Omnibus RIP Thread
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Scape @ Mon May 22, 2023 1:43 pm
He was epic in Rome.
DrCaleb @ Mon May 22, 2023 5:38 pm
Yea, he was great in Rome. I liked him in Punisher:WZ too.
xerxes @ Wed May 24, 2023 12:30 pm
Tina Turner: legendary rock’n’roll singer dies aged 83
Tina Turner, the pioneering rock’n’roll star who became a pop behemoth in the 1980s, has died aged 83 after a long illness.
She had suffered ill health in recent years, being diagnosed with intestinal cancer in 2016 and having a kidney transplant in 2017.
Turner affirmed and amplified Black women’s formative stake in rock’n’roll, defining that era of music to the extent that Mick Jagger admitted to taking inspiration from her high-kicking, energetic live performances for his stage persona. After two decades of working with her abusive husband, Ike Turner, she struck out alone and – after a few false starts – became one of the defining pop icons of the 1980s with the album Private Dancer. Her life was chronicled in three memoirs, a biopic, a jukebox musical, and in 2021, the acclaimed documentary film, Tina.
Damn. RIP to the queen of rock n roll.
raydan @ Wed May 24, 2023 1:22 pm
Strutz @ Wed May 24, 2023 2:09 pm
RIP Tina. You rocked the world.
raydan @ Wed May 24, 2023 2:14 pm
She's got legs
She knows how to use them
DrCaleb @ Wed May 24, 2023 3:05 pm
DrCaleb @ Thu Jun 08, 2023 9:48 am
xerxes @ Thu Jun 08, 2023 10:53 am
It damn well better be. Now he can join his butt buddy Jerry Falwell in hell where they both came from.
xerxes @ Mon Jun 12, 2023 8:03 pm
Silvio Berlusconi, scandal-ridden former Italian prime minister, dies aged 86
Allies and critics have paid tribute to the former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, the country’s longest-serving postwar leader and one of its most divisive, who has died aged 86.
The billionaire media tycoon and former AC Milan owner who entered politics at the head of his own Forza Italia in the 1990s as the traditional parties of the right collapsed led three governments between 1994 and 2011 and succeeded in making a comeback in 2017 despite a career tainted by sex scandals, allegations of corruption and a tax fraud conviction.
He died at the San Raffaele hospital in Milan, where he had spent six weeks this spring undergoing treatment for a lung infection linked to a chronic myelomonocytic leukaemia before being readmitted.
The Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, whose governing coalition includes Berlusconi’s Forza Italia as a junior member, said on Monday: “Silvio Berlusconi was above all a fighter. He was a man who was never afraid to stand up for his convictions, and it was exactly that courage and determination that made him one of the most influential men in the history of Italy.”
The two had recently disagreed over the war in Ukraine and Berlusconi’s friendship with Russian president, Vladimir Putin, who had sent him bottles of vodka for his most recent birthday. On Monday, the Russian embassy in Rome described Berlusconi as a great statesman and visionary, while Putin, in what appeared to be a deeply personal statement, said he was a “dear person, a true friend”.
Matteo Salvini, the deputy prime minister, described Berlusconi as “a great friend and a great Italian man”. Italy’s defence minister, Guido Crosetto, described Berlusconi’s death as “a great, enormous pain”. “He leaves a huge void because he was great. An era is over, an era is closing. I loved him very much. Goodbye Silvio.”
The former prime minister’s funeral is to be held on Wednesday in Milan – a city deeply associated with Berlusconi – when Italy will also mark a national day of mourning. Supporters draped in the flags of Forza Italia and AC Milan, which he owned between 1986 and 2107, gathered on Monday outside the Milan hospital where he died.
Born in Milan in 1936 to a middle-class family, Berlusconi began his business career in property development before going on to found Mediaset, Italy’s largest commercial broadcaster.
Forza Italia was founded in 1993 and a year later, Berlusconi was the first prime minister to be elected without previously having held a government office. His second term in office, between 2001 and 2006, was the longest served by any Italian leader since the second world war. He returned to power in 2008 but was forced to resign in 2011 amid an acute debt crisis and facing allegations he had hosted “bunga bunga” sex parties with underage girls, something he denied.
He was acquitted on appeal on all charges related to the parties, but was convicted of tax fraud in late 2012, for which he served his year-long sentence doing part-time community service at a residential home in Milan. His ban on running for office was lifted in time for the general elections in 2018, when Forza Italia ran in coalition with the League and Brothers of Italy but the parties fell short of the 40% required to govern.
In 2019, Berlusconi won a seat in the European parliament, and in general elections in October 2022 his party returned to power in a coalition led by Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Berlusconi was also elected as a senator.
It's been a good week for POS assholes who outstayed their welcome on Earth finally dying. You're next Kissinger....Satan's calling you home.
xerxes @ Tue Jun 13, 2023 5:32 pm
Cormac McCarthy, celebrated US novelist, dies aged 89
$1:
Cormac McCarthy has died at the age of 89, the American author’s publisher has announced.
McCarthy died in his home of natural causes. His son John McCarthy confirmed the death.
McCarthy was best known for The Road, the 2006 post-apocalyptic novel about a journey taken by a father and his son. Other critically acclaimed books by McCarthy are All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, both of which were turned into films. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, in 2007, dominated that year’s Academy Awards and won best picture, while the 2009 film of The Road was also well received.
Other authors shared their thoughts on the death of their contemporary. Stephen King wrote on Twitter: “Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89. He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.”
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, McCarthy was revered as a reclusive novelist whose bleakly violent, apocalyptic visions of the American south won him fans from Oprah Winfrey to Saul Bellow.
Widely seen as one of the US’s greatest novelists, McCarthy chronicled – in pared-back, dense, austere prose that prompted comparisons with authors including Herman Melville and William Faulkner – the violent lives of troubled characters. These ranged from No Country for Old Men’s Llewelyn Moss, who steals a case full of money from a scene of violent death near the Rio Grande and finds himself hunted, to the unnamed father and son in The Road, who walk a post-apocalyptic American hellscape peopled with cannibals and rapists.
For John Banville, McCarthy was an “extraordinary novelist, one of the very finest at work today, in America and in the wider world”, whose “work stands proud of the literary landscape, like one of those majestic, sharp-shadowed buttes in Monument Valley, though his colours can be as delicate as the palest shades of the Painted Desert”.
Saul Bellow, who chose him as a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant in 1981, praised his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences”, while the literary critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian “not only the ultimate western” but “the ultimate dark dramatisation of violence”, placing him alongside three other contemporaries he said had touched the sublime: Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.
McCarthy gave few interviews, with details about his life sparse for decades. He grew up outside Knoxville, Tennessee, dropped out of the University of Tennessee, and joined the US air force for four years before going back to university, dropping out again, and beginning to write novels in 1959. His 1965 debut The Orchard Keeper, written while he worked as an auto mechanic and living in poverty, told of a young boy in rural Tennessee, and the outlaw who has killed his father. It was followed by novels including 1968’s Outer Dark, in which a woman has her brother’s child; 1973’s Child of God, about a serial killer in the hill country of east Tennessee; and the semi-autobiographical Suttree in 1979, which was often described as his funniest novel.
It was in 1985, with Blood Meridian, that McCarthy found critical acclaim. Based on real events on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1950s, it follows the story of a 14-year-old Tennessean who finds himself in a world where Native Americans are being murdered. The New York Times said it “may be the bloodiest book since the Iliad” in a rare piece which included an interview with the novelist.
“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the paper. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
From early, McCarthy’s style was instantly recognisable: sparse, often entirely omitting punctuation and using polysyndeton – inserting conjugations to slow the rhythm of his language – to create a sombre, melancholic tone. He credited Melville, Dostoevsky and Faulkner as formative, while professing his indifference to authors who didn’t “deal with issues of life and death”.
His 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses was the first in the Border trilogy, which chronicled the lives of two cowboys working on the US-Mexico frontier. The novel won the National Book Award and widespread fame for McCarthy, while the second, The Crossing, in 1994, and the concluding volume, Cities of the Plain, in 1998, were also acclaimed.
McCarthy wrote a play, The Stonemason, in 1994, then turned his 1984 screenplay No Country for Old Men into a novel in 2005; the Coen brothers adapted the bleak tale into an Oscar-winning film in 2007. That same year, McCarthy won the Pulitzer prize for his 2006 novel The Road, a book he credited to the arrival of his second son, John Francis, in 2004 when the author was in his late 60s. In his first ever television interview, with Oprah Winfrey in 2007, he said he hoped readers of The Road would take away the message that they should “simply care about things and people and be more appreciative. Life is pretty damn good, even when it looks bad. We should be grateful.”
McCarthy had more success with other people’s adaptations of his work than his own screenplays. But unlike No Country for Old Men, his 2011 screenplay for the HBO film The Sunset Limited – originally a play – was not widely distributed or seen, while an adaptation of his 1984 screenplay The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender, was alternately panned as one of the worst films of 2013, and praised for being “deliberately unobvious”.
In 2009, a Texas university acquired McCarthy’s 98-box archive, which revealed that McCarthy was then working on three novels. More than a decade later, two of them were released in 2022: The Passenger and Stella Maris, two connected novels that follow Bobby and Alicia Western, two siblings who are tormented by the legacy of their physicist father, who helped develop the atom bomb.
The author married three times and lived in Spain and Texas for many years before settling in New Mexico, where he lived for three decades.
Asked by Winfrey in 2007 if he cared that he had millions of readers, he said: “In all honesty I have to say I really don’t. You would like for the people who appreciate the book to read it but as far as many, many people reading it, so what? It’s OK. Nothing wrong with it.”
McCarthy died in his home of natural causes. His son John McCarthy confirmed the death.
McCarthy was best known for The Road, the 2006 post-apocalyptic novel about a journey taken by a father and his son. Other critically acclaimed books by McCarthy are All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, both of which were turned into films. The Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men, in 2007, dominated that year’s Academy Awards and won best picture, while the 2009 film of The Road was also well received.
Other authors shared their thoughts on the death of their contemporary. Stephen King wrote on Twitter: “Cormac McCarthy, maybe the greatest American novelist of my time, has passed away at 89. He was full of years and created a fine body of work, but I still mourn his passing.”
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1933, McCarthy was revered as a reclusive novelist whose bleakly violent, apocalyptic visions of the American south won him fans from Oprah Winfrey to Saul Bellow.
Widely seen as one of the US’s greatest novelists, McCarthy chronicled – in pared-back, dense, austere prose that prompted comparisons with authors including Herman Melville and William Faulkner – the violent lives of troubled characters. These ranged from No Country for Old Men’s Llewelyn Moss, who steals a case full of money from a scene of violent death near the Rio Grande and finds himself hunted, to the unnamed father and son in The Road, who walk a post-apocalyptic American hellscape peopled with cannibals and rapists.
For John Banville, McCarthy was an “extraordinary novelist, one of the very finest at work today, in America and in the wider world”, whose “work stands proud of the literary landscape, like one of those majestic, sharp-shadowed buttes in Monument Valley, though his colours can be as delicate as the palest shades of the Painted Desert”.
Saul Bellow, who chose him as a recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant in 1981, praised his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences”, while the literary critic Harold Bloom called McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian “not only the ultimate western” but “the ultimate dark dramatisation of violence”, placing him alongside three other contemporaries he said had touched the sublime: Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon.
McCarthy gave few interviews, with details about his life sparse for decades. He grew up outside Knoxville, Tennessee, dropped out of the University of Tennessee, and joined the US air force for four years before going back to university, dropping out again, and beginning to write novels in 1959. His 1965 debut The Orchard Keeper, written while he worked as an auto mechanic and living in poverty, told of a young boy in rural Tennessee, and the outlaw who has killed his father. It was followed by novels including 1968’s Outer Dark, in which a woman has her brother’s child; 1973’s Child of God, about a serial killer in the hill country of east Tennessee; and the semi-autobiographical Suttree in 1979, which was often described as his funniest novel.
It was in 1985, with Blood Meridian, that McCarthy found critical acclaim. Based on real events on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1950s, it follows the story of a 14-year-old Tennessean who finds himself in a world where Native Americans are being murdered. The New York Times said it “may be the bloodiest book since the Iliad” in a rare piece which included an interview with the novelist.
“There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed,” McCarthy told the paper. “I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”
From early, McCarthy’s style was instantly recognisable: sparse, often entirely omitting punctuation and using polysyndeton – inserting conjugations to slow the rhythm of his language – to create a sombre, melancholic tone. He credited Melville, Dostoevsky and Faulkner as formative, while professing his indifference to authors who didn’t “deal with issues of life and death”.
His 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses was the first in the Border trilogy, which chronicled the lives of two cowboys working on the US-Mexico frontier. The novel won the National Book Award and widespread fame for McCarthy, while the second, The Crossing, in 1994, and the concluding volume, Cities of the Plain, in 1998, were also acclaimed.
McCarthy wrote a play, The Stonemason, in 1994, then turned his 1984 screenplay No Country for Old Men into a novel in 2005; the Coen brothers adapted the bleak tale into an Oscar-winning film in 2007. That same year, McCarthy won the Pulitzer prize for his 2006 novel The Road, a book he credited to the arrival of his second son, John Francis, in 2004 when the author was in his late 60s. In his first ever television interview, with Oprah Winfrey in 2007, he said he hoped readers of The Road would take away the message that they should “simply care about things and people and be more appreciative. Life is pretty damn good, even when it looks bad. We should be grateful.”
McCarthy had more success with other people’s adaptations of his work than his own screenplays. But unlike No Country for Old Men, his 2011 screenplay for the HBO film The Sunset Limited – originally a play – was not widely distributed or seen, while an adaptation of his 1984 screenplay The Counselor, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Brad Pitt and Michael Fassbender, was alternately panned as one of the worst films of 2013, and praised for being “deliberately unobvious”.
In 2009, a Texas university acquired McCarthy’s 98-box archive, which revealed that McCarthy was then working on three novels. More than a decade later, two of them were released in 2022: The Passenger and Stella Maris, two connected novels that follow Bobby and Alicia Western, two siblings who are tormented by the legacy of their physicist father, who helped develop the atom bomb.
The author married three times and lived in Spain and Texas for many years before settling in New Mexico, where he lived for three decades.
Asked by Winfrey in 2007 if he cared that he had millions of readers, he said: “In all honesty I have to say I really don’t. You would like for the people who appreciate the book to read it but as far as many, many people reading it, so what? It’s OK. Nothing wrong with it.”
Sad. He was a great writer. The Road was grim af (even moreso than the movie) but No Country for Old Men was gripping.
DrCaleb @ Tue Jun 13, 2023 7:03 pm
bootlegga @ Tue Jun 27, 2023 3:23 pm
Julian Sands: Remains found in California area where British actor disappeared
$1:
Hikers in the US have found human remains near the area where British actor Julian Sands disappeared.
Identification should be completed next week, the San Bernardino County sheriff's department in south California said on Saturday.
Sands, 65, disappeared on 13 January while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Los Angeles.
He is best known for his roles in the Oscar-winning film A Room With A View, and the TV dramas 24 and Smallville.
His other credits included 2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which he appeared opposite Daniel Craig.
Identification should be completed next week, the San Bernardino County sheriff's department in south California said on Saturday.
Sands, 65, disappeared on 13 January while hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains, north of Los Angeles.
He is best known for his roles in the Oscar-winning film A Room With A View, and the TV dramas 24 and Smallville.
His other credits included 2011's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, in which he appeared opposite Daniel Craig.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66012686
xerxes @ Fri Jun 30, 2023 3:34 pm
Alan Arkin, Oscar winning actor in Little Miss Sunshine, dies aged 89
Alan Arkin, the veteran US actor whose multi-decade career spanned the likes of Catch-22, Edward Scissorhands and Little Miss Sunshine (for which he won an Oscar), has died aged 89. His sons confirmed the news in a statement to People magazine, saying: “Our father was a uniquely talented force of nature, both as an artist and a man. A loving husband, father, grand and great grandfather, he was adored and will be deeply missed.”
Fellow actors paid tribute to Arkin on social media. Natasha Lyonne, who co-starred with him in the indie film Slums of Beverly Hills wrote: “The favorite of all my movie dads and so brilliant, inspiring and kind for so long.” Seinfeld star Jason Alexander said: “Such a wonderful, original voice for comedy… I learned so much from watching him. And the laughs I got from his glorious work seem endless. May he rest well.” Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean added: “Charming, hilarious, and armed with a flawless bullshit detector, he was pure pleasure to be with.”
Thanos @ Fri Jun 30, 2023 4:33 pm
RIP Alan. From Yossarian in Catch-22 to a role as a mob boss in something as insane as The Jerky Boys movie he was one of the best there ever was.
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