One of the big names for Sci-Fi genre junkies, Dan O’Bannon passed away from Crohn’s Disease on Thursday. Besides the iconic Alien Franchise (or at least Ridley’s Scott’s first entry), O’Bannon also wrote at the high and low ends of the science fiction spectrum including Screamers, Blade Runner (he was one of many involved in the screenplay, somebody will surely corret me if I’m wrong on this, but many of the writers were uncredited as the screenplay went through a ridiculous number of drafts before productions started), Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce, Invaders From Mars, John Carpenter’s Darkstar, Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall and John Badham’s Blue Thunder. He also directed the cult zom-com favourite, Return of the Living Dead (pictured, sort of, above)
Actress Brittany Murphy passed away (cause of death unknown at this point) in Los Angeles. From Mike Judge’s King of the Hill to Robert Rodriguez’s Sin City and Curtis Hanson’s 8 Mile and Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, she had a pretty solid and diverse career going. I’m sure more details will emerge.
Murphy had several projects still in production (one of them the action-fest The Expendables), not sure how those projects will be affected by her shuffling off the mortal coil.
Bummed I was when I read today that Michael Crichton passed away due to cancer – which he was able to keep very, very quiet. He was the first “big boy” writer I ever read, mostly because I loved all of the movies based on his books and my older brother was an avid Crichton reader, so I could steal his copies after he read them. While I haven’t read any Crichton in at least ten years, I remember vividly taking his books to my elementary school to read, trying to show off to the other kids that I was read big books written by a doctor. During those elementary years, I read Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Congo, The Andromeda Strain, and The Terminal Man. While I remember reading them – I even remember weird details like where I was sitting in my old house as I read certain parts of Jurassic Park – I am fairly confident that I didn’t understand a lot of it. Because I was something like ten years old. And these books had a lot of really big words that only doctors and scientists could understand, not a ten year old who plays with Ninja Turtles for fun. Then, as I got older, I put aside his in-your-face plot-driven thrillers aside for more character-driven ones to complement my literary snobbishness that had formed, but I was always thankful to Crichton for expanding my extremely feeble young mind.
Here, I will present you with seven reasons why I loved the absolutely awful adaptation of his novel Congo when I was ten years old.
1. Bruce Campbell, baby!
2. It was written by the guy that wrote Jurassic Park!
3. It has a gentle, talking ape named Amy!
4. It had apes that killed people too!
5. Winston from Ghostbusters was in it!
6. Laser weapons!
7. Awesome exploding volcano escape scene!
While many adaptations of his novels turned out terrible (Timeline, Sphere), just as many turned out great. The adaptation of his novel Jurassic Park, while not a great film, was so innovative, imaginative, and iconic for the time that when I finally got it for my birthday, I literally watched it every day for two-weeks straight. Then there is The 13th Warrior, based off his novel Eaters of the Dead, =an underrated gem starring Antonio Banderas in a story loosely based on the epic Anglo-Saxon poem of Beowulf.
He also wrote the screenplay for Twister and directed plenty of films on his own (including the adaptation of his own novel The First Great Train Robbery, starring Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland). With his expertise as a doctor, he also helped create a little show called ER.
He will be missed, but he made his imprint is all over popular fiction and blockbuster movies and that won’t go anywhere.
And with those words, Paul Newman revealed a lot about himself – his humor, his character, his modesty. I don’t know why, but I felt the tugging of having to say something, not because anyone out there has been eagerly awaiting my tribute, its just a strange feeling when your favorite actor dies. I suppose this is just my little, insignificant, unremarkable way of saying how much I appreciated Paul Newman. No, I did not know him nor did I ever see him on anything other than a screen, but after years of following an actor, admiring him, emulating him, eating his spaghetti sauce, working through his filmography, there is a sense of knowing – and when I received the text message at work earlier today from my brother filling me in on the news, I did feel as though I lost a friend of my own, as silly and clichéd as it may sound.
I credit Cool Hand Luke with being the first movie that really made me examine what was beyond the surface of a film and Newman’s portrayal of Luke Jackson is perfection defined. There is almost something divine about his performance. The Hustler. Hud. The Verdict. Road to Perdition. The Long Hut Summer. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Sting. Somebody Up There Likes Me. Hombre. Sweet Bird of Youth. The Young Philadelphians. Empire Falls. All of these are absolute favorite films of mine, many that I have countless times throughout the years. Exodus. Harper. Slap Shot. The Hudsucker Proxy. Nobody’s Fool. The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean. Absence of Malice. Winning. From the Terrace. The Color of Money. The Towering Inferno. The Drowning Pool. The list goes on.
If you go to the movies in the multiplex, or watch movie trailers on You-Tube, then Don LaFontaine’s voice should be immediately recognizable. According to the spoofy Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy trailer (contained here), he sounds like “a seven foot tall man who has been smoking cigarettes since childhood”.” The Voice is deep, and powerful, and spouts familiar sales pitches for the entire spectrum of movies. The man did more than 5000 of these things over his lengthy career. LaFontaine died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications from a collapsed lung. The official cause of death, however, was not immediately released. More on LaFontaine’s career, here.
Enjoy the Mr. Movie Voice primer via a gag-sketch for the Key Art Awards from a few years ago. DLF is clearly the big man in the voice-over team.
While the voice-over part of trailers can be blunt, obvious and even tedious, Mr. LaFontaine will certainly be missed. NOW!
(Time for the Grindhouse trailer voice-guy to step up and take over the shoes of the big man). The Voice is dead, long live the Voice!
My favourite Dan LaFontaine? He’s in there for only a second or two, but it is gold (kudos to Stephen Fry for the colour commentary):
Word comes this morning that comedian Harvey Korman, a staple of television and film, has died at the age of 81.
One of my earliest cinematic obsessions was Mel Brooks films…I loved them all, and Harvey Korman was a Brooks regular, usually playing a slightly villainous foil, yet one who ultimately didn’t have what it took to be truly evil. His Hedley Lamaar in Blazing Saddles is his best-known Brooks role, but I also enjoyed him in High Anxiety and History of the World, Part 1.
Of course, Korman’s primary outlet was television. He was a regular cast member of the long-running Carol Burnett Show, and even had a show of his own, The Harvey Korman Show (though it only ran for three episodes).
Moses. Marc Antony. Andrew Jackson. Michelangelo. These are but a smattering of the characters Charlton Heston played throughout his 50+ year career in Hollywood. As was fitting the personality of the actor himself, Heston often played powerful, strong-willed men, yet always managed to inject a dose of humanity into each one of them. Word comes today that Charlton Heston has died at the age of 84.
I have been a Charlton Heston fan for years, ever since I first saw him in Ben-Hur. It was a grand, magnificent movie that seemed larger than life, and Heston was the reason why, portraying the title character as a strong, yet ultimately flawed individual. I would spend a great deal of time over the next several years watching every Charlton Heston film I could get my hands on (which, in the golden age of Home Video, was quite an extensive collection). What I found was an actor who wasn’t afraid to challenge himself. Seemingly most comfortable in sweeping, historical dramas (The Agony and the Ecstasy, The Ten Commandments, El Cid), Heston appeared in a wide variety of films throughout his career, including ones that may have seemed an odd fit for him at the time. He played a Mexican policeman, certainly a stretch, in 1958’s Touch of Evil, a part he accepted simply because he wanted to work with the film’s director, Orson Welles. In the late 60’s and early 70’s, Heston took a stab at science fiction (Planet of the Apes, The Omega Man, Soylent Green), disaster films (Earthquake, Skyjacked, Airport 1975), and even William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra), giving each of these roles everything he had as an actor. That is ultimately Charlton Heston’s legacy as a performer: no matter how small the part was, no matter how awful the movie turned out to be (The Awakening was just pathetic), Charlton Heston approached every part he played as if it were the most important of his career.
In the mid-1990’s, I missed my chance to meet Charlton Heston, who was appearing at a book signing at the King of Prussia Mall, promoting his new autobiography, “In the Arena”. Having a few errands to run first, I lost track of the time and arrived at the book store about half an hour too late. While I made it in time to pick up one of the few remaining autographed copies he had left behind, I so wanted to shake the man’s hand, and thank him for the hours of enjoyment his performances had given me. “Oh well”, I thought to myself at the time, “maybe I’ll have another chance down the road”.
Known for his hard-bitten crime dramas and his redefinition of the heist film, director Jules Dassin passed away March 31st at 96. Thieves Highway, Night and the City and The Naked City would be as fine an introduction to noir as anything else out there, but I really, really have a soft spot for his heist picture Rififi. While the characters and story are somewhat familiar and a little slow to get to the centerpiece of the film, when you get there, well, cinematic Heaven. You see for over 25 minutes there isn’t a line of dialogue, just drills, hammering, and criminal labour to get to the goods. You can’t watch a modern heist picture and not acknowledge this film. (Also, the Criterion edition of the DVD is inexpensive and available. On a personal note, I believe it was the first Criterion Disc I ever purchased.) There is not a better way to remember this fine American director who did most of his work in Europe due to the blacklisting and chicanery of the era
Just heard from a co-worker that Heath Ledger was found dead today. No details as of yet, We’ll keep you posted. This may put a damper on The Dark Knight though.
UPDATE:
The actor Heath Ledger was found dead this afternoon in an apartment building at 421 Broome Street in SoHo, according to the New York City police. Mr. Ledger was 28.
At 3:31 p.m., a masseuse arrived at Apartment 5A in the building for an appointment with Mr. Ledger, the police said. The masseuse was let in to the home by a housekeeper, who then knocked on the door of Mr. Ledger’s bedroom. When no one answered, the housekeeper and the masseuse opened the bedroom and found Mr. Ledger unconscious. They shook him, but he did not respond. They immediately called the authorities. The police said they did not suspect foul play and said they found pills near body.
This is truly sad news. The more I think about this, the more disheartening it is. A shock to the industry, not to mention family and friends to say the least. I’m sorry to see him go.
