Before before she flew to Cannes on Sunday, Variety‘s Anne Thompson got Michael Moore on the phone to talk about the early-bird attacks on Sicko, his health-care doc that will screen in Cannes within a few days, and particularly Moore having taken ailing workers from Ground Zero in Manhattan to Cuba for free medical treatments. Here’s Fred Thompson‘s National Review attack piece. Here’s Moore’s official responses so far, and a bunch of links besides.

Paulie Walnuts‘ adoptive mom died on The Sopranos the night before last, and what else? A.J. got into some pronounced gangster action and “Christophuh” upped the ante on his end, but storm clouds aren’t assembling overhead and nothing is really happening in any kind of knockout-punch way, and it’s looking more and more like the Big Finale won’t actually materialize.
L.A. Times writer Mary McNamara has written that “the entire [final] season has seemed pure prologue, spotlighting one force, then another, which may or may not be the agent of Tony’s doom,” and also that “the rumor is that there will be no final cataclysmic event.” It’s almost as if Sopranos creator and producer David Chase is getting off on not delivering the whopping chest-punch thing that the fans have been waiting for. The season hasn’t ended so it’s too early to call him obstinate and perverse, but…

Something sudden and surprising did happen. My Lufthansa flight from JFK — due to leave the ground last night at 8 pm, but delayed an hour — arrived a little late in Munich, and I missed my connecting flight to Nice, which I had only a half-hour to get to. I was one of the first passengers off the plane and I ran through the airport like Peyton Manning, but the passport line and the re-scanning security process slowed things down considerably.

The only decent option is to take a short flight to Basel, Switzerland, and then I’ll have to get off and grab another jet (on another airline) to Nice, getting me there around 5 pm. The Cannes press office is open until 8 pm, however, so at least I’ll get myself credentialed so I can make the first screening tomorrow morning at 8:30.
The first social function of the festival happens tonight at La Pizza, a big noisy restaurant that serves great pizza and offers a view of the Cannes marina. I’m meeting the Toronto Star‘s Peter Howell, Variety‘s Anne Thompson, Toronto Film Festival communcations chief Andrea Grau, Santa Barbara Film Festival director Roger Durling, and the Hollywood Reporter‘s Gregg Goldstein for food and drink at 7:30.