I won’t pretend to have ever been the biggest fan of Chicago born comic Bernie Mac but I liked him in everything I ever saw him in and certainly can’t say I saw this coming. After a brief bout with pneumonia Bernie Mac passed away in a Chicago hospital earlier today. The comedian also suffered from a chronic tissue inflamation condition but early reports are that the tissue condition was not related to this illness. He was only fifty.
Some very sad news here, passed out way by regular Twitch reader grozilla. French special effects artist Benoit Lestang died over the weekend, reportedly by suicide. And while you may not know Lestang’s name you certainly know his work. He was the lead effects artist on Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs and other notable porjects on his extensive resume include Tell No One, City of Lost Children, Sheitan, Babyblood, Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Manderlay, Arsene Lupin and many, many more. Lestang was one of the leading effects men in the world and his influence will be missed.
There really aren’t a lot of people that the term ‘legendary’ can legitimately be applied to but Stan Winston was one of them. The man was a god amongst effects men, creating models and creatures for countless films that have filled my dreams since I was just a kid. Aliens. Terminator. Jurassic Park. Edward Scissorhands. All Stan Winston. And now the man is gone, having passed away from cancer yesterday evening. We’ll miss you.
I am virtually rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, so bare with me, when I see an article in Variety written by our friend Grady Hendrix of Kaiju Shakedown that apparently indy, Asian and horror label Tartan US has gone out of business. This is sad news for everyone. This basically means that they are selling off all their assets, including their library of 101 films. Now let’s hope that a good company picks up those titles, please not the Weinsteins, and continues where they left off.
This sucks ass, if I may be so blunt, and it’s always sad to see companies that you like and have done business with go the way of the Do Do. Tartan UK were my introduction to Asian and European films back in the day and I have been buying titles from them ever since. Let’s hope that Tartan UK is standing on stronger legs and it seems to be so as they’ve just announced their next wave of Blu Ray discs, that include Paranoid Park, I’m A Cyborg, The Proposition, Sky Blue, Funny Games U.S., A Tale of Two Sisters, P2 and Lady Vengeance.
Screen legend Charlton Heston passed away in his home last night. He was 84.
Heston starred in the films Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments and El Cid. He also starred in iconic sci-fi films such as the 1971 version of the novel I Am Legend, The Omega Man, and Soylent Green and Planet of the Apes, delivering some of cinemas most memorable lines, “Soylent Green is people!” and “Damn you. Damn you all to hell!”
He will be missed.
If you love great science fiction, then you definitely love the work of Arthur C. Clarke, and you surely love Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The sci-fi legend has died in his adopted home Sri Lanka. Clarke, who had been fighting post-polio syndrome for a long time, suffered breathing problems.
At this point, we have to also wonder if the David Fincher/Morgan Freeman project, the film adaptation of Clarke’s Rendezvous With Rama, is ever going to get off ground. The last news we had about it was late last year when Freeman assured us that the pre-production was still on, except it’s taking a bit more time. IMDB lists it as to be released in 2009. From the look of things, with Fincher busy with a million other stuff, it could likely be released in 2010, which would be a momentous and fitting year for Clarke fans.
One of the most endearing and well-loved stars of the Hong Kong entertainment scene, Lydia Sum Tin-ha, 60, has passed on at the Queen Mary hospital after a long battle with a combination of illnesses.
This is very sad news for those of us who practically grew up with her, watching her on TV in countless TVB drama serials and variety shows as well as films like the It’s A Mad Mad World series. In October last year, Sum, fondly known as Fei-fei, was rushed to hospital after she collapsed at home. She was then put in the intensive care unit in serious condition. The year before that, she had 32 gallstones removed and also a 2.7kg tumour. If anything, she was a real fighter and her sunny disposition never faded.
Sum debut as a child actress with Shaw Brothers in 1960. She became even more well-known with the highly popular TVB variety show, Enjoy Yourself Tonight.
The great humanist filmmaker Kon Ichikawa, 92, has died. He was hospitalised in late January for complaints of difficulty in breathing, but passed away from pneumonia in a Tokyo hospital yesterday.
Ichikawa was one of the great Japanese directors and one of the rare ones who was eclectic and could work comfortably in any genre. But his primary concern remained the human condition which he constantly explored in his films.There’s certainly no one in the world who can watch a film like The Burmese Harp and walk away unmoved. Another of Ichikawa’s anti-war films, Fires On The Plain, is even at once haunting, moving and humorous.
I was a late discoverer of Ichikawa’s works, but those two films remain unforgettable, deeply etched in both heart and mind.
Ichikawa won the Critics Award in Cannes for his documentary, Tokyo Olympiad, about the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games. Before that, he won the Jury Prize in Cannes for his 1960 film, Kagi.
He was an Oscar-nominated actor and had appeared in countless movies and TV shows. But he was best known as the police chief of Amity in Jaws.
Roy Scheider, 75, died Sunday in a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas. Cause of death has yet to be determined but Scheider was diagnosed with myeloma about three years ago.
Although his roles in The French Connection and All That Jazz got him noticed by the awards committee, his Chief Martin Brody became one of the iconic characters of cinema. I’m sure many of us Jaws fans have uttered the line “We’re gonna need a bigger boat” at least once in our lives. And to think that the role almost went to Charlton Heston. Heston was reportedly so pissed off at losing out to Scheider that he vowed never to work with Spielberg.
But of course, the rest of us were glad. And to us fans, Scheider will always be Chief Brody.
Though flung off a hyphenated abyss on page 63 only to land face front on page 64, Rob Davis’s essay “Bending Light & Baring the Soul” in the current issue of Paste (No. 36, 10/07) is an essential grasp on the cinephilic loss of Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman earlier this Summer.
Burnishing his insights on the films of Antonioni, Rob explains that he was a director for whom “existence is an indistinct concept.” “Again and again,” Rob writes, “Antonioni hid his plot in shadows but pulled the questions into the light.”
As for Ingmar? Rob concludes that Bergman “didn’t seem to have any answers to the questions he raised … but he kept asking them, and had a knack for bringing his stories to an appropriately dramatic conclusion without cauterizing all of his characters’ wounds. He was a smooth, precise director, but one who—unlike Antonioni—worked within the conventions of film grammar rather than pressing at the medium’s edges.”
Myself, I am reminded that no less than a month before Antonioni’s demise, Darren Hughes and I—on our way to a film at the San Francisco International—were tickled by a couple in a tennis court volleying with imaginary rackets.
Life is only so much cinematic citation after all.
Cross-published on The Evening Class.
Two titans of cinema in the same week (see also Bergman) comes as a blow to cinema lovers, especially the heyday of Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. Michelangelo Antonioni’s deliberately paced masterpieces L’Avventura, Blow-Up and The Passenger fused psychodrama, emotion and landscape in a unique way that remains influential to this day.
I first encountered a Bergman film many years ago with Persona, and was immediately awestruck by how different it was from all other films I had seen. It was one of those moments when you think you know cinema, and a film comes along and changes, or widens, your perception. What the heck were those flitting images? Why was there a shot of the camera crew?
As time went by, I discovered more and more of his works, and even love the films that were least liked by critics, such as the infinitely haunting Hour Of The Wolf. If anything, it was really The Virgin Spring that caught me by surprise. Knowing that it was the film that inspired Wes Craven’s Last House On The Left, I didn’t expect a film of such exquisite beauty in the midst of the horror of violence.
The game of chess is finally over. May he rest in peace.
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