Passages

[beamish14]

Terry Hall of The Specials and Fun Boy Three

[zedz]

Yikes! That seems way too soon. He left behind a lot of classic pop songs under his various guises.

Hush my darling, don't you cry

[j99]

The Specials were fantastic. What a terrible loss at a relatively young age. Glad I got to see them at their peak in 1979. An unforgettable gig. RIP.

[hearthesilence]

Very sad to hear about Hall, especially given his comments in recent years about his struggles with his health and just being happy to make it into his 60's (even looking forward to his 70's).

Also stunned to hear that Martin Duffy of Felt and more famously Primal Scream has died from a brain injury due to a fall at his home.

[cdnchris]

Unless I missed it here, Mike Hodges this past Saturday.

[FrauBlucher]

TCM Remembers 2022

[Matt]

Very sad to hear about Hall, especially given his comments in recent years about his struggles with his health and just being happy to make it into his 60's (even looking forward to his 70's).

Also stunned to hear that Martin Duffy of Felt and more famously Primal Scream has died from a brain injury due to a fall at his home.

I was so stunned about Terry Hall that I didn’t even learn the news about Martin Duffy until now. Felt vies among only a few others for “My Favorite Band,” and I had actually been thinking only a few days ago about trying to get in touch with Duffy to interview him about his time in the band. He is one of the geniuses of post

I suppose with Keith Levene, this makes the cliched and dreaded triple death (for post-punk legends). I can’t imagine my life without the music made by these three men, and that I lived while they lived.

[hearthesilence]

Thom Bell, legendary producer, arranger and songwriter who helped create “The Sound of Philadelphia" with Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff.

[Aunt Peg]

Australian actor Tony Barry, aged 81: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-23/ ... /101805186

[L.A.]

Maxi Jazz, lead singer of Faithless, aged 65.

[colinr0380]

Unless I missed it here, Mike Hodges this past Saturday.

That's really sad, particularly as we are just in the middle of a major revival of his work with BFI putting out Get Carter in cinemas and on UHD/Blu-ray and Arrow adding to their previous special editions of Flash Gordon and Black Rainbow with the recent release of 1998's Croupier on UHD, which was a key film at the time for bringing Mike Hodges back to prominence (in a timely way reminding everyone at the height of the Lock, Stock laddish revival of interest in the British gangster film of an earlier era of British crime stories) and well as for making Clive Owen into a star name (and importantly the Arrow edition of Croupier has a second disc with a documentary by David Cairns interviewing Hodges about his entire career at his home that was apparently filmed earlier this year). I'd love to see Arrow give the second collaboration between Hodges and Owen (and now Hodges' last feature length film), 2003's I'll Sleep When I'm Dead, the same treatment.

Selfishly, I would love to see his great 1985 sci-fi comedy Morons From Outer Space get rehabilitated by Arrow some time. Its obviously influenced by The Man Who Fell To Earth and the Star Wars/Close Encounters idea of sci-fi spectacular but done as comedy that punctures all the grandeur surrounding those films! It's also the first film starring the comic duo of Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith and whilst not as well received as their BBC series that led to a further film with 1989's non-Mike Hodges directed Wilt, which is kind of the comic version of The Element of Crime! Or at least works well in a double bill with the Lars von Trier film! If Arrow could do Hodges' adaptation of Michael Critchton's The Terminal Man starring George Segal too (which came out just a year after Critchton himself directed the film of Westworld), that would be much appreciated as well!

Maxi Jazz, lead singer of Faithless, aged 65.

Such a recognisable voice too with classic songs such as We Come 1 and Insomnia. From the No Roots album there was the Mass Destruction and Muhammad Ali song, but I particularly like Miss U Less, See U More.

[Finch]

John Neff, sound mixer on Mulholland Drive and The Straight Story as well as co-composer with Lynch on the album Blue Bob (some songs of which feature in MD) and collaborator with Rebekah Del Rio on the Part 11 song No Stars, passed away today at his home in Portland, OR, as per his daughter Jennifer on his social media account. John was a lovely man, with many stories to share and no uppity airs about him. I've lost count but he must be the sixth or seventh person in Lynch's orbit to pass on this year.

[L.A.]

Ruggero Deodato.

[mhofmann]

Ruggero Deodato.

Very sad to hear about his passing. He was an innovator that for a long time didn't get enough credit for his (in parts controversial) contributions to cinema.

[beamish14]

Vivienne Westwood

[Calvin]

Pelé - arguably the greatest football player of all time who won three World Cups with Brazil. He has also had an interesting relationship with cinema - most famously appearing in John Huston's Escape to Victory alongside Sylvester Stallone and Michael Caine. Earlier in his career, he played himself as an adult in the biopic O Rei Pelé and then, later, he co-wrote and starred in the blaxploitation-influenced Os Trombadinhas.

[colinr0380]

Ruggero Deodato.

Very sad to hear about his passing. He was an innovator that for a long time didn't get enough credit for his (in parts controversial) contributions to cinema.

And in another worrying sign that Red Letter Media has some premonitory sense for celebrity passings, their latest "Best of the Worst" Christmas video tackled Deodato's 1987 Cannon film The Barbarians, which I previously had not been that interested in seeing, but which looks very funny from the clips in their episode! It is strange to think of the director of Cannibal Holocaust making a tongue in cheek parody fantasy movie with a couple of musclebound Jersey dudes wisecracking at each other!

[Yakushima]

Eduard Artemyev passed away today. He created soundtracks for Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, Solaris and Mirror, and for many other films. He was 86.

[colinr0380]

Eduard Artemyev passed away today. He created soundtracks for Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker, Solaris and Mirror, and for many other films. He was 86.

Whilst his electronic Tarkovsky scores are what he should be most noted for (I still find that motoring back into the big city scene hypnotic!) Artemyev also did many of Nikita Mikhalkov's films including Urga (aka Close To Eden), An Unfinished Piece For Player Piano, The Barber of Siberia and the two Burnt By The Sun films. And a couple of films by Andrei Konchalovsky including 1976's A Slave of Love and a more recent 3D version of The Nutcracker!

[thirtyframesasecond]

For football mad men of a certain age (e.g. mine) Escape to Victory was probably our favourite film when they were 10 or so. I mean it's not a good film and the first half retreads many other war films but the football match is great fun. The biased ref, the cheating Germans, Max Von Sydow as a good Nazi, it plays into all our conceptions of world war two when you're that age. I still got annoyed at Pele's showboating when they're chasing the game but the scissor kick equaliser is worth it.

[CSM126]

The most bombastic shop-at-home pitchman ever, Don West, who also had a second career as a pro-wrestling commentator and a radio host. The guy was hysterical and even Will Ferrell couldn’t top him with an SNL parody.

[beamish14]

Neal Jimenez, writer of River’s Edge and writer/director of The Waterdance. He was a paraplegic as a result of an accident during the 80’s, and the latter film deals with that.

[CSM126]

Barbara Walters

[hearthesilence]

The most bombastic shop-at-home pitchman ever, Don West, who also had a second career as a pro-wrestling commentator and a radio host. The guy was hysterical and even Will Ferrell couldn’t top him with an SNL parody.

Yeah, the inspiration behind "The Shaq...PLAQUE!" Me and my friends loved that sketch - we'd parrot it endlessly in school.

[CSM126]

Benedict XVI