RIP Tom Sizemore

 Tom Sizemore was 61...he has a stroke in February so he was in a coma and his brother decide to switch off the life support :(,  a tough way to end a very tumultuous life...

my favorite part of his must be in Heat (1995)

he was in both Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down playing tough soldiers

and Natural Born Killers and True Romance...

but he did over 250 films, mostly B and Z fare after 2004, after his conviction and scandal with Heidi Fleiss, a downward spiral with drugs and more drugs. His small comeback was in the new Twin Peaks series...

RIP Wayne Shorter

 Another One of the greatest jazz players & composers is gone, mr. Wayne Shorter...he was 89...

he played in the Miles David Quintet 

and a lot with Herbie Hancock...

he co-founded Weather Report in 1970 with Joe Zawinul, Miroslav Vitous and Airto Moreira.

In the movies he collaborated with James Newton Howard on the soundtracks of Glengarry Glen Ross and The Fugitive. Also was one of musicians in the Philippe Sarde scored L'homme aux yeux d'argent (1985), together with Herbie Hancock,  Ron Carter and others.

This may be his best song...Speak No Evil, from the album with the same name...

Wayne Shoter on sax, Elvin Jones on drums, Herbie Hancock on piano, Ron Carter on Bass, Freddie Hubbard on trumpet.

and here's a program from Jazz Lincoln Center Orchestra (JLCO) with Wayne Shorter from 2017..,

The Nightingale (2018)

Due to her episode The Murmuring in Guillermo del Toro's anthology The Cabinet of Curiosities for Netflix, I checked Jennifer Kent's filmography. And saw her follow-up to The Babadook (my review here), her debut feature in 2014 (and horror movie of that year) is The Nightingale (2018), a gritty but also poetical feminine revenge period thriller set in Tasmania in 1825 which she wrote as well. A very intense but slow moving (especially the first half hour) film, it runs 2h 16 min.  Irish actress Aisling Franciosi (Clare) holds the film in a very powerful performance.  Brit Sam Clafin is the good looking but mega evil baddie lieutenant Hawkins.

Shades of recent  mini-series The English came to my mind, but this was way before that. 

Special Price of the Jury in Venice 2018.  And Marcello Mastroianni award for best actor to aboriginal Baykali Ganambarr (Billy). Plus a ton of awards, at home in Australia and ww. 

Supporting rogue, Damon Herriman as Ruse, he is Charles Manson in Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood and Mindhunter series, also at home in Oz in the series Mr. Inbetween and the mini-series The Tourist.

Clare is the Nightingale because she sings with a golden voice. The end credits feature 1988 The Chieftains song, The Strayaway Child, featuring a performing didgeridoo. 

3 1/2 out if 5 / 7 out of 10 

RIP Raquel Welch

Also this day has come...(15 Feb. 2023) one of the most beautiful women that walked the planet into the screen is gone. A real Goddess! Unbelievable, Raquel Welch was 82 now...She as born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago on September 5th 1940, her father Bolivian, her mother Irish-American. Her first job was on TV as a weatherwoman! She had four husbands and two daughters. 

During the "pandemic" in 2020 I caught up with some of her films, the excellent Hannie Caulder (1971), a revenge western that has a touch s feminism in in. Then saw again the whodunnit The Last of Sheila (1973, a model for the new Glass Onion mystery). About her his co-star James Mason said infamously, that she was "the most selfish, ill-mannered, inconsiderate actress that I have ever had the displeasure of working with."..)  Why he said that, beats me. It's the only bad thing I heard about her really.

Then saw the spaghetti interracial western 100 Rifles (1969), where she made love with/to Jim Brown. Also I saw a lot of documentary stuff and interviews on youtube. I was still mesmerized by mrs. Welch.

And I still am. She is immortal, you know? 

But the first time I saw her on the big screen as a child was not as Luana in One Million Years B.C. (1966), that ran in Romania under her name title-Luana and that I caught up at Cinema Popular in the early Eighties. No, it was as Constance de Bonacieux in Richard Lester's Three Musketeers (part one & two 1973/74). She won a Golden Globe for that part. The film played around 1976/77 in Cluj, where I was in primary school. 

And she was in the posters of Romanian Cinema magazine, the Cinemas postcard and a lot of photos in the mag. The film I mostly wanted to see with her those days was Fantastic Voyage (1966), her breakthrough role, which I finally saw on TV only in the early 90's and I taped it on VHS...til the DVD...

Also in Romanian theaters was L'animal, the Claude Zidi comedy from 1977 with her and Jean-Paul Belmondo. Which was kinda her last important part. In 1982 she was fired from the set of Cannery Row (that was meant to be her comeback and her first nudity role!) and successfully sued the studio earning a reported 15 million $!!! She went on TV movies, Fitness and yoga programs, and playing herself (in Seinfeld in 1997).  Wrote her biography, "Beyond the Cleavage" in 2000. She was on Broadway, the lead on Victor/Victoria. She even danced with a fluffy spider in The Muppets Show!

Running the Cinemateca Patria in Brasov (2014-2020) I always showed her films on her anniversary (5 September ), Fantastic Voyage, Bedazzled and 100 Rifles. One of my favorites was Fathom (1967). Great cameo in The Magic Christian (1969) as "The Princess of the whip", and the title role in Myra Breckinridge (1970, based on a novel by Gore Vidal), where she plays a transsexual and she clashed with legendary Mae West on the set. Her bit in the far-out Bluebeard (1972) as a sexy nympho nun is also a cool one.

Well, here she is to be remembered singing the aptly titled "I am a Woman", with Cher in 1975, in a very tongue-in-cheek appearance. We'll miss you all, Raquel...