"Charlton Heston, who won the 1959 best actor Oscar as the chariot-racing 'Ben-Hur' and portrayed Moses, Michelangelo, El Cid and other heroic figures in movie epics of the '50s and '60s, has died. He was 84."
       —AP

"Few films thrilled me -- or scared me -- as much as 'Soylent Green,' in which his character realizes that the stuff keeping the human race alive is made from other human beings: 'Soylent Green is people!' By then, he had played Moses and saved an entire people from destruction. Things didn't look good in 'Soylent Green,' but somehow, I thought, surely Charlton Heston could save us."
       —Manohla Dargis at the New York Times

"[T]here was something non-threatening, asexual even, to Heston's beefcakeiness: While he may have clutched Sophia Loren, Senta Berger, Janet Leigh and other babes of the era to his not-inconsiderable bosom, it never got really icky. Indeed, he seemed most comfortable expressing his sensual side by slashing away at Moorish invaders or urging his horses to ever-greater exertions on the race track."
       —James Adams at the Globe and Mail

"Where [Burt] Lancaster and [Kurt] Douglas were kinetic, bursting with restlessness, Heston was essentially static -- not so much statuesque as a statue in some audio-animatronic hall of Heroes. He stood and he spoke. That's why screenwriters loved him as much as movie audiences did. He was a hero to them all."
       —Richard Corliss at Time

"Heston succeeded at playing these courageous, imposing, appalled, beleaguered, almost classically handsome men (too much forehead, too many teeth) by overplaying them. This manly man's secret weapon was his histrionics -- it was camp. Even at his most ridiculous, Heston was hard to resist."
       —Wesley Morris at the Boston Globe

"Charlton Heston's defining performance, at least for members of my generation (whether most of us realize it or not), probably came in Wayne's World 2. He played a bit part, listed in the credits as 'Good Actor,' brought on in a gimmick to replace a man giving Wayne directions at a gas station whom Wayne complains isn't a good actor. Heston delivers the man's lines again, but does so with such pathos, such richness, that Wayne's mugging and crying in front of the camera almost seems genuine -- and Heston's Golden Hollywood baritone overacting fits the role perfectly."
       —Alex Remington at the Huffington Post

"The subject of the single most notorious pronouncement in the history of film criticism -- Michel Mourlet's proclamation that 'Charlton Heston is an axiom of the cinema' -- Heston made himself easy to dismiss in his later years with his own notorious pronouncements -- 'I'll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands' -- on behalf of the NRA. Yet I never loved him more than when he got up and walked out on a duplicitous, condescending Michael Moore in 'Bowling for Columbine.'"
       —Dave Kehr at DaveKehr.com

"It's funny--a few years back, one could really surprise people by pulling out that Michel Mourlet bit about Heston being an 'axiom of cinema;' now, thanks to the internet, almost everyone knows it. What we ought to acknowledge on his passing today is that Mourlet's pronouncement, dismissed as almost pathological hyperbole at the time and for some time after, was accurate."
       —Glenn Kenny at Premiere

[Photo: Heston in "Ben-Hur," MGM, 1959]

+ Charlton Heston Dead at 84 (AP)
+ The Man Who Touched Evil and Saved the World (NY Times)
+ Charlton Heston: a hero for his time (Globe and Mail)
+ Appreciation: Charlton Heston (Time)
+ Charlton Heston 1924-2008 (Boston Globe)
+ Rest in Peace, Charlton Heston (Huffington Post)
+ Charlton Heston 1924-2008 (DaveKehr.com)
+ Charlton Heston (Premiere)

By Alison Willmore in In quotes, Memoriam | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Charlton Heston

Ach, more death. Inventor, science fiction novelist and co-writer of "2001: A Space Odyssey" Arthur C. Clarke has passed away at age 90, after struggling with post-polio syndrome for almost 20 years. In December of last year, on his 90th birthday, Clarke recorded a goodbye message to his fans that can be found here on YouTube, saying "I now spend a good part of my day dreaming of times past, present and future...Being completely wheelchaired doesn't stop my mind from roaming the universe. On the contrary, in my time I've been very fortunate to have seen many of my dreams come true."

The LA Times has rerun an interview with Clarke from 2001:

I have a DVD player at the house. The other day, Dan Richtor, who played the ape with the bone in "2001," was here and I posed him beside the TV set showing that image. [Richtor now does payroll work for entertainment companies]. I labeled the picture: "From ape to L.A. executive in one lifetime. Is this progress?"

In his submission for Wired's 2006 six word story collection, Clarke bent the rules and went to ten words: "God said, 'Cancel Program GENESIS.' The universe ceased to exist."

[Photo: "2001: A Space Odyssey, MGM, 1968]

+ Sir Arthur C Clarke 90th Birthday reflections (YouTube)
+ Celebrity Setup: Evolution of a Sci-Fi Master (LA Times)
+ Very Short Stories (Wired)

By Alison Willmore in Memoriam | Link | Recommended (2)

Tags: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke

Anthony Minghella, the Oscar-winning filmmaker behind "The English Patient," "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "Truly Madly Deeply," has passed away at age 54, reports the BBC — no further details yet as to the cause of his death.

Minghella was a director, writer and a playwright who was also chairman of the British Film Institute. He'd just finished up filming an adaptation of "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," with Jill Scott as the lead, for British television. The last film of his in theaters was 2006's little-seen "Breaking and Entering," with Jude Law as an architect who gets involved with a Serbian woman (played by Juliette Binoche) after he catches her son robbing his office. Though the film was met with a mixed response from critics, it's portrait of a beautiful, vital but unromanticized segment of London was singled out for acclaim.

[Photo: Anthony Minghella on the set of "Breaking and Entering," MGM, 2006]

Update: Variety relays that Minghella "suffered a fatal hemorrhage at 5 a.m. GMT Tuesday at Charing Cross Hospital in London, where he had undergone an operation last week on a growth in his neck."

+ Director Minghella dies aged 54 (BBC)
+ Anthony Minghella dies at 54 (Variety)

By Alison Willmore in Memoriam | Link | Recommended (1)

Tags: Anthony Minghella

Kon Ichikawa, the Japanese director responsible for, among other things, the great anti-war films "The Burmese Harp" and "Fires on the Plain," passed away yesterday in Tokyo. From Douglas Martin in the New York Times:

Mr. Ichikawa's career reached what many consider its high point when Americans were streaming to art-cinema houses in the 1950s and '60s to see movies by emerging masters like Ingmar Bergman. In those years some critics rated Mr. Ichikawa on a level with Akira Kurosawa. He was "once hailed as one of the world's greatest directors," Olaf Möller wrote in 2001 in Film Comment.

From Mark Schilling at Variety:

Best known abroad for "The Burmese Harp" (1956) and "Fires on the Plain (1959), pics that vividly, if grimly, portrayed the human costs of WWII, as well as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics docu "Tokyo Olympiad" (1965), Ichikawa was the last directorial giant of Japan's now vanished studio studio system, which reached its peak in the 1950s and early 1960s, before succumbing to the advance of television.

Michael Atkinson wrote about "The Burmese Harp" for IFC News:

A decade after Hiroshima, a Japanese filmmaker makes the most heartbreaking anti-war film of all time. Little about "The Burmese Harp" seems groundbreaking today -- it is simply a cudgel on your tear ducts, and arguably the first war film made anywhere that suggests that war finishes nothing, and indeed creates traumas and responsibilities without end.

+ Kon Ichikawa, Japanese Film Director, Dies at 92 (NY Times)
+ Ichikawa dead at 92 (Variety)
+ "The Burmese Harp" and "Un Chant d'Amour" (IFC News)

By Alison Willmore in Memoriam | Link | Recommended (0)

Tags: Kon Ichikawa, The Burmese Harp