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Fuck 2016.

Paul Gregory, producer of Night of the Hunter and The Naked and the Dead, a suicide at 95 due to failing health, in December and just now being made public.

Ribs wrote:Raoul Coutard

Its difficult to think of a better tribute to Coutard than the opening scene of Contempt, in which he appears!

Well 2016 is just on a roll isn't it

Makes sense he couldn't live in this new world.

Cohen's death was the breaking point for me. Life goes on, but what a shock.

With all the great musicians that passed on this year, now they have their songwriter.

To be fair, Cohen's made it publicly known that he was close to death twice this year, but it still sucks no matter how you frame it.

(And between Prince, Bowie and Haggard, 2016 already lost plenty of great songwriters!)

An enormous loss. If you haven't heard the title track from his latest album ('You Want It Darker'), I urge you too.

It's difficult to think of a work of contemporary art that better reflects the existential ... not fear perhaps ... but atmosphere that seems to pervade many people at the moment.

As the great man said in another of his songs:

Things are going to slide. There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code.
Get ready for the future. It is murder.

Yeah, a complete reversal of mood given memories of Cohen playing "Democracy" in 2008 to thunderous applause. Jesus...

Well, that's... not a shock, but still a shockwave. For all the talk of 2016 being so terrible, in the death department and otherwise, it really is.

hearthesilence wrote:(And between Prince, Bowie and Haggard, 2016 already lost plenty of great songwriters!)

Have to add Guy Clark who's been missing from this thread anyway.

Robert Vaughn.

The Oscars in memorium segment is going to be half the ceremony

Nah, they'll just "forget" half of them.

swo17 wrote:Nah, they'll just "forget" half of them.

They'll all be included in the Academy's online PowerPoint presentation, while the broadcast montage will be made up of dead publicists.

antnield wrote:Robert Vaughn.

And so the last of the original Magnificent Seven passes away.

Cohen apparently passed away on Monday and was buried yesterday. Glad he didn't see what happened on Tuesday.

I'm basically a musical illiterate, but the thing that sprang to mind relating to Leonard Cohen was the way that his music kicked off the free-wheeling soundscape of Natural Born Killers (that's a film that really needs an in-depth essay exploring its music cues as much as one exploring its different film style references, and how they're all swirling in and out of each other to create a cultural miasma of clashing tones and styles).

And the thing that most came to me regarding Robert Vaughn is that he gets one of the most horrifically unfair deaths in The Towering Inferno (next to the couple trapped in the office early on and Jennifer Jones plunging out of the Great Glass Elevator!), where in attempting to defuse a panic he ends up getting dragged out of the building on that overloaded breeches buoy ferrying people to the other tower, before getting pushed off of it by the main bad guy of the film!

(Looking up on imdb I had not previously realised that Vaghn provided the voice of the sentient computer house menacing Julie Christie in Donald Cammell's Demon Seed! And for horror fans he turns up in a Joe D'Amato film, Zombie 5: Killing Birds as the blind, doom-proclaiming owner of the dilapidated mansion that a bunch of teens unwisely decide to spend the night in!)

Leon Russell.

Tulsa news station is reporting Leon Russell has passed away.

Tom Neyman, aka The Master from Manos: The Hands of fate, as per his daughter on Facebook.

Gwen Ifill. She was 61.