Passages

[FrauBlucher]

Welp, that time of year... TCM Remembers

[hearthesilence]

Mike Nussbaum dies at 99, days short of his 100th birthday. He was the oldest working actor in the country. (He's in the Criterion Collection for House of Games.)

[MichaelB]

Film distributors not only don’t become household names but also usually remain unknown even to habitués of specialist forums like this, but, alongside people like Artificial Eye’s Andi Engel and Mainline Films’ Romaine Hart, Kitty Cooper played an incalculably important role when it came to the UK circulation of films that could easily have remained languishing permanently in obscurity.

And she was particularly important to me personally because Contemporary Films, which she ran with her late husband Charles, secured the UK rights to untold numbers of films made behind the old Iron Curtain in countries like Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union that pretty much nobody else was picking up - the Coopers moved extensively in left-wing circles and had the necessary contacts.

[yoloswegmaster]

Lee Sun-kyun

[colinr0380]

Lee Sun-kyun

Awful news. Whilst all of the attention is of course on his role in Parasite, he also appeared in lots of Hong Sang-soo films: a small role in 2009's Night and Day and then much bigger parts in Oki's Movie, Nobody's Daughter Hae-won and Our Sunhi.

And I remember being first introduced to him with one of Tartan's "Asia Extreme" DVD releases of the mid-2000s, the Vietnam war set ghost film R-Point (which works weirdly well in a double bill with Apocalypse Now!)

[dadaistnun]

Such horrible news. As perhaps a testament to his talent, I saw Parasite less than a week after Nobody’s Daughter Haewon and didn’t even realize it was the same actor.

[domino harvey]

From what I’ve been reading, he was seen as a family friendly actor and the police leaked a bunch of messages between him and various women who weren’t his wife, largely because he wasn’t testing positive for drugs. Also read some rundowns of other extreme cancellations of celebrities for the most minor of offenses— South Korea sounds like a Twitter user’s dreamland

[Michael Kerpan]

It is shocking just how many Korean movie actors and other popular media figures (singers, etc) commit suicide. The great (and hugely over-popular) young actress SHIM Eun-ha made a great move when she quit acting before she turned 30, got married, went to college, and became a visual artist. I wonder what would have happened had she NOT quit when she did (poor LEE Eun-ju never made it to 25).

From Reuters:

Lee, 48, who met a gory end in the 2019 film, South Korea's first to win any Oscar, had faced police questioning three times over accusations of illegal drug use amid a government crackdown, with one session running 19 hours over the weekend.

At one time I wanted to visit Korea, but I think I am going to add this to my list of countries to avoid.

[beamish14]

David Leland, writer/director of Wish You Were Here, co-writer of Mona Lisa, and co-showrunner of The Borgias

[MichaelB]

And the writer of Made in Britain - which, unusually for a British television production, is more frequently attributed to its director Alan Clarke.

[hearthesilence]

Tom Smothers

[colinr0380]

David Leland, writer/director of Wish You Were Here, co-writer of Mona Lisa, and co-showrunner of The Borgias

There's that really interesting thing about Wish You Were Here, which is while Leland wrote and directed this film of the early life of notorious brothel madame Cynthia Payne (albeit under a different name), 1987 also brought us the film about her later career directed by Terry Jones, Personal Services, which was also written by Leland.

Other films he directed include one of the most obscure Handmade Films, Checking Out (starring Jeff Daniels and with Joe Eszterhas writing the screenplay), and the Liam Neeson boxing film The Big Man. Other than Wish You Were Here and Made In Britain his other big film (at least most shown on UK television) is probably writing and directing The Land Girls from 1998 which was one of Anna Friel's first feature films following her notorious groundbreaking for television lesbian kiss in UK soap opera Brookside a few years earlier.

[beamish14]

David Leland, writer/director of Wish You Were Here, co-writer of Mona Lisa, and co-showrunner of The Borgias

There's that really interesting thing about Wish You Were Here, which is while Leland wrote and directed this film of the early life of notorious brothel madame Cynthia Payne (albeit under a different name), 1987 also brought us the film about her later career directed by Terry Jones, Personal Services, which was also written by Leland.

Other films he directed include one of the most obscure Handmade Films, Checking Out (starring Jeff Daniels and with Joe Eszterhas writing the screenplay), and the Liam Neeson boxing film The Big Man. Other than Wish You Were Here and Made In Britain his other big film (at least most shown on UK television) is probably writing and directing The Land Girls from 1998 which was one of Anna Friel's first feature films following her notorious lesbian kiss in UK soap opera Brookside a few years earlier.

I’ve heard about Checking Out mostly from writer Joe Eszterhas’ memoir Hollywood Animal, and he completely trashed it. I’m definitely curious to see it, even though Letterboxd reviews aren’t very encouraging, either!

Shame that Wish You Were Here and Personal Services don’t have good Blu-Ray released. I don’t think MGM has them anymore in North America

I wonder if Leland wrote more unproduced scripts in tandem with Neil Jordan

[thirtyframesasecond]

Andre Braugher of Homicide: Life on the Street and Brooklyn Nine-Nine

He was also in Primal Fear, as one of Richard Gere's defence team.

[GaryC]

Richard Franklin, in his sleep on Christmas Day aged 87. He was best known for his recurring roles in Doctor Who (as Captain Mike Yates in the Pertwee era) and Emmerdale.

[beamish14]

Andre Braugher of Homicide: Life on the Street and Brooklyn Nine-Nine

He was also in Primal Fear, as one of Richard Gere's defence team.

and of course Glory (1989)!

[hearthesilence]

Tom Wilkinson

[aox]

Tom Wilkinson

What a loss. I feel like he was in every one of my favorite movies of the past 25 years. From John Adams (miniseries), Batman, Michael Clayton, and Eternal Sunshine. So many more too.

[beamish14]

Richard Romanus

[thirtyframesasecond]

An earlier Wilkinson role is the prosecution lawyer in In The Name of the Father - though he's ultimately outdone by Emma Thompson in the 'do not show to the defence' scene.

[colinr0380]

Tom Wilkinson had a great run of 'steadfast authority figures who shockingly turn out to be bad guys' in the late 90s surrounding The Full Monty: he's the primary antagonist of Rush Hour (giving off nefarious Chris Patten vibes at the time when painting the departing British as the looters of Hong Kong was probably a wise move to appeal to the incoming Chinese regime. He also a decade later turns up as a voice in the Hong Kong set Sleeping Dogs video game), The Ghost and the Darkness (another evil colonialist), Priest (evil Catholic) and perhaps most significantly at the centre of the convoluted conspiracy in (major spoiler):

Spoiler

Smilla's Sense of Snow, where he's the medical experimenter using indigenous children as test subjects

which archetype perhaps was being called back to in his Batman Begins role.

That slightly changed in the early 2000s to providing solid supporting characters with slightly less nefarious, yet still rather ambiguous as to whether they were working towards good or ill motives in Ang Lee's Ride With The Devil, Todd Field's In The Bedroom, the rather overlooked Talented Mr Ripley sequel Ripley's Game and in particular his great roles in Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and the priest at the centre of the "exorcism or murder?" courtroom drama-mixed-with-horror film take on a real life incident, The Exorcism of Emily Rose (the same Anneliese Michel material that the German film Requiem from the year afterwards also used as its basis). In all of those films he is rather pushed into the background, but usually turns out to be the key as to why all of the more flashy front of stage characters are behaving the way that they are.

That eventually mellowed somewhat into the grouchy neighbour in This Beautiful Fantastic, which is one of those twee films that desperately wants to be a Richard Curtis or Wes Anderson film (or UK version of Amelie) but becomes so quirksome that it quickly becomes irksome, but that's more an issue with the writing and all the actors handled the material well enough for all that.

Perhaps that's where we go full circle to Full Monty again since of course his big moment there is breaking out of the crowd to exuberantly react to Hot Stuff in the dole queue, which even influenced a future King to hump the air in emulation! (Thank God it wasn't Prince Andrew! [-o< )

[Mr. Deltoid]

Richard Romanus

He's great as the preening, yet dim, wannabe-wise-guy in Mean Streets - "Jap adaptors". I was shocked to see him in an Andy Milligan film, The Ghastly Ones, when I watched the Something Weird dvd a few years ago.

[domino harvey]

RIP T Wilk

[hearthesilence]

Maurice Hines

[Aunt Peg]

Investigative Journalist and Documentarian John Pilger, 84 https://deadline.com/2023/12/joh-pilger ... 235683948/