You can tell right away that Matt Johnson‘s Tony (A24, August), an Anthony Bourdain biopic, will assuredly satisfy. Dominic Sessa (The Holdovers) doesn’t look anything like the young Bourdain, and I don’t care because aside from Sessa’s acting chops he clearly has an X-factor thing going on. It’s also obvious that Antonio Banderas‘s performance as Ciro, a restaurant owner and chef who hires Bourdain, will be a pleasurable stand-out.

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The New York Sun is an online, mildly conservative-minded newspaper that also publishes a print edition. I bought a copy inside Grand Central Station a couple of months ago, and really loved turning the pages on my Westport-bound train. It reminded me of reading the Int’l Herald Tribune in Paris cafes bright and early, which I loved doing in the aughts. (The Trib‘s print edition stopped publishing on 10.14.13.)

The Sun‘s print version was revived last year by owner-publisher Dovid Efune.

I haven’t written a piece for print since the mid ’90s, so when editor Tom Teodorczuk asked for a pair of Cannes Film Festival articles (a “Cannes Then & Now” thang plus a wrap-up), I said sure.

The preview piece, which runs longish (25 or so paragraphs), will be online Friday. It’ll be stepped on, of course, but that’s part of the give-and-take. The print edition will appear next week. I’ll be in Cannes, of course, so I’m looking around for an hombre who can buy a couple of copies on my behalf.

Blake Lively‘s reps initiated the discussion that led to yesterday’s announcement of a settlement.

In short, Team Lively folded their case. After 18 months of aggressive press statements and social media back-and-forth from both sides, the Lively guys suddenly saw no upside in arguing the NYC court case that was going to begin later this month.

So they basically said “fuck it…Blake and especially Ryan Reynolds can’t do this any more and so we’re pulling the plug…nothing good for Blake can come from a trial, and particularly the tough grilling that would have come from Baldoni’s attorneys…tough questions and difficult answers that would have been reported and read by everyone.”

However Lively might have answered, the aftermath would have only underlined or intensified Blake’s mean-girl rep and the “everyone hates her…she’s radioactive” industry narrative.

In response to this Baldoni’s surprised attorneys presumably said “really?…uhm, okay, sure, fine. But we’re not coughing up a dime.”

That’s right — nobody paid anyone anything. Not a single Lively or Baldoni dollar was forked over to anyone from the opposing side. The party in a legal dispute who says to the other party “let’s make this go away”…that person is the loser in the matter.

If this isn’t a case of just desserts as far as Lively’s situation is concerned, I don’t know what would be. The joint statement about the settlement doesn’t contain an apology from Baldoni. No dough, no Baldoni mea culpa….nothing.

After months of feeling poked and annoyed by teasers and snippets of Chris Nolan‘s The Odyssey (Universal, 7.17), a full-sized, reasonably engaging trailer finally emerged yesterday.

I kept muttering to myself “where’s the cyclops?….where’s the cyclops?…where’s the cyclops?” The fucker can barely be seen, but it’s obvious he has a shaved head. Was the cyclops born bald or afflicted with a Mike Nichols-like disease? Or did he have to do a straight-razor head-shave every two or three days?

If only Nolan hadn’t chickened out of allowing a big Odyssey premiere to happen at the Cannes Film Festival (which starts next week), but then Nolan always chickens out when it comes to the Cote d’Azur. He’s an excellent filmmaker, but also (no offense) a bit of a pussy. Who makes a film about the WWII-era creation of the atom bomb without showing the bomb’s devastating impact upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

After going dark for a full two days (from the crack of dawn on Sunday, May 3rd, to the early-morning wee hours of Tuesday, May 5th), HE has finally returned to the land of the living and the read.

Since launching in August 2004 HE has endured occasional technical glitches and been out of service for…oh, two or three hours from time to time. But never in my 22 years of online column-filing — 28 years if you count my Mr. Showbiz, Reel.com “Showbiz Confidential” and Movie Poop Shoot chapters — had the column been down for a full day, much less two….Jesus. It felt eerie, strange. I was alone, adrift…voiceless.

But I was never at fault! Starting on or about 4.29.26 malicious attackers (i.e., scurvy criminal sociopaths) began exploiting a CPANEL bug, and massive corruption became evident within hundreds of web servers. CPANEL integration is everywhere….worldwide. Serious as a heart attack.

For two days I whined and begged and pleaded for help from the Liquid Web / Nexcess guys, who were overwhelmed given the huge scale of the corruption. While I managed to speak to two intelligent and lucid fellows (one based in Amsterdam, the other in Uzbekistan), I didn’t find my deliverer — a brilliant Amsterdam-based techie named Sharon K.– until yesterday afternoon. Sharon began a “rooted restoration” of HE and worked all through the New York night. The nightmare finally came to an end around….oh, 2 or 3 in the morning.

HE to A24 rep, send yesterday: “I’m very, VERY keen on seeing Olivia Wilde’s The Invite in Cannes. I’m dead certain there will at least a couple of market screenings. It’s too hot to keep away from European distributors, not to mention champing-at-the-bit European critics. All I want to do is see it there. I’ll be happy to wait for the commercial release to review it. Could you please assist? Thanks.”

Under the old-school aegis of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, Tom Cruise (turning 64 in July) will be costarring with Glen Powell in Top Gun 3 — another totally square, flash-bang, hot-shit, sirloin steak, right down the middle, stiff-saluting, high-velocity, bull’s-eye popcorn pleasure machine…only this time, I’m hearing, with a focus on advanced aerial combat vs. AI and drones.

You know that Cruise or Powell will prove at the end that AI jets are finally no match against live hot-dog pilots.

Only this time, Maverick must die at the end. Preferably William Holden-in-The Bridges of Toko Ri-style…shot by the enemy while trying to defend himself in a muddy ditch. Mud and blood. Cruise and Powell should actually buy the farm together. It could be one of the saddest, greatest death scenes in Hollywood history.

Top Gun: Maverick didn’t have the balls to end this way, but now Cruise has a chance to rectify himself and go out with a big surge of emotional ’80s nostalgia. Respect the heroic potential and stop whoring yourself out for the money, Tom. Pull the plug and go down with the ship.

What are some of the other great all-time death scenes? Gee, I think I sorta kinda explored this topic on 11.29.23….no?

The top five are (a) James Caan getting machine-gunned to death at the toll booth in The Godfather, (b) Warren Oates’ death scream in The Wild Bunch, (c) Brad Pitt’s strangulation death in The Counselor…horrifying but great, (d) Joe Pesci‘s lineoleum-tile head-splat death in Goodfellas and (e) Marlon Brando‘s hacking cough death in Act Three of The Godfather.

Tens of millions of serious movie fans swear by No Country For Old Men (’07), and I’ll bet there are less than 25 humans in the entire cinematic universe who approve of Joel and Ethan Coen’s non-depiction of the death of Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin).

Yes, this is how Moss’s shooting death was handled in Cormac McCarthy’s novel — the Coen’s were simply being loyal to McCarthy’s dramatic choice. The difference, of course, was that McCarthy could easily convey what happened to the reader but in the film it isn’t clear that it’s Brolin lying on that motel-carpet rug. No matter how you slice it, it’s a huge cheat….a WTF! for the ages.

“Uhm, Mr. Deakins? You really are a god among cinematographers, but I gotta tell ya, that pivotal shot in No Country coulda been composed a little better, no offense or anything.”

1. Christopher Walken shooting himself in the head in The Deer Hunter (’78) was full-stop moronic. I hated Michael Cimino‘s idiotic Russian roulette gimmick from the get-go, and have always refused to read anything into it. No lead character in a serious film has ever died for a dumber reason than Walken did in The Deer Hunter. Which I haven’t seen, by the way, since ’78 or thereabouts.”

2. John Hurt chest-burst death in Alien (’79). Except people weren’t reacting to Hurt’s death as much as the realistic physical effects that made the chest-fever scene seem so vivid and traumatic.

3. Rutger Hauer‘s wings-of-a-dove death scene in Blade Runner (’82). One of the saddest, gentlest and most beautiful death scenes in movie history.

4. James Cagney‘s blown-to-kingdom-come death in Raoul Walsh‘s White Heat (’49). HE comment: “Better to go out with a big glorious bang than whimpering and anesthetized inside some padded cell.”

5. A lovesick, house-sized ape plummets 86 stories to his death in King Kong (’33). HE comment: “20 or 30 seconds before he lets go and falls there’s an expression on Kong’s face as he looks up at the planes. The look says “you fucking assholes…I’m in love and all you want to do is kill me…you’re such pricks, all of you…why didn’t you just leave me alone with Faye Wray back on the island? I would’ve taken care of her.”

6. Each and every electric-chair death in The Green Mile elicits HE contempt. As God is my witness I’ll never see that godawful film again.

7. William Holden‘s pointless and easily avoidable death in Sunset Boulevard. Joe Gillis knows that Norma Desmond tends to react over-dramatically about everything, and he knows that she’s obsessively in love with him, and that the odds of her doing something rash if he announces he’s leaving her are high. If Gillis was smart he’d play it cool, leave her a sensible note, take the nice wardrobe and escape while she’s sleeping. And then go to the cops and say, “There’s an eccentric wealthy woman who may do something violent.”

8. Cagney’s dead-drop-flop at the end of William Wellman‘s Public Enemy (’31). HE comment: No comment required.

9. “Son of Brando Death Bubbles” was posted on 5.23.18.

Many years ago I posted a video capture of Marlon Brando‘s air-bubble death scene in Edward Dmytryk‘s The Young Lions. For over a decade I’ve been calling this the most ingenious use of water and oxygen to convey the dying of the light, bar none. No other screen actor had gone there before or has gone there since, at least to my knowledge.

The sane and reasonable Barack Obama was president during the initial posting. At the time only a small community of rightwing loons were taking the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump as a half-serious proposition. Why am I mentioning this? Because Trump announced his candidacy on the same day that I posted “Bluray Brando Bubbles.”

“Brando’s Christian Diestl is in a forest not far from a recently liberated concentration camp, sick of war and madly bashing his rifle against a tree. Then he runs down a hillside and right into the path of Dean Martin‘s Michael Whiteacre and Montgomery Clift‘s Noah Ackerman. Ignoring the fact that Diestl is unarmed, Whiteacre fires several bullets and Diestl tumbles down the hill. He lands near a shallow stream and then splashes into it, face down.

“The camera goes in tight, showing that Brando’s mouth and nose are submerged. A series of rapidly-popping air bubbles begin hitting the surface — pup-pup-pup-pup-pup-pup-pup — and then slower, slower and slower still. And then — this is the mad genius of Brando — two or three seconds after they’ve stopped altogether, a final tiny bubble pops through. There’s something about this that devastates all to hell.”

Official Wiki definition: “The Overton Window is the range of policies or ideas acceptable to the mainstream public at a given time, determining what politicians can support without risking their electoral chances. It shifts over time through social movements and media, moving from unthinkable to mainstream, impacting policy by dictating the boundaries of political feasibility.”

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There was some grousing that Jordan Ruimy‘s 4.23 summary of a recent “private” screening of Luca Guagnino‘s Artificial (Amazon MGM), generally understood to be “The Social Network geared to the AI era,” may have mischaracterized this or that aspect. But not too much, as I understand things.

I’m certainly jazzed about Artificial being ultra-zietgeisty…one of those timely topic flicks emerging as just the right moment.

It’s pretty much guaranteed to debut at the Venice Film Festival four months hence, and will probably open commercially in October or November.

Ruimy: “Pic’s first half mainly follows Ilya Sutskever (Anora‘s Yura Borisov), portrayed as idealistic, slightly naive brain of the operation — the one who truly believes in the bigger picture, much like Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network. However, as the film progresses, the spotlight gradually shifts to Sam Altman (Andrew Garfield, who of course played Saverin in David Fincher‘s 2010 classic).

Garfield’s performance apparently starts out grounded, but becomes larger as the film moves on.

Jason Schwartzman and Cooper Hoffman “seem to be the quiet MVPs of the ensemble, Hoffman playing a co-developer in the film’s second act with Schwartzman playing a disgruntled tech innovator who delivers a monologue to Borisov’s character about the far greater risks of allowing AI to spiral out of control.

As one might expect, Artificial “is kind of two things at once…partly a love letter to Silicon Valley (especially San Francisco) focusing on the power players, and partly a warning about where all of this could be heading.”

Consider a hypothetical and answer honestly: If, God forbid, some kind of violent death was to befall President Donald J. Trump, how would you respond? Outside of deploring any act of murder that takes out any elected official or prominent person, what would be your gut reaction after the dust settles? Deep down, I mean.

We all understand, I think, that a sizable percentage of adults would not be emotionally devastated by Trump being iced. The general reaction would certainly not be like the nationwide response to JFK’s murder.

If you ask me, the sudden death of The Beast would trigger such a great heaving sense of relief and a general “ding-dong, the witch is dead” happiness, even if his death is caused by purposeful violence.

I’m not advocating a sudden terrible finish for the guy, mind. Certainly not on paper.

Bill Maher said last night that if you’re one of those who would rejoice and weep grateful tears at Trump’s out-of-the-blue demise, then you’re not a good person. Okay, guilty — I’m not a good person, and I really, really couldn’t be more at peace with that. I would be at one with the infinite serenity of Siddhartha.

This said, Trump, left to this own devisings, is one of those malevolent German-gene fucks who will live a longish, sprawling life. This is something I know about as I too am a lucky recipient of strong German genes.