Actor Abe Vigoda died on Tuesday at the ripe old age of 94. For those of you who watched TV in the mid-70s, you’ll know him as the curmudgeonly, hemorrhoidal Sgt. Philip K. Fish from ABC’s Barney Miller and, later, its short-lived spinoff, Fish.
Watching a hirsute Leonardo DiCaprio (as frontiersman Hugh Glass in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant) defy innumerable odds–including, but not limited to: Indian attack; protracted bear mauling; burial alive; river rapids and waterfall plunge; a sweat-lodge fever; likely food poisoning from raw fish and buffalo liver; a fall from a cliff while galloping on a horse; a night spent inside the aforementioned horse, now gutted; bathing
If you’re of a certain age, your first introduction to the great Alan Rickman wouldn’t have been as Snape in the Harry Potter films, but rather as master criminal Hans Gruber in John McTiernan’s Die Hard (1988), a film that launched into the public’s consciousness both Bruce Willis’ receding hairline and one of cinema’s great villains:
The recent release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the passing of Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the great cinematographers, got me thinking about the two groundbreaking science fiction epics released back in 1977, George Lucas’ original Star Wars (eventually subtitled Episode IV: A New Hope upon its 1981 theatrical re-release) and Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (the only movie for which Zsigmond received an Academy Award,