William Friedkin’s death in August prompted a look back at his most significant work from the ’70s and ’80s, a run of movies which were controversial and only intermittently commercially successful. At his best, Friedkin’s cool, detached approach to dangerous subjects resulted in powerful movies which influenced the direction of popular genres and his work from that period remains challenging today.
In a career lasting six decades, Bert I. Gordon co-wrote, produced, directed, sometimes photographed and created the special effects for a couple of dozen cheap-and-cheerful horror and sci-fi movies. He died this week at age 100, having directed his final feature in 2015 at age 93, a pretty good record for someone who mostly worked on shoestring budgets.
Howard Curle, one of my oldest and dearest friends, passed away on August 12 after a four year fight with cancer. It will take a long time, of ever, before I can come to terms with this loss – but he has left me with decades of wonderful memories and an incalculable impact on my own work as a filmmaker and writer.
Long-time friend Dave Barber, programmer of the Cinematheque and heart and soul of the Winnipeg Film Group died on Monday July 26 after six hard weeks in hospital, leaving behind a local and national film community which owed him an enormous debt for his unceasing work to get Canadian independent cinema seen by audiences across the country. For those close to him, the loss is more personal and painful; Dave’s decency and humour affected us all deeply and its absence now leaves a painful hole which will be impossible to fill.
One of the great post-New Wave French directors recently died. Bertrand Tavernier, versatile in the subjects he tackled and deeply humanist in attitude, was 79.
Actor John Saxon died last week. With almost two-hundred roles over six decades, he was a distinctive presence on screen though never a star. In the 1970s and “80s, he worked regularly in Italian genre movies, doing much of the work that his fans most appreciated.
Agnès Varda, whose remarkable career spanned from 1955’s La Pointe Courte to the recently released Varda by Agnès (2019), has died at the age of 90. In six-and-a-half decades, she created a body of work rooted in a fascination with human beings and the social forces which shape them, in features and documentaries full of acute insights and humour.
The older I get, the more often I hear of the death of people who have touched my life in some way. This summer seems to have been worse than most.
George A. Romero, who died on July 16, a master of the horror film, was influential far beyond the movies, having originated the now-ubiquitous zombies of pop culture in his best known films, Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead.
Some brief comments on several recent movie-related deaths, plus random observations about an eclectic group of recently watched Blu-rays in various different genres.