RIP (2007)

[frankenjohn]

R.I.P.

[LivingDeadGirl]

Very sad and very disturbing news..

FAYETTEVILLE, Ga. - Pro wrestler Chris Benoit strangled his wife, suffocated his 7-year-old son and placed a Bible next to their bodies before hanging himself with a weight-machine pulley, authorities said Tuesday.

Investigators found anabolic steroids in the house and want to know whether the muscle man nicknamed “The Canadian Crippler” was unhinged by the bodybuilding drugs, which can cause paranoia, depression and explosive outbursts known as “roid rage.”

Authorities offered no motive for the killings, which were spread out over a weekend, and would not discuss Benoit’s state of mind. No suicide note was found.

The bodies were found Monday afternoon in the house, off a gravel road in this suburb about 20 miles south of Atlanta.


Benoit’s 43-year-old wife was killed Friday in an upstairs family room, her feet and wrists were bound and there was blood under her head, indicating a possible struggle, Ballard said. Daniel was probably killed late Saturday or early Sunday, the body found in his bed, the district attorney said.

Benoit, 40, apparently hanged himself several hours and as long as a day later, Ballard said. His body was found in a downstairs weight room, his body found hanging from the pulley of a piece of exercise equipment.

A closed Bible was placed next to the bodies of the wife and son, authorities said.

The prosecutor said he found it “bizarre” that the wrestler spread out the killings over a weekend and appeared to remain in the house for up to a day with the bodies.

Toxicology test results may not be available for weeks or even months, Ballard said. As for whether steroids played a role in the crime, he said: “We don’t know yet. That’s one of the things we’ll be looking at.”

World Wrestling Entertainment said on its Web site that it asked authorities to check on Benoit and his family after being alerted by friends who had received “several curious text messages sent by Benoit early Sunday morning.”

[ZapRowsdower]

No sympathy for Chris Benoit from me. My thoughts go out to his wife and child.

[LivingDeadGirl]

Me too, that's what I meant by sad and disturbing...

[Pulpmariachi]

At least you could always count on him to like pretty much anything, even if it was just reassurance that you weren't the only person on the planet who liked the movie....unless it was "Clerks III".


Film Critic Joel Siegel Dies at 63


Joel Siegel, one of the most notable faces of movie criticism thanks to his position as the lead film critic and entertainment editor for the ABC talk show Good Morning America, died on Friday after a long battle with colon cancer; he was 63. Known for his succinct and common-sensical movie reviews, which featured highly quotable and pun-filled one-liners delivered with a snappy patter, Siegel was one of the first critics to parlay his writing job into a television career, alongside other famed personalities as Gene Shalit, Jeffrey Lyons, and of course, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Starting out as a radio DJ and newscaster, Siegel first worked for Robert F. Kennedy's campaign as a joke writer, in addition to being a book reviewer for the Los Angeles Times and a freelance critic for other publications. Siegel moved to New York in the 1970s, where he first worked for WABC and then for ABC's fledgling morning show, Good Morning America. He stayed with the show for the rest of his career, and was reportedly at work even two weeks before his death. Though he maintained a mostly sunny aura on air, his career was not without controversy -- most recently, in 2006, he vociferiously left a screening of Clerks II 40 mintues into the film, inciting the wrath of director Kevin Smith. At the age of 54, as he was receiving chemotherapy for colon cancer, Siegel found out he was going to be a father for the first time, and had only a 70% chance of living to see his child. After his son Dylan was born in 1998, Siegel wrote Lessons for Dylan, a book that was part biography and part life lessons and was published in 2003. In addition to his television career, Siegel also received a Tony nomination for writing the 1981 Broadway musical The First. He is survived by his wife, Ena, and their son. --Mark Englehart, IMDb staff


RIP.

[frankenjohn]

Yeah, I used to watch him all the time as a kid. R.I.P.

[frankenjohn]

This popped up as soon as I opened IMDB, and I let out a huge gasp.

Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish director considered one of the most influential and acclaimed filmmakers of modern cinema, died at his home in Faro, Sweden, on Monday; he was 89. The death was announced by the Swedish news agency TT and confirmed by Bergman's daughter, Eva, and Astrid Soderbergh Widding, president of The Ingmar Bergman Foundation, though an official cause of death was not yet given. Nominated for nine Academy Awards throughout his career and honored with the Irving G. Thalberg award in 1971, Bergman was cited as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, with his bleak, unsparing yet highly emotional explorations of the human psyche and its relation to life, sex, and death, in both highly symbolic and intensely personal films; he most notably influenced Woody Allen, who considered him the greatest of filmmakers. His images ranged from the stark black-and-white of films like The Seventh Seal to those awash in dreadful reds such as Cries and Whispers and the holiday warmth of Fanny and Alexander, his last film for the cinema. Born in Uppsala, Sweden in 1918, Bergman was the son of a Lutheran minister, and religious imagery as well as the tumultuous relationship between his parents would pervade his work. Though growing up in an extremely strict and devout family, Bergman lost his faith at an early age and grappled with the concept of the existence of God in many of his early films. Bergman discovered the magic of imagery at the age of nine with a magic lantern, for which he would create his own characters and scenery, and this love of light and images brought him to the theater world after a brief stint at the University of Stockholm. Bergman worked in both theater and film throughout the 1940s, as part of the script department of Svensk Filmindustri and as a director and producer for numerous small theater companies. His first script to be produced was the 1944 film Torment, and began as a director with small movies that allowed him to hone his craft; among his notable earlier works were Prison, Summer Interlude, and Sawdust and Tinsel.

Bergman came to the fore of the international cinematic community with the 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, his classic melancholy comedy about the romantic entanglements of three 19th century couples during a weekend at a country estate. The film propelled him to stardom and won him a a Cannes Film Festival award for "Best Poetic Humor" (it was also later adapted by Stephen Sondheim into the musical A Little Night Music). He established his legacy and reputation with his next two films: The Seventh Seal, featuring the now-iconic imagery of Death playing chess with a tortured medieval knight (Max Von Sydow), and Wild Strawberries, the study of an aged professor (played by Victor Sjostrom) revisiting his youth and his darkest fears as he drives through the Swedish countryside. Both films were phenomenal critical and box office successes, with Wild Strawberries earning Bergman his first Oscar nomination, for Best Screenplay. Bergman's The Virgin Spring, the grim fable about two parents exacting revenge on their daughter's murderers, won the Best Foreign Language film Oscar in 1961. He followed up that film with a trilogy of films -- Through a Glass Darkly (another Foreign Language Film Oscar winner), Winter Light and The Silence -- in which he grappled most powerfully with his lack of faith and belief in the power of love.

Making as many failures as he did successes, Bergman found favor with a number of films throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including the now-famous Persona, Hour of the Wolf, The Passion of Anna, Cries and Whispers (a nominee for Best Picture), Scenes from a Marriage, The Magic Flute, and Autumn Sonata. Throughout his films he used an ensemble of actors, most notably Max von Sydow, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Erland Josephson and Liv Ullman, with whom he had a personal relationship and a child. He also almost always worked with the legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist, who won two Oscars for Cries and Whispers and 1982's Fanny and Alexander. It was that latter film that Bergman declared to be his final cinematic work, an intimate portrait of brother and sister set in early 20th century Sweden that was originally conceived as a four part TV film, and was released in the US at a truncated 188 minutes. It won four Oscars, including Best Foreign Language Film. Though he officially "retired" from the film industry after Fanny and Alexander, Bergman made films for Swedish television, continued to direct theatrically (including a version of Hamlet in Swedish that traveled to the US) and wrote screenplays that were filmed by other directors, including Bille August, Bergman's son Daniel, and actress and former lover Liv Ullman. His last work as director was Saraband, a revisitation of the two lead characters (Ullman and Jospehson) from Scenes from a Marriage. Bergman was married five times, and his fifth wife, Ingrid von Rosen, passed away in 1995. He is survived by nine children from his past marriages and relationships. At press time, a funeral date had not yet been set. --Mark Englehart, IMDb staff

Wow. He was definatelty one of my favorite, FAVORITE directors of all time. His films are SO good and I knew he retired but I thought he was doing well. Cinema has lost one of it's best today. R.I.P.

[Pulpmariachi]

RIP.

[Heineken Skywalker]

Sorry to say, I think the only film of his I've seen is THE SEVENTH SEAL, and that one not until fairly recently.

Former talk show host Tom Snyder, has also passed away.

R.I.P. to both.

[Pulpmariachi]

There were a couple more who passed away today:

From IMDB:

1.)French Actor Michel Serrault Dies


French actor Michel Serrault has died. He was 79. The movie star passed away at his home in Honfleur, France after a long illness on Sunday. Serrault garnered worldwide critical acclaim for his performance in 1978 comedy movie La Cage Aux Folles - the film was nominated for three Oscars and the actor won the first of three Cesars for the film. After beginning his career on the stage, he began working on a cabaret act with playwright Jean Poiret which proved a huge success in the music halls of Paris. But it wasn't until Serrault landed a role in Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1954 French thriller Les Diaboliques that he hit the big screen. He was married with two daughters - one of whom passed away in a car crash in 1977.

2.) Michelangelo Antonioni, the Italian film director whose modernist style created such haunting, enigmatic films as L'Avventura and Blow Up, died Monday at his home in Italy; he was 94. Antonioni had suffered a debilitating stroke in 1985 which gave him limited speech capabilities and curtailed his directing abilities, though he continued to work, most notably on 1995's Beyond the Clouds, after his stroke. Born in Ferrara, Italy, Antonioni graduated from the University of Bologna with a degree in economics but went to work for a local newspaper as a film writer and critic. Moving to Rome during World War II, he collaborated with Roberto Rossellini on A Pilot Returns and began making short documentaries. His first full-length film, Story of a Love Affair, was released in 1950, and he found his breakthrough with 1957's The Outcry, where he met actress Monica Vitti, who would go on to star in his famed film trilogy of emotional alienation: L'Avventura, La Notte, and L'Eclisse, released from 1960-1962. With these austere black-and-white films, seductive and amazing to some and puzzling and mysterious to others (L'Avventura and L'Eclisse both won the Jury prizes at Cannes), Antonioni established himself as one of the premier international filmmakers of the time, alongside fellow countryman Federico Fellini and other emerging directors of the '60s such as Roman Polanski and Ingmar Bergman; he was considered such a fixture of the time that he was even mentioned in lyrics (alongside Fellini and Polanski) in the seminal musical of the '60s, Hair.

In 1966, Antonioni found box office as well as critical success with Blow Up, the story of a London photographer (David Hemmings) who believes he may have accidentally captured a murder on film. The quintessential portait of the swinging '60s, the film featured a luminous Vanessa Redgrave and, most notoriously, an imaginary, silent tennis game played between two sets of white-faced mimes. While some shrugged, others continued to celebrate his success, and Antonioni received two Academy Award nominations for writing and directing Blow Up. That film was followed by the notorious flop Zabriskie Point, an existentialist rumination in Death Valley featuring amateur actors, but Antonioni then rebounded with The Passenger, starring Jack Nicholson as a journalist researching a documentary in the Sahara, now considered one of his best films. Antonioni made only a handful of films following The Passenger, and worked only in a limited fashion after his stroke, though he surprised critics and audiences with 1995's Beyond the Clouds, which producers would only back with the stipulation that director Wim Wenders follow the filming in case Antonioni faltered. Though he was only able to speak a few words, the director was able to communicate effectively with his crew and actors; the same year Beyond the Clouds was released, he received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement. Antonioni is survived by his wife, Enrica, whom he married in 1986.

RIP to them too (especially because I liked 'The Passenger.' I'll have to watch it again sometime.

[frankenjohn]

What is going on?! R.I.P. to both.

[Pulpmariachi]

From Tiny Mix Tapes:

Max Roach Dead at 83



"Art is a powerful weapon that society, or the powers that be, use to control or direct the way people think. Culture is used to perpetuate the status quo of a society. Even though I’m involved in music for the sake of entertainment, I always hope to offer some kind of enlightenment." - Max Roach

Max Roach, one of the most significant drummers of jazz and certainly one of my favorites, thought of jazz as a "democratic musical form" that comes from a "communal experience." Helping to ’un-define’ the role of drummers as a mere "subservient figure," Roach opened music listeners to the idea that sound can be a force for social change. Shattering jazz hierarchies and exploring the subtle timbres and textural play that drumming afforded, Roach’s brilliant career found him playing with everyone from Charles Mingus and Clifford Brown to free-jazzers Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton.

Blacklisted for a period in the ’60s by club owners and record companies for his overt politics (heard on albums like We Insist!, It’s Time, and Speak, Brother, Speak!), Max Roach was obviously never one to shy away from merging art and politics. His conception of music went beyond simply notes and rhythms — it became a vehicle for his thoughts, his ideas. “My point is that we much decolonize our minds and re-name and re-define ourselves... In all respects, culturally, politically, socially, we must re-define ourselves and our lives, in our own terms.”

Of course, most of Roach’s contributions to jazz were not overtly political, but with jazz becoming more and more a museum artifact and background music for White House banquets, I like to think that his overall contribution to jazz was more "enlightenment" than "entertainment."

Posted by Mr P on 08-17-2007

We're losing all the greats here.

[Heineken Skywalker]

RIP to Mr. Roach and also to Merv Griffin who recently passed and was not acknowledged here.

[Heineken Skywalker]

Luciano Pavarotti Dies at 71

Opera legend Luciano Pavarotti has died at age 71, as his health deteriorated to a "very serious" condition after he fell unconscious; he passed away at his home at 5 a.m. local time. The Italian tenor's health took a turn for the worse following his recent hospital stay to undergo treatment for pancreatic cancer, and, on Wednesday, a local TV news station in Modena reported Pavarotti was on his death bed after suffering kidney failure. Friends and family of the 71-year-old singer held a bedside vigil at his home in Modena, located in northern Italy. A spokesperson for the University Policlinico hospital, where the singer was previously treated, refused to comment on the status of his health. Pavarotti underwent surgery for cancer last year and had at least five rounds of chemotherapy. In addition to his innumerable opera roles, Pavarotti also starred in the 1982 film Yes, Giorgio and won an Emmy award for his 1985 appearance on the PBS Great Performances series.

I don't follow opera music, but without a doubt, Pavarotti was the most famous contemporary opera singer. Who didn't know his name?
R.I.P. sir.

[frankenjohn]

R.I.P.