ArmyOfShadows Tagged Articles at Cinematical

• James Aljian (c.1932-2007) - Vice President of finance for MGM Studios in the 1970s and then for MGM/UA in the early 1980s. He died of cancer April 12, in Los Angeles. (Variety)
• Dick Arnall (1944-2007) - British animator who worked on Yellow Submarine and produced the BAFTA-nominated shorts A is for Autism and Home Road Movies. He died of pneumonia as a consequence of a brain tumor February 6. (Guardian)
• Nair Belo (1931-2007) - Brazilian actress who appears in Heart and Guts and Alberto Cavalcanti's Simon the One-Eyed. She died of heart disease April 17, in Rio De Janeiro. (Globo)
• Ariane Borg (1915-2007) - French actress who appears in The Phantom Wagon. She died April 16, in Couilly-Pont-Aux-Dames, Seine-et-Marne, France. (IMDb)
• Kitty Carlisle Hart (1910-2007) - Actress best known for starring alongside the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera. She also starred opposite Bing Crosby in She Loves Me Not and Here Is My Heart and appeared as herself in Hollywood Canteen. After more than forty years away from the movies, she made appearances in Radio Days and Six Degrees of Separation. She was also the widow of Moss Hart. She passed away following a battle with pneumonia April 17, in New York City. (MSNBC)
• Jean-Pierre Cassel (1932-2007) - French actor (pictured) who worked with many of the great masters of cinema. He starred in Melville's Army of Shadows, Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Renoir's The Elusive Corporal, Clément's Is Paris Burning? and multiple films by Chabrol and by de Broca. He also appears among the ensemble casts of Superman II, Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, Murder on the Orient Express, Prêt-à-Porter, the upcoming Asterix at the Olympic Games and the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers and its follow-ups, The Four Musketeers and The Return of the Musketeers. His son is actor Vincent Cassel, with whom he appears in Matthieu Kassovitz's Café au Lait and The Crimson Rivers. He died April 19. (Playfuls)

Before I landed the stable, glamorous and lucrative job of film critic, I lived in a small town (population about 4500) with two movie screens (the theater expanded to a whopping five screens in the spring of 1985). As of the fall of 1984, I was already a movie nut. Over the course of the year, my parents drove me to see Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, The Karate Kid, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Starman and Dune. But it was in December that I saw the light. On their TV show, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert counted down their lists of the ten best films of 1984, which contained many titles that I hadn't seen and many others I hadn't heard of: Once Upon a Time in America, Amadeus, The Cotton Club; Paris, Texas; Love Streams, Stranger than Paradise, Secret Honor, This Is Spinal Tap, The Killing Fields, Choose Me, Entre Nous, A Passage to India, Micki & Maude, The Natural, and -- oddly -- Purple Rain. I scribbled down the titles and spent the next several months hunting for them on video, feverishly watching them on my family's primitive, but then brand-new, VCR.

Nowadays, with the Internet and all, people can look up dozens (hundreds?) of ten-best lists, and unless you have a favorite critic, the result is going to be more or less a consensus of all those lists. Sadly, that generally singles out the lowest common denominator choices, the films that have been specifically created, screened and promoted as award contenders. (In other words, the films that wound up on Richard Roeper's list.)