “that scene.” Leydon and Whitty can trot out their “tut-tut” and “harumph” routines all they want, but I was there. And if experiencing hormonal surges by way of a film are a mark of adolescent immaturity, and if denial or suppression of same is a mark of seasoned maturity, I’ll take the former, thanks. And if I choose not to mask said surges with harumphy, tut-tut terminology, that’s what many of us would call “acceptance.” Life is short, allow for the occasional gusto moment, let it in, etc.

Final remark to Leydon, Whitty: I didn’t write and direct the third-act lesbian scene in Novitiate — Margaret Betts did. If you have a problem with this sort of thing, take it up with her. I just sat down and watched it and shared what I shared.

If a non-showbiz marriage ends after eight years, it probably means that the parties gave it their all and embraced the right kind of devotional selflessness for five or six or seven years. Marriages usually work out if the husband accepts that the wife is the absolute boss, and if he begins each and every day on his knees, ready and eager to do her bidding. It really is that simple. When marriages don’t work out, it’s usually because the husband has decided to stand tall, look the wife in the eye and speak bluntly. (Never do that!) Or because of infidelity or, as Val Kilmer once said, “not enough steaks in the freezer.” But if a showbiz marriage dies after eight years….well, they did it right for a long while but their careers got in the way. Which is to say the wife’s career surged while the husband’s ran out of gas (i.e., A Star Is Born). Or the other way around (i.e., Chris Pratt and Ana Faris). Another thing that destroys a showbiz marriage is when a movie they’ve made together is critically savaged and then dies at the box-office (i.e., Brad and Angie’s By The Sea). And it never helps if either party has an alcohol issue (i.e., Brad at the time of his split from Angie).

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— Jason (@jasonosia) August 7, 2017

I’m heading out to play badminton so this will have to be quick. It took me forever to see Geremy Jasper‘s Pattycake$ (Fox Searchlight, 8.18), but when I finally did a couple of weeks ago I was knocked over. Yes, it’s pure formula in the mode of Rocky, Hustle & Flow and 8 Mile. But Danielle McDonald is a revelation, or at the very least a superstar of the Jersey ‘burbs. (Even though she hails from Australia.) When someone like myself, a guy who’s repeatedly complained about the spread of burgeoning obesity in our culture and the increasing influence of fatty corporate foodstuffs…when someone like me does a double somersault for Patticake$ I think it means something. Yes, we’ve seen it before but it’s the singer, not the song. All hail Jasper, McDonald and costars Bridget Everett, Siddharth Dhananjay, Mamoudou Athie, the great Cathy Moriarty, McCaul Lombardi and Patrick Brana.