cigarette

Jimmy Fallon once grabbed a cigarette out of Greg Gutfeld’s mouth, crinkled it up and tossed it to the ground, hollering at the Fox News personality, “Those things will kill you!” But it sounds like the place where they were hanging out had a shot at killing them too.

The two late-night hosts were both “wasted” about 15 years ago when he and Fallon met for the first time at an illegal Hell’s Kitchen bar run by a mutual friend — one who looked like “a cross between a Viking and a larger Viking,” the “Gutfeld!” host said Thursday night on NBC’s “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.”

The bar looked “like a place where special-ops forces waterboard terrorists,” he added. “There was no bar … it was a cooler, like the kind you take to a beach.”

“Dude, you’re not making this up,” Fallon said. “I totally know what you’re talking about. … I think I remember bringing beer into the bar and then him charging me for my own beer.”

The men’s magazine editor-turned-satirist recalled that their mutual friend operated that way. “He is very cheap, but if you want someone dead, he’ll do it.”

So he walks into the illegal bar with his buddy Andy Levy after the two had just finished taping something — perhaps “Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld” — and Fallon sees him and then tackles him, he said, “like a giant golden retriever.” Then the NBC host grabs Andy and the two fall to the ground wrestling. So Gutfeld decides it’s a good time to spark up a cigarette.

But Fallon leaps up, rips it out of his mouth and shouts the aforementioned you’re-gonna-die warning. “I go … ‘Dude, I’m not rich. You’re rich,’” Gutfeld said. “Cigarettes are expensive in New York City.”

He said Fallon’s face suddenly changed to one of sadness. “And then you left.”

Five minutes later, the “Saturday Night Live” alumnus came back toting a fresh pack of Parliaments, which he handed to the co-host of “The Five.”

“And I go, ‘That was really sweet. You want me to die.’”

Gutfeld, who was on “The Tonight Show” to promote a new game show he’s hosting, then remembered the group piling into Fallon’s car and tooling around to another bar that was, well, in the same building. “We literally drove from one door to another door … I think you wanted to impress that you had a driver.”

These are the things, apparently, that happen to the rich.

“Yeah!” Fallon said. “We had a nice ride, right?”

A nice ride indeed. Short, but nice. Meanwhile, over on “Gutfeld,” fill-in host Kat Timpf was talking about her erstwhile boss taking two full days off work to get a colonoscopy. Oh, how times have changed.

And the tables have indeed turned quite a bit in the last 15 years: “Gutfeld!,” which airs on Fox News at 7 p.m. local time and 10 p.m. Eastern and riffs on politics and the news of the day, is leading the nighttime chat show pack with — according to LateNighter — 3.289 million viewers in the second quarter and 238,000 in the advertiser-coveted demographic of those ages 18 to 49.

Fallon’s “Tonight Show” drew only 1.19 million viewers in the second quarter with 157,000 in the demo. That trails Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show,” which has a year to go before cancellation and leads the 11:35 p.m. broadcast pack with 2.42 million viewers and 219,000 in the demo in the second quarter, followed by “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” with 1.77 million viewers and 220,000 in the demo.

We know from headlines that small-scale technologies such as drones have transformed war, most urgently affecting Ukraine’s ability to stay in a bruising battle for its existence against Russia. But it’s done the same for covering war too, especially the kind of fleet, up-close dispatch of which we can now say Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov is a master.

The Associated Press correspondent’s follow-up to his harrowing, Oscar-winning “20 Days in Mariupol,” which rendered the first weeks of Russia’s invasion inside a city under siege, is another intimate perspective on his country’s devastation. But this time it’s from the frontlines of Ukraine’s 2023 counteroffensive, specifically one brigade’s nightmarish trek to liberate a Russian-occupied town. In its heart-stopping intimacy — courtesy of helmet-cams, drones and the foxhole connection between citizen soldier and countryman journalist — “2000 Meters to Andriivka” is a war chronicle like no other.

Right away, Chernov introduces us to war’s chaos with bodycam footage from a Ukrainian soldier named Piro. It’s a dugout POV capturing how a lull marked by jokes and cigarettes can quickly become enemy fire, screaming and artillery shells flying. A retreat is abandoned when the platoon’s armored carrier gets stuck. In the ensuing scramble, comrades are hit and we hear a resigned, “That’s it for me.” Suddenly this view feels less like one from a trench but a grave.

No wonder Chernov’s measured narration sounds bleaker. His speculative dread from “Mariupol” has been replaced by a fact-driven weariness. He and AP colleague Alex Babenko press on, embedding themselves in a battalion tasked with a one-mile push to retake the town of Andriivka near a Russian stronghold. The path, however, is a thin ribbon of forest hiding Russians in trenches, fortified on each side by open minefields.

Also, the designation “forest” seems generous: The gnarled and stripped trees look broken, suggesting an open wasteland instead of a battleground that could provide cover. They’ve clearly already seen plenty of destruction, and by the end of the film, they’ll have seen more. Chernov tells us that one soldier described this unrecognizable homeland to him as like “landing on a planet where everything is trying to kill you.”

The first-person footage as the group advances is breathless and dense with gunfire, yelling and the sense that each inch will be hard-won on the way to planting that Ukrainian flag in Andriivka, which, from drone shots, already looks decimated. (The film is broken into chapters indicating meters gained.) “I came to fight, not to serve,” says this brigade’s war dog of a leader, a former warehouse worker named Fedya who at one point is shot but makes his way back to the mission after being evacuated for treatment.

Still, during long foxhole waits, when the only visible smoke is from a cigarette, Chernov’s gentle off-camera queries to Fedya’s men (ranging from the hopelessly young to a 40-something new grandfather) elicit touching optimism for a return to normal life: a shower, a job, friendly rivalries over trivial matters, the chance to smoke less, to fix a toilet back home, to rebuild. Then Chernov’s voiceover comes in for the softly spoken hammer-blow peek into the future: which of these guys will die in later battles or perhaps never be found. This is gutting stuff.

There’s never been as immersive a war documentary as “2000 Meters in Andriivka,” cleaving as it does to the swings between peril and blessed boredom, mixing overhead shots (including a suicide drone’s vantage) and underground views like a dystopian saga. War is hell, but Ukraine’s survival is paramount. The senselessness, however, seems a constant. “Why are you here?” a Ukrainian soldier barks at a captured Russian, who mutters back, “I don’t know why we’re here.”