Watch Don Rickles Roast Robert De Niro And Martin Scorsese In His Final Project

Vanity Fair offers a piece on the late, great comedian Don Rickles.

The piece covers Don Rickles appearance with Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, his co-star and director of the classic crime film Casino, on his show Dinner With Don. 

Even at a rich 90 years old, Don Rickles was among the sharpest comedians of them all. The legendary insult comic, who died in April, was the king of comebacks, a talent he flaunted in his final project, Dinner with Don. The series, taped last year, features Rickles having a nice dinner with an array of famous comedians, including Amy Poehler, Jimmy Kimmel, and Zach Galifianakis. Of course, that nice dinner comes with a healthy helping of Rickles roasting his guests within an inch of their lives.

In an exclusive clip for Vanity Fair, you can now watch the very first episode of Dinner with Don, featuring the late comedian tucking in with fearsome film duo Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro. The trio go way back to when Scorsese cast Rickles as a fast-talking manager in the 1995 gangster classic Casino. They remained friends over the years, with Scorsese and De Niro joining a star-studded lineup for a Rickles tribute in 2014. The drama duo tapped into their inner insult comics when celebrating the comic, throwing hilarious barbs with Rickles–esque alacrity.

“I loved and admired Don, but I don’t want to say anything nice about him,” De Niro said in a statement to Vanity Fair. “It might piss him off and make him come back from the dead.”

You can read the rest of the piece and watch the video clip via the below link:

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/09/don-rickles-robert-de-niro-martin-scorsese-roast 

You can also read an earlier post on Don Rickles via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2017/04/rip-don-rickles-insult-comic-and-wwii.html 

You can also watch Don Rickles insult Frank Sinatra on the Johnny Carson show via the below link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q5_V9RT8aR8 

The True Story Of The Booze, Bullfights, And Brawls That Inspired Ernest Hemingway’s 'The Sun Also Rises"

 Vanity Fair offers an excerpt from Lesley M. M. Blume's Everybody Behaves Badly: Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises, a book that covers the back story of Hemingway's great novel about expatriates from the 1920s.

Ernest Hemingway’s debut novel gave a voice to the Lost Generation—often by lifting it directly from his affluent expat circle in post-war Paris. A new book by Lesley M. M. Blume recounts the scandalous trip to Pamplona that inspired Jake Barnes, Lady Brett Ashley, Robert Cohn, and the characters from literature’s greatest roman à clef. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/05/the-true-story-of-the-booze-bullfights-and-brawls-that-inspired-ernest-hemingways-the-sun-also-rises

Christopher Hitchens Was An Impossible Act To Follow

The British newspaper the Telegraph offers a piece by Carol Blue, the wife of the late writer and speaker Christopher Hitchens. Blue recalls her husbands final days in the piece.

Onstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.

If you ever saw him at the podium, you may not share Richard Dawkins’s assessment that “he was the greatest orator of our time”, but you will know what I mean – or at least you won’t think, “She would say that, she’s his wife.”
 

Offstage, my husband was an impossible act to follow.
 

At home at one of the raucous, joyous, impromptu eight-hour dinners we often found ourselves hosting, where the table was so crammed with ambassadors, hacks, political dissidents, college students and children that elbows were colliding and it was hard to find the space to put down a glass of wine, my husband would rise to give a toast that could go on for a stirring, spellbinding, hysterically funny 20 minutes of poetry and limerick reciting, a call to arms for a cause, and jokes. “How good it is to be us,” he would say in his perfect voice.
 

My husband is an impossible act to follow. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/bookreviews/9480797/Christopher-Hitchens-an-impossible-act-to-follow.html

You can also read an earlier post on the passing of Christopher Hitchens via the below link:

http://pauldavisoncrime.blogspot.com/2011/12/in-memoriam-christopher-hitchens-1949.html 

Camorra Crime Boss Shot And Killed Leaving Beach South Of Rome

 

The Washington Post offers a piece on the murder of a Camorra crime boss who was killed near Rome.

Authorities were searching Friday for a gunman who shot and killed an organized crime boss clad in a swimsuit as he walked from a beach to join his family at a hotel in a resort town south of Rome.

Gaetano Marino — a boss from the Neapolitan Camorra — was hit by at least four shots to the head and another five or six to his back Thursday afternoon after he left the beach en route to his hotel in Terracina, 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Rome in Lazio region. His family had gone ahead of him back to the hotel, police said.

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/neopolitan-crime-boss-shot-and-killed-leaving-beach-south-of-rome/2012/08/24/3b494aaa-edd8-11e1-b624-99dee49d8d67_story.html

You can also read a Vanity Fair piece on the Camorra via the below link:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/05/naples-mob-paolo-di-lauro-italy