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Obituary
| Topic started by NOV on Thu Jun 4 20:41:15 2009. | [Full View] |
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| From: Wibha on Thu Jun 25 19:40:27 2009. | [Full View] |
| From: NOV on Thu Jun 25 20:17:12 2009. | [Full View] |
| Sun wrote: |
| LOS ANGELES (AP) — Michael Jackson, the sensationally gifted child star who rose to become the “King of Pop” and the biggest celebrity in the world only to fall from his throne in a freakish series of scandals, died Thursday, a person with knowledge of the situation told The Associated Press. He was 50.
The person said Jackson died in a Los Angeles hospital. The person was not authorized to speak publicly and requested anonymity. The circumstances of his death were not immediately clear. Jackson was not breathing when Los Angeles Fire Department paramedics responded to a call at his Los Angeles home about 12:30 p.m., Capt. Steve Ruda told the Los Angeles Times. The paramedics performed CPR and took him to UCLA Medical Center, Ruda told the newspaper. Jackson’s death brought a tragic end to a long, bizarre, sometimes farcical decline from his peak in the 1980s, when he was popular music’s premier all-around performer, a uniter of black and white music who shattered the race barrier on MTV, dominated the charts and dazzled even more on stage. His 1982 album “Thriller” — which included the blockbuster hits “Beat It,” “Billie Jean” and “Thriller” — remains the biggest-selling album of all time, with more than 26 million copies. He was perhaps the most exciting performer of his generation, known for his feverish, crotch-grabbing dance moves and his high-pitched voice punctuated with squeals and titters. His single sequined glove, tight, military-style jacket and aviator sunglasses were trademarks second only to his ever-changing, surgically altered appearance. By some measures, he ranked alongside Elvis Presley and the Beatles as the biggest pop sensations of all time. In fact, he united two of music’s biggest names when he was briefly married to Presley’s daughter, Lisa Marie. As years went by, he became an increasingly freakish figure — a middle-aged man-child weirdly out of touch with grownup life. His skin became lighter, his nose narrower, and he spoke in a breathy, girlish voice. He surrounded himself with children at his Neverland ranch, often wore a germ mask while traveling and kept a pet chimpanzee named Bubbles as one of his closest companions. In 2005, he was cleared of charges he molested a 13-year-old cancer survivor at Neverland in 2003. He had been accused of plying the boy with alcohol and groping him. The case took a fearsome toll on his career and image, and he fell into serious financial trouble. Jackson was preparing for what was to be his greatest comeback: He was scheduled for an unprecedented 50 shows at a London arena, with the first set for July 13. He was in rehearsals in Los Angeles for the concert, an extravaganza that was to capture the classic Jackson magic: showstopping dance moves, elaborate staging and throbbing dance beats. Hundreds of people gathered outside the hospital as word of his death spread. The emergency entrance at the UCLA Medical Center, which is near Jackson’s rented home, was roped off with police tape. “Ladies and gentlemen, Michael Jackson has just died,” a woman boarding a Manhattan bus called out, shortly after the news was annunced. Immediately many riders reached for their cell phones. In New York’s Times Square, a low groan went up in the crowd when a screen flashed that Jackson had died, and people began relaying the news to friends by cell phone. “No joke. King of Pop is no more. Wow,” Michael Harris, 36, of New York City, read from a text message a friend sent to his telephone. “It’s like when Kennedy was assassinated. I will always remember being in Times Square when Michael Jackson died.” |
| From: NOV on Fri Jun 26 2:59:16 2009. | [Full View] |
| From: groucho070 on Fri Aug 7 3:25:40 2009. | [Full View] |
| From: NOV on Wed Aug 12 23:02:52 2009. | [Full View] |
| Quote: |
| Commentary: Filmmaker John Hughes fondly remembered
By A. O. Scott I've reached the age when my children sometimes ask, "Dad, what were things like in the olden days, when you were a teenager?" They mean the 1980s, and it's not so easy to explain. The ancient past never is. But in a pinch I can turn to "The Breakfast Club," "Sixteen Candles" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." The haircuts, the music, the clothes — it's all there, and also something of the buoyancy and confusion of being young in those days when VCRs were still a novelty, and vinyl records were not yet obsolete, when text was not a verb and the potential of the Internet was something not even the nerds of "Weird Science" could intuit. John Hughes, who died on Aug. 6 at 59, directed only eight films, of which the four I've mentioned are the best. All but his last, "Curly Sue," belong to the '80s, a decade in which Hughes was also busy as a producer, a screenwriter and a pop-culture embodiment of the age. Historians of cinema may be slow or begrudging in appreciating his achievement, but if auteur status is conferred by the possession of a recognizable style and set of themes, Hughes' place in the pantheon cannot be denied. Especially for those of us born between the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Bicentennial, the phrase "a John Hughes movie" will instantly conjure a range of images and associations, including the smooth, pale faces of a bevy of young actors. I cringe at the phrase "brat pack," but there they are: Judd Nelson, Jon Cryer, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Anthony Michael Hall. And above all, of course, Molly Ringwald, the ginger-haired teenager who, from 1984 to '86, was for Hughes what James Stewart had been for Frank Capra at the end of the Great Depression, and what Anna Karina had been for Jean-Luc Godard in the mid-'60s: an emblem, a muse, a poster child and an alter ego. Especially in "Sixteen Candles" and "Pretty in Pink" (directed by Howard Deutch from Hughes' script), she represented his romantic ideal of the artist as misfit, sensitive and misunderstood, aspiring to wider acceptance but reluctant to compromise too much. In "Sixteen Candles" she's Sam, the neglected younger sister and social oddball; in "Pretty in Pink" she is Andie, a poor girl in a sea of affluence. That both characters have boys' names is evidence of just how much their author identified with them. Shortly after I heard the shocking news of Hughes' death, I was talking to a friend of mine, a few years older than I am, who had seen almost none of those movies. The half-decade gap in our ages made all the difference. While I was in high school, in my own private breakfast club, she was a budding undergraduate cinephile, dressing in black and watching Godard movies. But I don't think I'm alone among my cohorts in the belief that John Hughes was our Godard, the filmmaker who crystallized our attitudes and anxieties with just the right blend of teasing and sympathy. Godard described "Masculin Féminin," his 1966 vehicle for Jean-Pierre Léaud and Karina, as a portrait of "the children of Marx and Coca-Cola." McCarthy and Ringwald, in "Pretty in Pink," were corresponding icons for the children of Ronald Reagan and New Coke. Which is not to say — I hasten to tell the children of Barack Obama and Vitamin Water — that movies provide a literal or comprehensive picture of that time. A lot of stuff is left out. Politics, for one thing. Black people, for another. And like many other filmmakers who solicit the favor of young audiences, Hughes has been faulted for smoothing over too many rough edges and softening harsh social and psychological realities. The response, which will never satisfy some critics, is that his films are fables, not documentaries. These comic dramas may seem juvenile, but they have a classicism — an attention to nuances of dialogue, an elegance of narrative design — that places them well within the noble tradition of Hollywood romance. The spirit of Ernst Lubitsch smiles on "Sixteen Candles," and some of Preston Sturges' mischief inhabits "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." In any case, it is as fairy tales rendered from experience, rather than as blunt records of life, that his mid-'80s movies live on. They capture — with a winning mixture of optimism and melancholy, with a generosity of spirit tempered by a punitive sense of right and wrong — something essential in the experience of youth. Not only in that specific era, but also before and, I'm guessing, since. Like most artists who are perceived as the voice of a generation, Hughes did not belong to the generation in question. He was a baby boomer, a member of the high school class of 1968 in Northbrook, Ill. And his vision of the classes of 1984 and after was certainly colored by a post-'60s sense of wariness and counter-counterculture suspicion. A few years ago an article in Slate pegged Hughes as a conservative, even a reactionary, whose celebration of rebellion had more to do with the middle-class resentments that brought Reagan into office than with residual anti-establishment radicalism. The answers to this accusation are: maybe so, and so what? It is true that while his heroes, most notably Ferris Bueller and the members of the Breakfast Club, are in conflict with authority, they are also stubborn in their individualism and often unapologetically materialistic. Which is part of what makes them authentic, and authentically confused. The unspecified North Shore Chicago suburb where most of these stories take place is, at first glance and in its own mind, a paradise of uniformity and privilege. And this setting, rather than being the facile hell imagined in movies like "American Beauty," is shown as a genuine expression of the American utopian ideal, a pastoral city on a hill where everyone is comfortable and everyone's the same. The paradox is that most people feel, and want to be, different. Not to smash the system or flee its clutches, but rather to find a place within it where they can be themselves, even if they like strange music, come from a poorer family or favor eccentric styles of dress. That desire is what motivates Sam, the birthday girl in "Sixteen Candles," and it also drives both the cocky Ferris Bueller and his nervous buddy Cameron. The great, paradoxical insight of "The Breakfast Club" is that alienation is the norm, that nerds, jocks, stoners, popular girls and weirdos are all, in their own ways, outsiders. Adolescence is the stage at which this contradiction is most acute, and its possible resolution most tantalizing. And when Hughes moved outside of that zone, into childhood or early adulthood, a sour, hostile undertone crept into his films. You see this in the brutal slapstick of "Home Alone" (which he wrote and produced but did not direct) and the eruptions of misogyny in "She's Having a Baby," and also in the belligerence of John Candy, who replaced Ringwald as Hughes' second self in "Planes, Trains and Automobiles" and "Uncle Buck." So you might say that, as an artist, John Hughes never outgrew high school. And it's a little eerie that Hughes died so soon after Michael Jackson, another fixture of '80s popular culture locked in perpetual youth. Their deaths make me feel old, but more than that, they make me aware of belonging to a generation that has yet to figure out adulthood, for whom life can feel like a long John Hughes movie. You know the one. That Spandau Ballet song is playing at the big dance. You remember the lyrics, even if it's been years since you heard them last. This is the sound of my soul. I bought a ticket to the world, but now I've come back again. Why do I find it hard to write the next line? |
| From: groucho070 on Wed Aug 12 23:22:28 2009. | [Full View] |
| From: NOV on Wed Aug 12 23:37:52 2009. | [Full View] |
| groucho070 wrote: |
| most of which I didn't like... |
| From: groucho070 on Wed Aug 12 23:45:24 2009. | [Full View] |
| From: NOV on Mon Sep 14 23:02:15 2009. | [Full View] |
| Quote: |
| LOS ANGELES: Patrick Swayze, the hunky actor who danced his way into viewers' hearts with "Dirty Dancing" and then broke them with "Ghost," died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.
"Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months," said a statement released Monday evening by his publicist, Annett Wolf. No other details were given. Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from a particularly deadly form of cancer. He had kept working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting "The Beast," an A&E drama series for which he had already made the pilot. It drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran on the cable television station in 2009, but A&E said it had reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season. Swayze said he opted not to use painkilling drugs while making "The Beast" because they would have taken the edge off his performance. He acknowledged that time might be running out given the grim nature of the disease. When he first went public with the illness, some reports gave him only weeks to live, but his doctor said his situation was "considerably more optimistic" than that. "I'd say five years is pretty wishful thinking," Swayze told ABC's Barbara Walters in early 2009. "Two years seems likely if you're going to believe statistics. I want to last until they find a cure, which means I'd better get a fire under it." A three-time Golden Globe nominee, Swayze became a star with his performance as the misunderstood bad-boy Johnny Castle in "Dirty Dancing." As the son of a choreographer who began his career in musical theater, he seemed a natural to play the role. A coming-of-age romance starring Jennifer Grey as an idealistic young woman on vacation with her family and Swayze as the Catskills resort's sexy (and much older) dance instructor, the film made great use of both his grace on his feet and his muscular physique. It became an international phenomenon in the summer of 1987, spawning albums, an Oscar-winning hit song in "(I've Had) the Time of My Life," stage productions and a sequel, 2004's "Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights," in which he made a cameo. Swayze performed and co-wrote a song on the soundtrack, the ballad "She's Like the Wind," inspired by his wife, Lisa Niemi. The film also gave him the chance to utter the now-classic line, "Nobody puts Baby in a corner." And it allowed him to poke fun at himself on a "Saturday Night Live" episode, in which he played a would-be Chippendales exotic dancer alongside the corpulent - and frighteningly shirtless - Chris Farley. A major crowd-pleaser, "Dirty Dancing" drew only mixed reviews from critics, though Vincent Canby wrote in The New York Times, "Given the limitations of his role, that of a poor but handsome sex-object abused by the rich women at Kellerman's Mountain House, Mr. Swayze is also good. ... He's at his best - as is the movie - when he's dancing." Swayze followed that up with the 1989 action film "Road House," in which he played a bouncer at a rowdy bar. But it was his performance in 1990's "Ghost" that showed his vulnerable, sensitive side. He starred as a murdered man trying to communicate with his fiancee (Demi Moore) - with great frustration and longing - through a psychic played by Whoopi Goldberg. Swayze said at the time that he fought for the role of Sam Wheat (director Jerry Zucker wanted Kevin Kline) but once he went in for an audition and read six scenes, he got it. Why did he want the part so badly? "It made me cry four or five times," he said of Bruce Joel Rubin's Oscar-winning script in an AP interview. "Ghost" provided yet another indelible musical moment: Swayze and Moore sensually molding pottery together to the strains of the Righteous Brothers' "Unchained Melody." It also earned a best-picture nomination and a supporting-actress Oscar for Goldberg, who said she wouldn't have won if it weren't for Swayze. "When I won my Academy Award, the only person I really thanked was Patrick," Goldberg said in March 2008 on the ABC daytime talk show "The View." Swayze himself earned three Golden Globe nominations, for "Dirty Dancing," "Ghost" and 1995's "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar," which further allowed him to toy with his masculine image. The role called for him to play a drag queen on a cross-country road trip alongside Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo. His heartthrob status almost kept him from being considered for the role of Vida Boheme. "I couldn't get seen on it because everyone viewed me as terminally heterosexually masculine-macho," he told the AP then. But he transformed himself so completely that when his screen test was sent to Steven Spielberg, whose Amblin pictures produced "To Wong Foo," Spielberg didn't recognise him. Among his earlier films, Swayze was part of the star-studded lineup of up-and-comers in Francis Ford Coppola's 1983 adaptation of S.E. Hinton's novel "The Outsiders," alongside Rob Lowe, Tom Cruise, Matt Dillon, Ralph Macchio, Emilio Estevez and Diane Lane. Swayze played Darrel "Dary" Curtis, the oldest of three wayward brothers - and essentially the father figure - in a poor family in small-town Oklahoma. Other '80s films included "Red Dawn," "Grandview U.S.A." (for which he also provided choreography) and "Youngblood," once more with Lowe, as Canadian hockey teammates. In the '90s, he made such eclectic films as "Point Break" (1991), in which he played the leader of a band of bank-robbing surfers, and the family Western "Tall Tale" (1995), in which he starred as Pecos Bill. He appeared on the cover of People magazine as its "Sexiest Man Alive" in 1991, but his career tapered off toward the end of the 1990s, when he also had stay in rehab for alcohol abuse. In 2001, he appeared in the cult favorite "Donnie Darko," and in 2003 he returned to the New York stage with "Chicago"; 2006 found him in the musical "Guys and Dolls" in London. Swayze was born in 1952 in Houston, the son of Jesse Swayze and choreographer Patsy Swayze, whose films include "Urban Cowboy." He played football but also was drawn to dance and theater, performing with the Feld, Joffrey and Harkness Ballets and appearing on Broadway as Danny Zuko in "Grease." But he turned to acting in 1978 after a series of injuries. Within a couple years of moving to Los Angeles, he made his debut in the roller-disco movie "Skatetown, U.S.A." The eclectic cast included Scott Baio, Flip Wilson, Maureen McCormack and Billy Barty. Swayze had a couple of movies in the works when his diagnosis was announced, including the drama "Powder Blue," starring Jessica Biel, Forest Whitaker and his younger brother, Don, which was scheduled for release this year. Off-screen, he was an avid conservationist who was moved by his time in Africa to shine a light on "man's greed and absolute unwillingness to operate according to Mother Nature's laws," he told the AP in 2004. Swayze was married since 1975 to Niemi, a fellow dancer who took lessons with his mother; they met when he was 19 and she was 15. A licensed pilot, Niemi would fly her husband from Los Angeles to Northern California for treatment at Stanford University Medical Center, People magazine reported in a cover story. - AP |
| From: groucho070 on Tue Sep 15 0:32:15 2009. | [Full View] |
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