In his 7.15 review of Morgan Neville‘s Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain (opening Friday), Wall Street Journal critic Joe Morgenstern notes that the film “has been criticized for what some see as a sexist and reductionist implication that Bourdain’s failed relationship with his last girlfriend, the Italian actress and filmmaker Asia Argento, was the cause of his suicide.

“Argento figures significantly toward the end of the film, as she did in its subject’s life,” Morgenstern writes. “But she’s a latecomer in a documentary that evokes, and makes sense of, the full sweep of Anthony Bourdain’s gifts, charms, successive careers, sustaining passions and bedeviling obsessions. A film of fitting energy and complexity, it’s a stirring account of an astonishing life.”

I’m sorry but that’s just not honest or true. After seeing Neville’s film a month ago I tried to explain the Bourdain suicide thing as plainly as possible (6.16). Here it is again for good measure:

“The first 80 to 90 minutes of Roadrunner are just okay. At times they almost feel a bit boring. But during the final 30 or 40 minutes the film dives into the ‘what happened during the final few weeks of Bourdain’s life, and why did he fucking hang himself?’ section.

“By the end the viewer has been left with a clear impression that Bourdain’s relationship with the notoriously edgy and prickly Asia Argento was a giddy, obsessive thing that intensified Bourdain’s hot plate and probably jarred his sense of emotional equilibrium.

“I’m not saying that Argento ‘killed’ him in some way — Bourdain sadly did that all to himself — but she definitely shook him up and rattled his composure and apparently brought him to the edge of something or other.

“Bourdain was a moody, free-associating, nakedly honest fellow with a tendency to occasionally fall into caves of depression, and it appears that he swan-dove into the Argento relationship without the slightest sense of measured, step-by-step gradualism. Frank Sinatra once sang “let’s take it nice and easy…it’s gonna be so easy.” Bourdain definitely didn’t do that with Argento.

“There’s a stocky guy from Bourdain’s camera crew who tells Neville that Anthony was ‘a lifelong addictive personality, [and at the end he was] addicted to another person [i.e., Argento]. He didn’t understand he would drive her away if he didn’t stop talking about [how great she was]…you could see her pulling back and he just wouldn’t stop.’

“So in a way Bourdain was apparently smothering Argento to some extent, and so just before his death she performed that public affair in Rome with Hugo Clement. Her apparent intention was to say to Bourdain ‘back off, don’t smother me, let me be free.’ She and Bourdain had an open relationship, but if Argento had been a tad more considerate she would have indulged herself with Clement more discreetly.

In the doc, Parts Unknown director Michael Steed says he checked on Bourdain after the Argento-Clement photos appeared online, and that Bourdain was not cool about it, mentioning that “a little fucking discretion” would have been nice on Argento’s part.

He meant that if you have an open relationship you fuck around in the shadows — you don’t push it in your partner’s face.

Argento didn’t push Bourdain off the cliff — he jumped of his own accord. But had it not been for their relationship and his extreme immersion in that bond, Bourdain might be alive today. Maybe. Who knows? Possibly. This is definitely what the film leaves you with.

All of a sudden there’s a surge of Cannes oogah-boogah, generated by three recently-screened titles. Things are happening, the communal blood is up, buzz is buzzin’, etc.

The craziest of the three is Julia Ducournau‘s Titane, an extreme wackazoid auto-erotic midnight movie (“very violent”) made for critics who love embracing the outer behavioral limits as a way of asserting their anti-bourgeois credentials.

The most quietly absorbing and perhaps the saddest and most compelling is Asghar Farhadi‘s A Hero, a reportedly subtle, solemn and very well made Iran-based drama about an indebted man, on a brief furlough from prison, trying to do the right thing only to suffer the ravages of social media.

And an impressive blend of scurviness, small-town desperation and humanist compassion is reportedly delivered by Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket, a small-time loser drama about an aged-out porn star (Simon Rex) flopping on his mother’s couch in Texas City, Texas (an oil-refinery suburb of Galveston) as he tries to somehow regenerate his life by finding a hot young lassie who might be interested in a porn career and may have the stuff that will strike sparks with the Los Angeles porn industry

Which of these films will most likely penetrate the thick gelatinous membrane of the American moviegoing consciousness (or at least movie-watching distraction)…which show will animate the attention span or activate the den of drooping cultural depression?

Obviously Baker’s Red Rocket (the term, by the way, is slang for a dog’s erection) because it’s American and involves banal oozy sex and general small-town, what-the-fuck depravity — familiar topics for many younger Americans these days.

Farhadi’s A Hero will travel with Farhadi fans (and that would include yours truly) and that in itself should suffice.

And Ducournau’s Titane is obviously made for the wackos and weirdos…have at it!

Earlier today on Twitter PopCulture.com staff writer Daniel S. Levine (@dsl899) enthused about Criterion’s recently released Bluray of Frank Borzage‘s History Is Made At Night (’37). The film is proudly bannered as a restored 4K digital transfer. Levine called it “great.”

What this Bluray seems to provide, based on frame captures, is another lovingly restored grainstorm experience — a hazy, soft-focused relation of Criterion’s Bluray of The Awful Truth (released on 4.7.18). Borzage’s 1937 film probably looks as good as it ever will on Bluray, agreed, but it’s certainly not the stuff of profound visual transportation. Not in my book, it isn’t.

So I asked Levine what exactly is so “great” about the Criterion Bluray in question. Not only did he decline to reply, but he blocked me.

If I was Levine I would’ve manned up and said something like “this is the most lusciously rendered version of this classic Borzage film ever savored in HD…the heavy-mosquito-swamp atmosphere is not a problem but a beautifully detailed, other-worldly immersion…Jean Arthur, Charles Boyer and Colin Clive covered in hundreds of trillions of micro-mosquitoes…it’s glorious!”

Five days ago HE commenter “hupto” posted an anecdote about the aesthetic preferences of younger action audiences (if that’s not a contradiction in terms) and an overheard response to a 6.9.12 double-bill showing of Goldfinger and Thunderball at the Aero in Santa Monica.

Goldfinger had just ended and the author was on his way up the lobby stairs to the men’s room when he heard a young guy complaining to his girlfriend about how slow and boring Goldfinger was. The submissive girlfriend asked if they’d be staying for Thunderball and the guy replied “hell no!”

This young sophisticate had apparently been persuaded that the ’60s James Bond / Sean Connery films delivered action highs along 21st Century lines (the idiotic Kingsman flicks, the Fast and Furious franchise, etc.). I recognize how the pacing of Goldfinger could seem, to a cinematic knuckle-dragger, a bit slow and steady, and that this 1964 Guy Hamilton film (my third favorite Connery after From Russia With Love and Dr. No) is more invested in character and dialogue than your average teenager or 20something of today is used to.

Nonetheless I found this anecdote hugely depressing.

There are tens of millions of sensible left-center moderates like myself who despise cancel culture, and certainly no one who loathes it more than myself. I am nonetheless sickened and disgusted by Mel Gibson having apparently saluted Donald Trump as he arrived at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC 264) event two nights ago.

I’m not saying Gibson should be confined to the same doghouse that became his principal dwelling after his racist remarks were reported following a 2006 DUI bust, but saluting that rancid, bloated sociopath and would-be destroyer of democracy is intolerable.

Serious question to Cannes-based Jordan Ruimy: “Given the mostly encouraging reviews for Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch so far (an 88% Metacritic rating) and no other film doing as well with the critics so far, is it fair to suggest that Dispatch seems likely to emerge as a prime contender for the Palme d’Or?

The five biggies (and correct me if I’m wrong) are The French Dispatch, Drive My Car, Benedetta, Compartment #9 and Val.”

Ruimy to HE: “Dispatch is minor Anderson.”

HE to Ruimy: “Not as good as Grand Budapest Hotel?”

Ruimy to HE: “Hell no.”

The scene in Cannes as the end-credits wrap following the world premiere of THE FRENCH DISPATCH, as Wes Anderson-y a movie as any… pic.twitter.com/qmShSnzqfc

— Scott Feinberg @ Cannes (@ScottFeinberg) July 12, 2021

HE to Ruimy: “Okay.”

Ruimy to HE: “[David] Ehrlich didn’t even like it.”

HE to Ruimy: “I was influenced by Peter Debruge‘s Variety rave…so he’s just capitulating to the underlying desire to praise films because it feels good or something?”

Ruimy to HE: “I think a lot of critics are doing that. Cannes ’21 is being celebrated as the reemergence of cinema. There’s a celebratory mood in the air here.”

HE to Ruimy: “So there are no real HOTTIES so far…not really. No big consensus films.”

Ruimy to HE: “Benedetta is too shocking for [some]. I guess Dispatch is the de facto Oscar movie here so far, but it’s very minor. The photography is stunning, but the anthology aspect of it does a major disservice to Anderson’s style. He works better with a large tableaux and a two-hour narrative.”

I think we’ve all understood for the last 10 to 15 years and certainly since the pandemic hit that the lore and religiosity of film…the faith and investment and occasional wonder of movies as it used to exist in the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s and even the early aughts is over…a few welcome exceptions aside, the beating heart of movies as it used to be is in permanent cardiac arrest…double kaput and triple fucking finito.

But just to be sure that we all understand this without the slightest trace of ambiguity, former Paramount and 20th Century Fox honcho Barry Diller has repeated the death mantra in so many words:

“The movie business is over,” Diller said in an exclusive interview with NPR’s David Goura during the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference. “The movie business as before is finished and will never come back.”

Diller’s remarks sounds better if you add the “f” word so here they are again, augmented: “The movie business that we used to know is fucking over. It’s fucking finished and will never fucking come back.”

“There used to be a whole run-up,” Diller said, remembering how much time, energy and money studios invested in distribution and publicity campaigns. The goal, he said, was to generate sustained excitement and enthusiasm for new movies. “That’s finished,” he said. “I used to be in the movie business where you made something really because you cared about it,” he said, noting that popular reception mattered more than anything else.

Best Diller quote: “These streaming services have been making something that they call ‘movies.’ They ain’t movies. They are some weird algorithmic process that has created things that last 100 minutes or so.” The definition of “movie,” he said, “is in such transition that it doesn’t mean anything right now.”