Are you tired of all the false rumors of celebrity deaths (today it was Rick Astley)? And are you tired of all the jokes that Michael Jackson is really still alive somewhere, hanging out with Tupac, JFK and Elvis? So are we, but we thought we’d take both the obnoxious death hoax trend and the idea that MJ faked it so he could live in peace and out of debt as inspiration for something more worthwhile: a discussion of favorite false deaths in movies.
The device is quite popular, especially in thrillers and horror flicks, and it can be employed as a plot starter or in a twist ending. James Bondhas done it, as has Sherlock Holmes. Whether someone fakes his/her own death or is simply mistaken for dead, the actual deed or the ultimate reveal can end up terrific cinema. In fact, it was very difficult for us to narrow our favorites down to ten. It’s a shame we had to leave out memorable scenes from Heathers, Hero and many other movies. Certainly you’ll disagree with some of our exclusions, too, so feel free to name them in the comments section.
Just beware; there may be SPOILERS after the jump: …Read more
Wow––this is amazing. Enrico Enrica Fico, the widow of Michelangelo Antonioni, told Italy’s La Stampa that her husband essentially committed long, slow suicide by refusing to eat. The article is in Italian and I’m sure the Google translation is imperfect, but it’s good enough to get the gist.
The filmmaker went nearly completely blind after suffering a stroke and, according to his widow, “not to see for him had become absolutely unacceptable.” Fico says Antonioni actually asked her to shoot or poison him, but she refused, and instead allowed him to starve himself by subsisting on “only a few teaspoons” of food each day from September 2006 until his death the following summer.
Incredibly, Antonioni’s widow compares his chosen manner of death to his filmmaking style. The translation is mangled but the sentiment seems clear: “Like his films, even his death was a masterpiece.It went quiet in absolute and embracing the absolute, as if it were a mystic.”
Above: the end of Il Grido, in which the protagonist falls (accidentally) to his death at the feet of his horrified former mistress.
I don’t really know what the TakeApart blog means when they say, “with the times of today mirroring the times of the film, [Zabriskie Point] couldn’t be more relevant”––the movie’s such crazy hippie fantasy, I can’t imagine a time when it was ever relevant––but I’ll thank them for pointing to the clip of its beautiful but vacant stars sitting next to Rex Reed and Mel Brooks on The Dick Cavett Show.
Victoria Large at Not Coming to a Theater Near You, on David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s “outsourcing” of some of the shooting of Intimidad to their subjects: “The technique of allowing the subjects to help author their own story feels appropriate to Intimidad, not only because it allows for the intimacy of the title, but also because it reflects one of the most striking things about the film: that it is about those who take action and are not merely acted upon.”
David Hudson alerts us to the Invitation to the Dance blog-a-thon, which began at Marilyn Ferdinand’s blog yesterday. I’m thinking about taking a crack at how the dynamic of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers is inverted in Dirty Dancing, but I’m open to other suggestions if you’ve got any.
Another season of MTV’s faux-reality melodrama and grade-A guilty pleasure The Hills debuted last night, and it was greeted by yet another New York Times review comparing its “plotlessness and dreamy cinematography” to the cinematic style of Michaelangelo Antonioni. As you know, I’m a big fan of cinema-conscious analyses of the Hills. But when the NYT’s Ginia Bellafonte calls The Hills — a by-all-accounts highly manipulated soap opera about “real” people, produced for the consumption of young, female mass audience — “Antonioni-esque,” what does she actually mean? I carefully watched the season premiere this morning on MTV.com and came up with five areas where this tale of California blondes of the aughts converge with Antonioni’s mid-to-late century masterpieces of modern isolation.
Several days ago, Scott Kirsner linked a CNET story about YouTube’s plans to automatically block all copyrighted content beginning in September. Google already pulls content based on copyright holder request, but if this ends up going through, it would have a much farther reaching impact on the kinds of fil m clips and oddities that I often link to on SpoutBlog. I think it’s a mistake. Right now, YouTube is the closest thing we have to a comprehensive online archive of 20th century culture. Just in terms of its educational potential, it’s invaluable.
So, while we can, let’s put the YouTube archive to good use. If there’s any filmmaker whose work lends itself to an introduction via YouTube, I’d say it’s Michelangelo Antonioni. At the very least, the YouTube watching experience may be the only way to transform his work for short attention spans. His best scenes worked almost as self-contained shorts; his poderous narrative pacing can make a full feature feel at best like an event, and at worst, like an unbearable slog.
Almost all of the Antonioni clips currently available on YouTube represent the last scenes of their respective films, which makes sense, as several of these are now film school staples, although I’d love to be able to show you, say, the opening of Red Desert. Still, I’ve compiled four final scenes here; consider the fifth spot reserved. If someone manages to upload a clip (ANY clip) from Red Desert (available on frill-free DVD) before YouTube’s proposed regulations go into effect, I’ll update this post.
1. Zabriskie Point (1970)
Antonioni’s much-maligned hippies-in-Death Valley film is by turns laughable and stunning. It’s most famous for its two hallucinogenic set pieces: in one, two beautiful road-tripping strangers screw on rocky desert shoal. As Fiona A. Villella noted at Senses of Cinema, this “leads to a complete breakdown in realist narrative logic as multiple couples and groups of young people engaged in sexual play magically appear throughout the valley.” Antonioni repeats the logic of multiples in the latter set piece, in which the female half of this couple watches as her boss/sugar daddy’s vacation home spectacularly explodes to sounds of Pink Floyd on the sound track. Antonioni presents the explosion in slow motion, over and over again from different angles, cut with close-ups of the innards of the house (the TV, the fridge) combusting as if part of a separate demolition. Thus hippie bliss gives way to violent, anarchic destruction. Absolutely, without a doubt, the best art film explosion sequence of all time.
You know that old chestnut about deaths coming in threes? Yesterday, Defamer assumed that Ingmar Bergman’s death was part of a triptych that also included Tom Snyder and actor Michel Serrault. But with this morning’s news of the death of Italian maverick Michelangelo Antonioni, you’ve got to wonder if there’s another 90-ish European art house master who’s about to go.
Yesterday I organized a round-up of Bergman obits, which as an afternoon activity was time consuming but not exactly rigorous — everyone has something to say about Bergman, so I just sat back and collated. But Antonioni was, to my mind, a different kind of artist, far more polarizing and uneven, one that I don’t think I could passively pay tribute to. I don’t love everything he made, but films like Blow-up, Red Desert and Zabriskie Point were crucial to my personal film education. Let me stew on this for a few hours, and then I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, you’ll find the famous final scene from Zabriskie above. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it later today.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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