dead list

Sir Howard Morrison OBE died on September 24.
There have been plenty of tributes to him, the best being a 15 minutes summary of his career on radio live.

Interesting to hear that his OBE and knighthood wasn’t for services to music, but for the work he did for Maori children. This was a side if him that didn’t get a lot of publicity.

The tangi went on for five days and it was estimated that well over 10,000 people turned up to say farewell.

On the day of his death, talkback hosts Willie Jackson and John Tamihere opened the lines for people to talk about him. It was interesting to hear people in provincial New Zealand remember concerts from the 60s and seventies, or people who had met him.

The overall feeling I got is that New Zealand is, at heart a small town. And that‘s no bad thing.

cashed out

dead-kashin the elephant-euthanised on monday 24 august after a long illness

there hasn't been a time that i remember that kashin wasn't at the auckland zoo. and yeah, i had the kashin money box that was issued in the early seventies to help kids get used to the idea of saving (i wonder if i've still got an asb account somewhere)

i mourn him, noy for himself but because another piece of my past has been lost and gone forever

r.i.p kashin

john hughes is dead

sixteen candles, pretty in pink, some kind of wonderful,weird science, planes, trains and automobiles. these films are the cinematic equivilant of a big mac and fries, but they were kind of appealing. ok they were basically standard teenage romcoms, but the differnce was that hughes didn't assume that teenagers were a homogenous bunch, but that there were a large group of sub-cultures in theage group. he got a fair bit of praise for this, and his view of teenagers has informed teenage cinema since (see 10 things i hate about you, for instance)

nontheless they're not bad films and ok for a mindless 90 minutes

the two films he will be best remembered for (at least according to the media) were ferris buellers day off and the breakfast club.. both of them screened on tv last year. ferris bueller held up pretty well, but i was surprised how much the breakfast club irritated me.
when i first saw it in the mid eighties, i actually liked it a lot as an attempt to take young people seriously. i did notice that hughes seemed to be indulging in SIGNIFICANT WRITING, but the performances managed to overcome this and actually make a quiet and effecting film.
however, when i saw it last year, the characters all seemed to be a bunch of selfish whining brats and i couldn't help muttering "wait till you get out into the real world, you little snots"
i guess its a movie you should see when you're fifteen and then never see again.

if hughes was one of the giants of eighties cinema, then we must remember the duff films. john hughes, you are accused of making:
uncle buck
home alone
home alone 2
101 and 102 dalmations
(most of these have the same plot)

he hadn't make a film in some years, but his films (and their soundtracks) still strike a chord in the teemagers of the eighties

dead list

david carradine
i vaguely remember kung fu, his series from the seventies, and yeah, i sat through kill bill. both parts. twice
i just found it annoying that these were the only two productions mentioned in his obituary. what about boxcar bertha? or the long riders, or even (the original) death race 2000.

for my money, his best role was as woody guthrie in bound for glory

as for the rumors surrounding his death, i don't really care.

dead list

danny la rue (distant memories of 1970s british variety shows)

i've been cinematically violated

i intended to note the death of don deluise, largely becasue of his work as one of mel brooks' stock company in the seventies, although it seems that most of the tributes focused on his performance in "cannonball run"

however, i discussing his death with rob, i remebered that he had appeared in a truly horrendous film called "the silence of the hams". yes, its a parody film and for a long time, i considered up there wikth sister act 2 as one of the worst films ever made.

then yesterday, i saw the first 40 minutes of "meet the spartans" ( idin't see the rest as i had to go to dialysis".

yes, i get the joke, the spartans were repressed homosexuals, homosexuality is funny, reality tv shows are funny, celebreties are funny, farting is funny, ripping off other people is funny.

i disagree. i did not laugh once. i almost vomited, but i did not laugh once.

compared to eatching this film, having two ten inch needles shoved into my arm came as an absolute delight.

the saddest thing about this fil? accoring to wikipedia, it grossed $84 million dollars.

heaven tonight

russell brown on public address notes the death os steve android of the christchurch band the androids.
they issued one single "auckland tonight/getting jumpy". i don't have the single but i have both songs on various complimations. classic bits of nz post punk pop.

(best of the complimations, apart from ak79, is a thing i picked up for 5 bucks called "christchurch music". its a double cd that has a wide range of christchurch sourced music from dinah lee (do the bluebeat) and lutha 9only time will let us know), to bic runga, the narcs and the feelers and the gordons (adults and children), jpse (i like rain) and the johnnys (who killed johnny). the androids track is "getting jumpy")

mr brown also notes that its the ten year anniversary of the death of kevin amith, actor, comic and one third of "say yes to apes" beleive it or not, i do have a copy of the ablbum he released under the name hyphen-smythe

Dead List 3

Note the death of Wendy Richards
I've never seen Eastenders, so I didn't know her from there, but that wasn't her only role. On Radio Live yesterday Andrew patterson noted that she was also famous for appearing in "one of the funniest British sitcoms ever"
Anyone know what tthis was, because I only remember her from "Are you being served?' which was...um...crap.

Another death that will only resonate for New Zealanders who remember the seventies.
The dear departed is Robert Bruce, a wrestler who appeared on 'On the mat". After that show folded, he did some stunt work and eventually became an agent. His clients included Temuera Morrison and Cliff Curtis.
Apparently, Robert Bruce was his real name.

Names have been a topic much discussed of late. There seems to be a backlash against people who give their kids "special" names. There is a current thread on the Herald site that discuses this.

The tragedy is that some names gain a resonance that wasn't originally intended. The latest child deaath in NZ was a six month old named Cherish. Ironiaclly, she appears to have died from neglect...

brief encounter

about a year ago, 15 year old pihema cameron and a friend decided to round off a day of smoking dak and drinking by spraying his mark on the fence of 50 year old bruce
emery, who had been tagged before, grabbed a knife and ran outside to confront the youths.
either emery stabbed cameron or cameron confronted him and fell on the knife-the end result was the same; pihema cameron died.
emery went home, cleaned the knife and went to bed.
he was arrested a couple of days later and was charged with manslaughter.
this afternoon, he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison.

this has been a contentious case. there is, of course, concern over the death of a "child" (15 is probably stretching that description), but there is also a lot of support for emery. tagging is a problem and had emery called the police, it was likley that they wouldn't have bothered taking the call.

did pihema cameron deserve to die? well, no, but it is disturbing that a number of my fellow citizens believe that he got what he disturbed.

there has also been the traditional cry of "where were the parents?"

then there is emery. he has lost his business and his freedom, his family have had to move as they have been getting death threats.

bad decisions all round

de-lux

as mac said on facebook, bummed about the death of lux interior of the cramps
actually saw them when they were in nz, when was that now?
(actually 85 or 86)
dug out my old copy of a date with elvis and gave it a spin

have also put my favourite cramps song-kizmiaz-on my blip.fm profile

rip lux

WASP swatted

i note the death of john updike.
can't say i was a fan.
the herald report notes that he wrote "the witches of eastwick" and some other stuff (quality of nz reporting, huh?)
wikipedia is a little more forthcoming.

i quite liked the movie of witches, so i thought i'd give the book a try. i read the first couple of chapters and then put it down, meaning to go back to it, but i never did.
i may still have it around somewhere, i might dig it out and give it another try
you known what they say, as long as an authour is still being read, he's never really dead

carried off

two deaths this week
the first is jack douglas, best known as a regular in the carry on films, often playing sid james' gormless sidekick

a couple of years ago, tv3 screened a different carry on each day during the christmas break. i'm not a huge fan, but having a fondness for british comedy, i tuned in when i wasn't doing anything else
they were, i guess, a kind of filmed seaside postcard, mild smut, double entendres and so on

the best of them were parodies of other films (carry on cleo, carry on henry) and so on
its odd but as films became more permissive, the team kept on with the same old format and so looked tired and out of date. the one time where they tried to matchn the "confessions" series was the worst carry on i'd seen-carry on emmanuelle.

my fellow dead list collector robbie and i tried to work out how many carry on regulars are left.
barbara windsor is currently on eastenders, apparently jim dale does the audio book versions of harry potter-after that we got into an arguement over who as a regular.

Adourned sine die

A bad week.

The third death I noted was that of John Mortimor, creator of Rumpole of the Bailey.

Rumpole had a huge impact. Apparently at the height of the show's popularity, there were a number of lawyers emulating him-drinking at wine bars and reciting poetry.

I first heard the show before I saw it-there was a radio version starring Maurice Denham. the I got the books and finally saw the TV Shows

They are now slowly being released on DVDs and still hold up well.

Mortimor was still publishing-Rumpole and the Reign of Terror came out last year and believe that there is another one that's just come out. time for another trip to the bookshop.

He also wrote other things. I quite enjoyed Dunster and Paradise Postponed, although his book of interviews were oddly unsatisfying being as much about Mortimer as they were about his subjects.

Still, RIP Mr Mortimer

Be seeing you

Also dead this week was Patrick McGoohan
Obviously, he will be best remebered for The Prisoner. I got the DVDs a couple of years ago-it is still a really good series.

This wasn't all he did, though. Most of the coverage of the death has mentioned Braveheart, which he was good in.

One that is missed however, was a film he made for Disney. The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh aka Dr Syn. I don't remeber much about it except that it was set in England and had McGoohan as a priest(?) by day and a highwayman with a sack over his head at night.

I'll have to try and find it.

Dead List

it's a tragedy when people die and there have been a lot of them this week
here is an opportunity to pay tribute to the famous who have gone.

The first one this week was Ricarado Motalban.
I don't remember ever watching Fantasy Island, although the small guy in the white suit yelling "the plane, the plane" is a cultural symbol of my time

i do remeber him from star trek-the wrath of khan (and from the original star trek episode "space seed"