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After Domino once speculated that we perhaps didn't need a threadsplit for Aretha Franklin's passing since it might not garner too many posts, I'm thrilled to inform all of you that discussion of Grumpy Cat's untimely demise has been moved here.

Huh, I've been going around with the vague assumption that Wouk has been dead for years. In addition to The Caine Mutiny, I really like The Winds of War and War & Remembrance, and I even have a soft spot for The City Boy.

L.A. wrote: Tue May 21, 2019 8:48 am Niki Lauda

This is depressing. Not only because Lauda’s legacy is immense and will forever be ranked at the top of the greatest drivers with Senna and Clark. It hurts even more because he was one of the last prominent individuals of that era of F1 who gave us the most detailed description of that unhinged, developing era of the sport.

Canadian film director Jean Beaudin

The great Green Bay Packers’ QB Bart Starr, 85

FrauBlucher wrote: Sun May 26, 2019 5:16 pm The great Green Bay Packers’ QB Bart Starr, 85

That's sad to hear, he was a class act, but he certainly lived a full life. I recommend Keith Dunnavant's biography America's Quarterback, which focuses on Starr's character and has personal reflections on his history; it's an easy read, loping and full of feel-good anecdotes. As enjoyable as that is, the better book is David Maraniss' When Pride Still Mattered biography of Vince Lombardi, which is wide-ranging, more volatile, and full of human frailties, but feels more honest afterward (like David Halberstam's sports books) because it presents a more complete picture of sports-as-conflict. It also features great anecdotes about Starr and his leadership. On video, I recommend the NFL Films "Legends of Autumn" DVDs which feature a profile of Starr and the Ice Bowl in volume 1, and the NFL America's Game series disc 1 (on Super Bowl 1 - Starr is one of the three featured interviewees). Starr (like Tarkenton, my boyhood hero) always comes across in these interviews as a decent man who kept his soul while accomplishing amazing feats in unsavory environments; some of the other characters remind me of the locker-room jocks who would pants the helpless geeks.

June Harding, best remembered as Hayley Mills' pal in The Trouble with Angels, passed away in March.

Claus von Bülow

Director Yasuo Furuhata on 20th May, who directed many films starring Ken Takahata including Station from 1981.

Archivist extraordinaire Freddy Buache.

Frank Lucas, whose story was turned into the Ridley Scott film American Gangster.

colinr0380 wrote: Sat Jun 01, 2019 7:16 pm Frank Lucas, whose story was turned into the Ridley Scott film American Gangster.

Greatly exaggerated...

Agustina Bessa-Luís, the grand dame of Portuguese literature many of whose works were adapted by Manoel de Oliveira, passes away at 96. What is most tragic is that she spent much of the last ten years incapacitated (I'm not sure to what extent) from a stroke. Still, she was/is one of the greatest writers of all time as far as I'm concerned and I say that with almost none of her work translated yet into English. That situation may soon finally be changing; it was on the verge of changing anyway but, sadly it seems, an author's death also often seems to spur such stuff along. Anyway, the two linked pieces are fine, extensive tributes (just run them through a translator).

Dr. John

So many of his early LPs are so great, especially Right Place, Wrong Time and Gris-Gris, not to mention his studio work that pre-dates it. The greats keep going.

Drucker wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 10:07 pm Dr. John

So many of his early LPs are so great, especially Right Place, Wrong Time and Gris-Gris, not to mention his studio work that pre-dates it. The greats keep going.

I haven't gotten much past his early albums, but Dr. John Plays Mac Rebannek, from the early 80s, and his last album of originals, Locked Down, from 2012, are both good as well. Gris Gris, Gumbo, and Plays Mac... are the three I've had in pretty regular rotation for the past few years.

Narciso Ibáñez Serrador, a towering figure in Spanish television who is probably best known here as the director of Who Can Kill a Child? and The House That Screamed

Ryszard Bugajski, practically a one-film director as far as his reputation outside Poland is concerned, but even if he'd only made Interrogation (1982) he'd deserve a permanent place amongst the Polish cinema giants.

As with other massively controversial Communist-era projects (for instance, the films of Jerzy Skolimowski, Jan Němec and Pavel Juráček), the film's overwhelmingly negative official receptionforced Bugajski into Canadian exile, where he worked mainly in television, but he eventually returned home, and I can thoroughly recommend General Nil (2009), The Closed Circuit (2013) and Blindness (2016) to anyone who thinks that Interrogation was a one-off.

Unlike virtually all his contemporaries, Bugajski preferred head-on confrontation to discreet euphemism, and was still at it in recent years - for instance, The Closed Circuit is about a real-life post-Communist corruption scandal that was still very much ongoing when it was made. It's also quite telling that one of his unmade projects was a film about the Kielce pogrom of 1946, in which 42 Jews, many of them death camp survivors, were murdered by their fellow Poles. Unsurprisingly, no Polish funding body would touch it, and nobody outside Poland wanted to touch the subject of postwar Polish antisemitism either - and I can well imagine how Bugajski would have approached it.

Wow, that's pretty eerie. Only last night I'd decided to watch Interrogation again, after
not having seen it in several years. Still a powerful film by an incredibly talented director.

Hopefully Second Run will reissue it on Blu-ray sometime in the future.

Hopefully Polish rightsholders will belatedly realise what constitutes a commercially realistic fee!

Put it like this: there's a reason why Second Run's tally of Polish BDs is currently at a big round zero, despite dozens of HD masters now being available.

Too true. I should've added quotation marks to "sometime."