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      Seth Meyers Slams Trump’s $50 Million Fund-raiser

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      Meyers said the dinner menu at a Palm Beach campaign event for Donald Trump “had so many foreign words, I’m surprised he didn’t have it deported.” Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Not One to Exaggerate’Donald Trump made an appearance at a campaign fund-raiser held by a billionaire donor, John Paulson, in his Palm Beach home on Saturday. The Trump campaign said it raised more than $50 million.The former first lady Melania Trump was also in attendance, where, Seth Meyers joked, “she finally got to meet an actual billionaire.”“And just to give you an idea of how elite this fund-raiser was, check out the food they served: ‘The evening’s menu included an endive and frisée salad, filet au poivre, and pavlova with fresh berries for dessert.’ That menu had so many foreign words, I’m surprised he didn’t have it deported.” — SETH MEYERS“Trump claims he raked in $50 million Saturday night, which seems high, but he’s not one to exaggerate.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“While speaking at his Palm Beach fund-raiser over the weekend, former President Trump complained that immigrants aren’t coming to the U.S. from ‘nice’ countries like Denmark, Switzerland or Norway. And then, at the end, added, ‘Oh, Slovenia!’” — SETH MEYERS“Maybe because people don’t tend to flee one of the happiest countries on Earth.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Whenever Trump says ‘nice,’ he means ‘white.’” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Eclipse Edition)“The sun and the moon did the thing that everyone’s been saying they were going to do for centuries now. The path got totalitied, and now both planets will go back to years of ignoring each other before they inevitably hook up again. Textbook toxic relationship.” — JON STEWART“It was quite a sight, and if you’re excited about the eclipse and the sky turning totally black, wait ’til you hear about nighttime.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yeah, all the news stations had nonstop coverage, but I think CNN messed up by not having Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper count down to the blackout while getting blacked out.” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, this is the day you don’t look directly at the sun. Or as one guy put it, [imitating Trump] ‘It’s very easy to do.’” — JIMMY FALLON“And if you missed the eclipse, don’t worry; there are currently two billion videos of it on Instagram.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJon Stewart laid into American leaders for continuing to support Israel on Monday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightConan O’Brien, who had a brief stint as the “Tonight Show” host almost 15 years ago, will return as a guest on Tuesday.Also, Check This OutThe final episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” found Larry David on trial.John Johnson/HBOThe series finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” found Larry David in familiar territory. More

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      Jeff Schaffer and Susie Essman on the ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Finale

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      In an interview, Jeff Schaffer and Susie Essman discuss why Larry David revived the polarizing “Seinfeld” finale. “We know what you thought of that, and we don’t care,” Schaffer said.With a parade of callbacks and a twist a quarter-century in the making, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the HBO series starring Larry David as a heightened version of himself, ended its 20-plus-year run on Sunday.The final episode, which referenced the polarizing 1998 finale of “Seinfeld,” David’s previous show, was replete with the usual out-of-bounds commentary and cranky fixation on minutiae; David and his co-stars — Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman, J.B. Smoove, Richard Lewis — do not, by creative mandate, change. (“I’m 76 years old, and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life,” David tells a child in the episode, in the opposite of a teachable moment.) In real life, though, the cast are longtime friends, and have weathered much together, including the death of Lewis, who played himself, in February.On Monday, Jeff Schaffer, the longtime executive producer and director, and Essman — who portrayed Susie Greene, the scene-stealing, expletive-hurling wife of David’s manager (Garlin) — got together for a post-mortem video interview about the series that, they said, changed their lives. Essman was in her home in New York, and Schaffer, who got his start as a writer on “Seinfeld,” was in the “Curb” offices in Los Angeles, where a sign on the wall behind him, hanging askew, read: “No defecation please.” (It was a prop from Latte Larry’s, the “spite store” that David’s character opened to malign a neighboring coffee shop, Schaffer said. “And it’s a sentiment I feel is as true now as it was then.”)Essman and Schaffer spoke about filming their final moments with Lewis, how the characters could live on, and why the “Seinfeld” finale idea led to the end of the series. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When did you conceive of the finale?JEFF SCHAFFER It was July of ’22. We were writing the season — we weren’t that far — and we knew that we were starting with Georgia. [In the season premiere, David’s character gets arrested for giving a woman water while she waits to vote in defiance of a local election law.] When you start with a crime, one of the possibilities is a trial. So that was floating around, one of the many paths that we could go down.And we were just talking about a little story, of Larry not wanting to be involved in a kid’s lesson. We talk out the scene and distill it down to a few lines. In character, he said, “I’m 75 years old, I’ve never learned a thing in my life.” And that was the moment for us where we said, “Hold on a second, what if we just blew that up and just told everybody: ‘Larry’s never learned his lesson,’ and just did the ‘Seinfeld’ trial again?” Just owned it. Like, we know what you thought of that, and we don’t care. We’ve learned nothing. We’re going right at it. We’re steering the Titanic right back at the iceberg.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Filmmakers Love to Adapt Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley

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      In the new series and in five previous movies, the character serves as a blank slate to examine the mores and concerns of the time.Tom Ripley’s background is always sketchy. Patricia Highsmith provides only a few rudimentary details in the first few chapters of “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” her 1955 novel that kicked off a series of five books about the elusive con artist. Tom lives in New York, in near-destitute circumstances. He has some friends — acquaintances, really — whom he hates, mentally labeling them “the riffraff, the vulgarians, the slobs.” He wants nothing more than to be rid of them, and after the first few chapters, he succeeds. He receives money from an aunt in Boston; she raised him after his parents drowned in the harbor there. He hates her, too.When we meet Tom, he has been committing check fraud through the mail, amassing payments in the amount of $1,863.14 that he does not plan to cash. The con job was, he thinks, “no more than a practical joke, really. Good clean sport.” He’ll destroy the checks before boarding the ship that will take him to Europe, where he’s tasked with hunting down Dickie Greenleaf, the scion of a shipbuilding mogul who’s been wasting time, and money, in Italy.The curious thing about these features of Tom Ripley’s life is that they add up to nothing. Highsmith structures them as telling details, the kinds of specifics that writers employ like shorthand to build a person in the reader’s mind. But in fact, we get very little from them, and at every turn our attempts to wrap our heads around this character are rebuffed. You might think Tom is a man of taste and talent, except he doesn’t exhibit any real taste, and the talent seems limited to a knack for forgery and impersonation. You might think he’s a malevolent mastermind seeking to bilk a wealthy family of their fortune, but he’s really just pathetic, far more concerned with making sure the Greenleafs view him as a man of their own social class. Unfortunately, he’s charmless.Tom is not particularly handsome, clever or well-connected. He’s just miserable, but he doesn’t have much in the way of plans, or goals, beyond getting away from where he is.This does not make Tom Ripley a screen-ready hero. He’s not even really a strong template for an antihero. But that has not stopped filmmakers from trying. Five films and now a Netflix series, starring a parade of alluring actors, have tried out various angles on the Ripley question. Who is this guy, really? A criminal? A climber? A sociopath? A thief?Alain Delon in “Purple Noon,” which offers a French existentialist take on the character.Criterion CollectionWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Series Finale Wraps Up Like ‘Seinfeld’: Review

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      Larry David’s HBO comedy ended on Sunday after 12 seasons. Longtime fans might have noticed similarities with a certain earlier sitcom.After 12 seasons, spread across 25 years, the HBO comedy staple “Curb Your Enthusiasm” ends with an episode that sees Larry David put on trial. Witness after witness testifies to Larry’s lifetime of selfish and antisocial behavior. The jury finds him guilty, of course.Then he gets out of jail on a technicality and goes home. Because that’s the only kind of ending that makes sense in “Curb”-world.In fact, even former “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fans who hadn’t watched the show in years — but dropped back in for the finale — probably could have predicted how it was going to end. David (the creator, not the character) has never varied much from the formula he introduced on HBO back in 2000, when he first started telling darkly farcical, often cringe-inducing stories about the twists and turns of modern manners, featuring a fictionalized, exaggerated version of himself: a ridiculously rich crank, living off the fortune he made cocreating the sitcom “Seinfeld.”The final episode pays off a story line that had run through the final season since the premiere, when Larry (the character, not the creator), gave an old acquaintance named Auntie Rae Black (Ellia English) a bottle of water while she was waiting in line to vote in Atlanta, in violation of a Georgia election law.It also validated the popular theory that the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” finale would reflect or at least reference the polarizing final episode of “Seinfeld,” which David wrote. With its trial setting, callbacks to earlier episodes and cameos from memorable past guest stars, the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” finale mirrored the basic premise of the “Seinfeld” one, with a few key tweaks, and Jerry Seinfeld played a key role.In the “Seinfeld” finale, the main characters were put on trial for violating a Good Samaritan law by failing to help a person in need. In the “Curb” finale, Larry is on trial for being a Good Samaritan; the voting line incident had made him a folk hero to voting rights advocates. But in the world of the show, the words “hero” and “Larry David” couldn’t remain closely linked for long — it causes too much cognitive dissonance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best True Crime to Stream: Scams, Schemes and Costly Lies

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      Four picks across television, film and podcast that depict the art of the con.There are so many true crime offerings dedicated to scams, frauds and con artists that it can be overwhelming. Many of these stories are astonishing and worthy of attention, whether the deceptions are financial, medical, romantic or otherwise. Often most surprising is how relatively painless it seems to lay such traps, and how many people, regardless of personal circumstances, take the bait.Here are four picks across television, film and podcast that stand out, all of which underscore what can unfold when a hunger for money, power or prestige is put above all else.Documentary Film“Operation Varsity Blues: The College Admissions Scandal”With college acceptance season upon us, it seems appropriate to revisit one of the most outrageous education scandals in recent years: a $25 million bribery scheme that prompted a federal investigation called Operation Varsity Blues. The mastermind behind it was William Singer, a basketball coach turned college admissions counselor who ran a criminal enterprise that opened a fraudulent path for wealthy people to have their children accepted by elite universities under the guise that they had earned entry based on academic and extracurricular excellence. Test scores were doctored, for example, and athletic credentials were fabricated in ludicrous ways.Dozens of powerful people were accused and arrested, most famously the actresses Felicity Huffman and Lori Loughlin, who both served time in prison.In this 2021 film, the director Chris Smith puts a fresh spin on re-enactments, long the life blood of true crime television and films, by recreating full scenes and pulling dialogue directly from wiretaps. Matthew Modine (“Stranger Things,” “Oppenheimer”), who plays Singer, and other actors bring it all to life.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Grey Gardens’ and Billy Joel in Concert

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      TCM airs the cult classic 1975 documentary, and Joel airs his first broadcast concert at Madison Square Garden.For those who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, April 8-14. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTHE GREEN MILE (1999) 7 p.m. on AMC. Based on the 1999 Stephen King novel of the same name, this three-hour-plus film tells a somber tale of the death row warden Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) who meets an enigmatic inmate, John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan) — a gentle giant with healing powers that border on the supernatural.ELTON JOHN & BERNIE TAUPIN: THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS GERSHWIN PRIZE FOR POPULAR SONG TRIBUTE CONCERT 8 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). The songwriting duo of Elton John and Bernie Taupin are the recipients of the 2024 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, awarded by the Library of Congress. To honor their achievements, a tribute concert held in Washington D.C. will be held with performances by Metallica, Garth Brooks, Annie Lennox, Joni Mitchell — last year’s honoree — and more.TuesdayFrom left, Ke Huy Quan, Sean Astin, Josh Brolin, Corey Feldman and Jeff Cohen in “The Goonies.”Warner Bros.THE GOONIES (1985) 6 p.m. on E! When a band of misfit neighborhood kids finds a treasure map to the fabled treasure of an infamous pirate known as One-Eyed Willy, a zany adventure unfolds as they race to find gold to save their homes from foreclosure. Will the Goonies find what they’ve been searching for before the Fratellis, a crime family hot on their tail, get their grubby mitts on the priceless jewels? Will their coastal town be saved from destruction? Faced with treacherous traps, secret caves and no shortage of nail-biting moments, repeat after me: “Goonies never say die!”WednesdaySalvatore Corsitto, left, and Marlon Brando, in “The Godfather.”Paramount PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Cole Brings Plenty, ’1923’ Actor, Is Found Dead

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      Mr. Brings Plenty, 27, was found dead in Kansas days after his family reported him missing. Officials did not provide a cause of death.Cole Brings Plenty, an actor in the television series “1923,” was found dead on Friday in Kansas after his family reported him missing earlier in the week, officials said.The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement that its deputies had found Mr. Brings Plenty, 27, in a wooded area in Johnson County, which borders Missouri.The deputies had been responding to a report of an unoccupied vehicle and found him dead in an area away from it, the statement said. The office did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Brings Plenty, who identified himself as Mnicoujou Lakota on Instagram, played Pete Plenty Clouds, a Native American sheepherder, in the television show “1923,” a prequel to “Yellowstone.” The show depicts abuse toward Native American children in boarding schools established or supported by the government.In May 2023, Mr. Brings Plenty and his uncle Mo Brings Plenty visited the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in Washington to talk about the boarding schools and other issues affecting Native Americans.Mr. Brings Plenty’s acting credits also include the Western television shows “Into the Wild Frontier” and “The Tall Tales of Jim Bridger,” according to IMDb, the entertainment database. He was a student at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan.Mr. Brings Plenty’s father, Joe Brings Plenty Sr., confirmed his son’s death in a statement shared by a family spokeswoman, Michelle Shining Elk.“We would also like to thank everyone who came to walk beside us as we searched for my son and provided the resources we needed to expand our search areas,” Mr. Brings Plenty Sr. said in the statement.Mo Brings Plenty shared a missing person’s poster on social media that said his nephew went missing on March 31 and had missed an appointment with his agent, which was “uncharacteristic.”The poster said that Mr. Brings Plenty had last been seen in Lawrence, Kan.The Lawrence Police Department said in a statement that it had submitted an affidavit for the arrest of Mr. Brings Plenty after the police identified him as a suspect in a case of domestic violence that happened on the morning of March 31.The police said that officers had responded to a woman screaming for help in an apartment in Lawrence and that the suspect had fled before officers arrived.“This incident involves allegations of domestic violence, which limits the amount of information we can share to protect the victim,” the statement said.The police said that Mr. Brings Plenty’s family had contacted them, expressed concern and reported him as a missing person. Mr. Brings Plenty was found about 28 miles southeast of Lawrence. More

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      Kristen Wiig Hosts ‘SNL’ With Help From a Few Famous Friends

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      Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling, Paul Rudd, Jon Hamm, Martin Short, Paula Pell, Fred Armisen and Will Forte all turned out to help induct Wiig into the show’s Five-Timers Club.Despite her claim that her fifth time hosting “Saturday Night Live” would not be celebrated with a parade of celebrity guests and other “S.N.L.” alums wishing her well, Kristen Wiig turned her opening monologue into just that as she marked this milestone with help from Paul Rudd, Matt Damon, Ryan Gosling and other famous pals.Wiig, an “S.N.L.” cast member from 2005 to 2012 who was joined on this weekend’s broadcast by the musical guest Raye, began by saying hello to members of the house band. Before she could get much further, she was interrupted by Rudd, who sat in the audience wearing the jacket he received as a member of the show’s hallowed Five-Timers Club.Rudd told Wiig he had “heard a rumor that you might be doing one of those five-timers sketches featuring awesome celebrity cameos.”“So is there, like, a script or something I could look at for that?” he asked.Wiig replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we’re doing one of those.”But she was halted again by Paula Pell, the “Girls5eva” star and former “S.N.L.” writer. She told Wiig that the jackets were not all that special anymore, adding, “They basically hand those out to everybody like free maxi pads.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More