Unless you live under a proverbial rock, you’ll know that journalist/author/dandy Tom Wolfe died on May 14 at the ripe age of 88. I won’t rehash his impact on American arts and letters — there’s been plenty of ink spilled for just that purpose the last week or so, including this obit in the “failing” and now “crooked” The New York Times.
It’s doubtful that many of you will recognize the name Anne V. Coates. Such is the lot of a film editor, unknown to all but a handful of film geeks as he or she toils in the shadows of an editing suite, sweating over hundreds of thousands of feet of film (or nowadays, digital image capture), shaping it one cut at a time into something resembling a tightly paced, coherent narrative.
Well, I had another post in the works but the passing of two favorites, one a director, the other an actor, preempts our regularly scheduled programming.
Miloš Forman
While the great unwashed may not be familiar with the name, you certainly know his work, which I’ll get to in a moment. But first:
Such is the immortal nature of images captured on celluloid that even a (self-proclaimed) cineaste occasionally finds himself confusing the dead for the living, an embarrassing scenario that usually plays out thusly: sprawled on the couch, clicker in hand, the CFS stumbles across a film featuring a performance by such-and-such that’s so clever he finds himself activating IMDB’s phone app to see what such-and-such has done lately, only to be reminded that such-and-such now resides in the great proscenium in the sky.
I don’t know about you, but the 1992 Kevin Costner/Whitney Houston vehicle, The Bodyguard, remains a guilty pleasure 25 years (!) on. Ably directed by Mick Jackson, the film features a reliably sturdy performance by Costner, a bunch of hit songs sung by Houston that more than compensate for her wobbly acting, a surprise appearance by Ralph Waite (Mr. Walton from The Waltons) during his late career renaissance (he also appeared in
News is spreading quickly that movie director Jonathan Demme has died to esphogeal cancer at the relatively young age of 73. Bummer. He was truly an original talent. That said, Demme’s career took a very interesting turn with the 1991 release of The Silence of the Lambs. Unfortunately, it was not necessarily a turn for the better. While this may sound a bit harsh, especially considering the poor man’s body isn’t yet cold, hear me out.
Word on the street is that Mr. Polito succumbed to cancer today at age 65. You may not be familiar with the name, but Polito, with his compact build and unique voice, was a very talented and recognizable character actor. In terms of exposure, he’ll probably best be remembered for playing Det. Steve Crosetti in the first two seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street.
The untimely passing of His Royal Badness has offered up one bittersweet positive: various movie-theater chains are showing a limited engagement of Purple Rain (1984) on the big screen.
Back in the fall of 1984, at the tender age of 15, The Conflicted Film Snob was lucky enough to see the film with some friends during its original
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.
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: