Passages

[flyonthewall2983]

His voice is also featured on two songs from the last two Pink Floyd albums, primarily taken from this commercial.

[dadaistnun]

Buell Neidlinger

[bearcuborg]

Sudan, the last male white rhino.

Recently featured on a heartbreaking/heartwarming episode of Nature on PBS. Hopefully they can preserve the northern white rhino through in vitro fertilization, in one of the 2 females that are left.

Insanity.

[FrauBlucher]

This depresses me to no end. Several years ago I went on an African safari and these animals are just so amazing. It's very sad that many will go extinct. Hopefully technology can keep them around.

[razumovsky]

Andre S. Labarthe

Coincidentally I was just watching his brilliant short film about Antonioni's Passenger, which is an extra on Indicator's new release. What an extraordinary legacy Labarthe leaves.

[Lost Highway]

Louise Latham

Up there with Hitchcock’s best of bad mothers. She wasn't just a monster, underneath she conveyed the sadness of a mother incapable of loving to her child. Her transformation in the flashback scenes a couple of decades earlier was startling but that was much closer to hear real age.

[L.A.]

Erwin C. Dietrich

[colinr0380]

Erwin C. Dietrich

Probably best known as one of Jess Franco's patron producers in the mid 1970s. This was not quite on such lavish budgets as Franco had during his Harry Alan Towers-as-producer period before this, but the Dietrich period covers such films as the bizarre shot-on-location in Germany adaptation of Jack The Ripper(!) starring Klaus Kinski, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun (which is Franco's entry into the nunsploitation-period horror trend that was kicked off seemingly by a combination of The Devils and Witchfinder General. Though it is pretty good for a Jess Franco film, it is not really in the league of the better entries in the genre such as Behind Convent Walls or Flavia The Heretic), as well as that strange 'unofficial' Franco entry into the Ilsa series in which Dyanne Thorne plays the title role of either Ilsa The Wicked Warden, Wanda The Wicked Warden or Greta The Mad Butcher depending on the territory it was released in!

Spoiler

That is also the film in which Ilsa/Wanda/Greta gets her customary comeuppance (the character dies at the end of every film in the Ilsa series!) and is turned upon by the women she has been holding prisoner and torturing, who cannibalise her whilst being intercut with jungle cats and animal sounds!

Plus a couple of Franco's entries in the 'women in prison' genre that all seem to be shot in the same jungle locations as seen in the Ilsa film: Women In Cell Block 9 (which I have not yet seen) and Love Camp, which I remember (favourably) comparing to Zack Snyder's Sucker Punch film a few years ago. I will just quote that part of the post relating to Love Camp's head-spinning ending here:

Perhaps it may be just that I was watching too many Jess Franco films in the run up to this one, but I was preparing myself for something in a different vein and somehow found myself watching something very similar! I guess though another way Sucker Punch shows that it is not quite a Franco film is that, despite a rather dark ending, it still doesn't have quite as depressing and abrupt ending of a Franco film, such as something like Love Camp! (At the end of that film the lead character escapes from a brothel with a couple of cellmates in order to rejoin her husband but in a shocking about-face when the group are captured by the rebel leader who was a frequenter of the brothel, and who incidentally provided our lead with her first sexual awakening, she lets her two female companions go back to the camp to be executed and even abandons her husband, who is also present on the scene, in order to run into the arms of the rebel leader! This all takes place in the space of about a minute of screen time!)

And the bizarre Blue Rita (very NSFW!), which is one of the more stylish of Franco's films of this period (it helps that he's back on his old 'nefarious nightclub' turf territory reminiscent of Vampyros Lesbos!)

___

Outside of Franco, Dietrich also directed seemingly a lot of sex films and seemingly a lot of the 'sexy Scandinavia'-types of films. (For instance he directed Danish Love Acts, which has an amazing (and NSFW of course!) trailer shown on one of the 42nd Street Forever trailer compilation sets). Another film he produced was the cult classic homoerotic bonkers biker movie Mad Foxes (still very NSFW!)

But most strangely he had a very brief moment of producing more mainstream films with Escape To Athena (though only credited on the German prints of the film), as well as The Wild Geese and its Antonio Marghereti directed sequel Codename: Wild Geese with Lee Van Cleef, Klaus Kinski again and Ernest Borgnine(!)

[antnield]

Stéphane Audran.

[thirtyframesasecond]

Stéphane Audran.

She's superb in Le Boucher.

[colinr0380]

Here's a great piece by Dan Sallitt and Kevin B. Lee on Le boucher and The Unfaithful Wife.

In basically anything by Chabrol she holds the centre of the screen, usually stoically, disturbingly inscrutable to her partners: playing dangerous relationship games in Les biches, the stunning fulcrum character around whom the action revolves (but also the character that we mostly view from a distance) in The Unfaithful Wife, and in Betty. I think her role in La rupture is one of the strangest ones, the central character but after the harrowing frying pan wielding first scene, almost passive in the face of the legal system and underhanded manipulations of the other characters until that beautifully sad drugged trippy ending. One of the most fascinating muse collaborations between director and actress in French cinema, and perhaps cinema in general.

In terms of other roles, of course there is the wonderful Babette's Feast. She is also in Bertrand Tavernier's Coup de Torchon in which she plays the wife whilst Isabelle Huppert is the young mistress of Philippe Noiret's character. She is also in one of the few UK-made westerns, Eagle's Wing.

In more surprising appearances she turns up in Jess Franco's bizarre 1988 remake of Eyes Without A Face, Faceless. Plus she plays Jean-Claude Van Damme's mum in Maximum Risk!

[colinr0380]

Deborah Lee Carrington at 58, mainly a stuntwoman but she had a memorable role as one of the prostitutes in the bar in Verhoeven's Total Recall, dispensing a particularly painful form of justice!

[hearthesilence]

Steven Bochco

[NABOB OF NOWHERE]

Winnie Mandela

[kubelkind]

Barbara Stone

[GaryC]

Gil Brealey, producer of Sunday Too Far Away and director of Annie's Coming Out (aka A Test of Love in the USA).

[Murdoch]

Steven Bochco

Watching some Cop Rock now, the most splendid TV misfire ever conceived.

[flyonthewall2983]

Former pro wrestler Johnny Valiant

[Saturnome]

Isao Takahata

[Michael Kerpan]

Isao Takahata

Devastated...

Variety

Japan Times

[zedz]

Jazz giant Cecil Taylor

[hearthesilence]

Takahata and now Taylor. Jesus what a shitty day.

[Professor Wagstaff]

Susan Anspach

[fdm]

Hell of a sad news day...

[denti alligator]

Jazz giant Cecil Taylor

He had an astounding run, though. And he's one of the few who seemed with each year to get even better. That Willisau concert from the late 90s is something like one of the greatest solo piano recordings of all time, in any genre. I cherish his over 100 recordings. One of the great American musicians, period.