Passages

[HinkyDinkyTruesmith]

Michel Ciment

[MichaelB]

Poster artist Roger Kastel - even if you don't know the name, you'll certainly know the work, as his output includes the Jaws poster.

[GaryC]

A.S. Byatt, Booker-winning novelist and short-fiction writer. That winning novel was Possession, which was filmed in 2002. Other film adaptations include Angels and Insects (1995, from her novella, "Morphio Eugenia", in the two-novella collection of the film title) and Three Thousand Years of Longing (2002, based on her novella "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye", title story of that collection).

[therewillbeblus]

Dex Carvey, Dana Carvey's son, at 32 of accidental drug overdose

[Aunt Peg]

Actor Joss Ackland, 95, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/n ... -at-age-95

[Aunt Peg]

Former US first Lady, Rosalynn Carter, 96: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-20/ ... /103124760

[hearthesilence]

Chicago saxophonist Mars Williams.

...probably best known to Chicago jazz fans as a longtime member of the NRG Ensemble, the wild and woolly free-jazz quintet started in the late 70s by the late eccentric Hal Russell. A native of Chicago who’s been playing since he was ten, Williams first encountered Russell playing free-music duets with his dog around 1978. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Williams reminisces. “It was a textural piece and he brought his dog onstage and started blowing his horn. The dog just looked at him, cocking its head while Hal blew this big squealing noise. After a while he finally gave up and turned around, and then the dog let loose with this moan. That was it–I had to play with Hal.”

A small NEA grant took Williams away from Chicago, first to study with the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Roscoe Mitchell in Madison, and later to attend the influential Creative Music Studio in Woodstock, New York. He wended his way down to New York City, and quickly became involved with downtown regulars like Fred Frith, Bill Laswell, and John Zorn. But it was a regular stint with the Waitresses, the ironic new wave band best known for the hit “I Know What Boys Like,” that gave him his first taste of commercial success. As that band started to collapse, Williams began playing with the Psychedelic Furs and ended up recording and touring for three of the group’s biggest albums.

[fdm]

more on Mars

[colinr0380]

Actor Joss Ackland, 95, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/n ... -at-age-95

Perhaps his best role (though not his most famous, since that is probably the broad villain in Lethal Weapon 2) is as the zoo owner in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts.

And his voiceover for that trailer reminds me that Ackland was up there with John Hurt in voicing so many adverts that appeared on television in the 1980s and 90s!

[Jonathan S]

I remember meeting Joss Ackland and Pauline Collins when I was eleven in the summer of 1972 (I guess) as they were filming a period TV drama on a rather bleak beach at Staithes, Yorkshire. My parents had urged me to ask for their autographs and between takes I went up to them and also enquired what they were doing. Mr Ackland genially explained it was for an episode of the forthcoming series Country Matters and they both happily gave autographs (though I wonder if they'd have tolerated such an interruption from anyone older). I think I already knew Ms. Collins from Upstairs, Downstairs but I'd never heard of Mr Ackland, nor did I know the meaning of "country matters" (in the Shakespearean sense) and he didn't enlighten me. I still have a snippet of Super 8 footage of them being filmed. Apparently the episode was called Crippled Bloom, broadcast in September 1972.

[MichaelB]

Perhaps his best role (though not his most famous, since that is probably the broad villain in Lethal Weapon 2) is as the zoo owner in Peter Greenaway's A Zed and Two Noughts.

...which he thought was the worst film that he'd ever been in.

(Source: a rather gleeful Peter Greenaway on the Blu-ray audio commentary!)

[colinr0380]

It cannot have been worse than being namechecked as an alternate street name of a 'made-up drug' in Brass Eye by Rolf Harris! (NSFW)

[flyonthewall2983]

liked him in The Hunt For Red October

[MichaelB]

Polish character actor Włodzimierz Musiał, not exactly a household name (understatement) but his distinctive looks meant that he played visually memorable parts in a number of major Polish films, including regular collaborations with Wojciech Marczewski, Juliusz Machulski, Krzysztof Zanussi and above all Piotr Szulkin (five out of six features, missing only Golem, plus television projects).

Perhaps his most memorable part for Szulkin was as the archivist from hell in O-bi, O-ba: The End of Civilisation who takes it upon himself to destroy everything that doesn't have an explicit reference to the people his country is at war with, regardless of its cultural importance (the Bible being by no means exempt), just in case they win.

[brundlefly]

Marty Krofft

[beamish14]

Geordie Walker, guitarist for Killing Joke. Goddamn, this has been a rough year for fans of British post-punk groups

[dwk]

Aldo Lado

[Mr Sausage]

Aldo Lado

I haven’t seen his other work, but his two big giallos, A Short Night of Glass Dolls and especially Who Saw Her Die, are at the top of the subgenre and well worth watching.

[dwk]

I haven’t seen his other work, but his two big giallos, A Short Night of Glass Dolls and especially Who Saw Her Die, are at the top of the subgenre and well worth watching.

Those two and Night Train Murders are the only film of his that I've seen. Night Train Murders is probably the best of The Virgin Spring knockoffs.

[GaryC]

I can't see an online obit as yet, but British writer D.G. (David Guy) Compton at the age of 93 on 10 November. His novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (aka The Unsleeping Eye) was filmed by Bertrand Tavernier as Death Watch (Le mort en direct).

[beamish14]

Elliot Silverstein, director of Cat Ballou and The Car. I believe he was the last living person to have helmed episodes of Rod Sterling’s The Twilight Zone, too

[Lemmy Caution]

Jean Knight, famous for her big 1971 hit Mr. Big Stuff. Apparently Stax shopped the song around without much interest, until King Floyd's tune Groove Me hit big. Looking for followup material, a Stax producer dug out Mr. Big Stuff, also recorded at Malaco with a similar sound. Don't know much about her career, just checking into her early '64 releases. Jean Knight was part of the great and prolific
NO soul wave, but she ditched her actual family name, Caliste, in favorable of sounding less ethnic/regional. Jean Caliste sounds memorable and melodic imo.

[colinr0380]

I haven’t seen his other work, but his two big giallos, A Short Night of Glass Dolls and especially Who Saw Her Die, are at the top of the subgenre and well worth watching.

Those two and Night Train Murders are the only film of his that I've seen. Night Train Murders is probably the best of The Virgin Spring knockoffs.

Very sorry to hear this. I love all three of those films, each with great (and very different!) Ennio Morricone scores. Short Night of the Glass Dolls is an excellent murder mystery taking place in flashback as a man paralysed into seemingly appearing to be dead is wheeled closer and closer to his upcoming autopsy in front of a class of medical students and tries to piece together how he ended up in such a perilous situation. The paranoid atmosphere invoked by the mystery takes in doomed romances, mysterious murders and the inevitable sex cults (watch this in a triple bill with All The Colours of the Dark and Eyes Wide Shut!) before a darkly cynical ending, something which would only get more pronounced in the other two films.

Who Saw Her Die? is an amazing giallo set in dark and dangerously threatening Venice (watch this in a triple bill in between Death In Venice and Don't Look Now!) as a father deals with his grief in losing his daughter to a child murderer by relentlessly pursuing an investigation, only to reveal the underlying corruption holding every societal institution together, turning his personal loss outwards into condemning all those surrounding the compulsively driven killer as being just as, if not more, complicit in allowing the killings to occur.

And then Night Train Murders takes this societal condemnation to ultimate extremes, pushing the ironic horror further than even Wes Craven did in Last House On The Left, as two girls travelling home for Christmas get threatened by two thugs. But things really get nasty when an older well-dressed woman gets involved, goading the thugs into more and more extreme acts on the girls. This all ends in a final section that re-does the ending of Last House On The Left (and The Virgin Spring - watch these three films in a triple bill!), as after the two girls are murdered the two thugs and the woman randomly end up at the house of one of the girls without realising it and then the parents take out their violently bloody vengeance out on those who wronged them so badly. Only unlike the other two versions of the story, in this film whilst the two thugs get killed, the well dressed woman is able to escape scot-free from any shared culpability, placing all the blame on the men (who are arguably just the dumb 'hands' committing the heinous acts whilst she was the malicious 'mind' actively causing the escalation in the assault), and I seem to remember the final shot is of her left doing her make up (using the make up case she bought in the opening credits scored to the Demis Roussos theme tune!) to make sure that she is presentable ready for the cops arriving!

I think all three are high points of the Italian giallo genre. Brutally cynical and unsparing in their view of humanity and offering no shred of comfort for anyone, only revealing further moral and societal failings with every twist.

Unfortunately I have not seen any later films by Lado, though I really want to see 1989's Love Ritual, which takes the real-life crime committed by Issei Sagawa whose murder-then-cannibalisation actions scandalised France, and turns it into what seems like a weird compulsive doomed romance film(?) where its in real life not too handsome killer appears in its trailer to be portrayed as a handsome rakish figure? I don't know how tasteful that film would be however!

[hearthesilence]

We were very sorry to learn last night that former Society president Victor J. Kemper, ASC has passed away at the age of 96. He was honored with the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998. His wide-ranging feature credits include Dog Day Afternoon, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Slap Shot, The Jerk, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, National Lampoon's Vacation. We will soon publish a complete memorial piece.

[colinr0380]

We were very sorry to learn last night that former Society president Victor J. Kemper, ASC has passed away at the age of 96. He was honored with the ASC Lifetime Achievement Award in 1998. His wide-ranging feature credits include Dog Day Afternoon, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Slap Shot, The Jerk, Pee Wee's Big Adventure, National Lampoon's Vacation. We will soon publish a complete memorial piece.

First credit on Cassavetes' Husbands too. Plus director of photography on Elaine May's Mikey and Nickey; that 'filmed on an actual aircraft carrier' film The Final Countdown (the same year as doing the musical Xanadu), Michael Critchton's cold medical-horror adaptation of Robin Cook's novel Coma; Richard Attenborough's horror film which has Anthony Hopkins losing his sanity to a ventriloquist doll, Magic (along with other Anthony Hopkins spooky film from the year before, Audrey Rose); Eyes of Laura Mars; and in the same year as Pee-Wee's Big Adventure he did Clue!

Plus, at the forefront of the family entertainment wave of the 90s as DP on Beethoven and, um, Jingle All The Way.