Alan Rickman, Harry Potter and Die Hard Actor, Dies Aged 69
bbc.com
bbc.com
Jason Nesmith: You WILL go out there.
Sir Alexander Dane: I won't and nothing you say will make me.
Jason Nesmith: The Show Must Go On.
Sir Alexander Dane: ...Damn you."... By Grabthar's hammer... what a savings."
It's like he's contemplating his entire acting career and questioning how he got to this point in his life.
That's my favorite Rickman scene as well.
It takes a fine actor to pack 30 years of fictional history into a single line. I'll greatly miss his tremendous talents.
Rickman clealy had a lot of fun playing villains; apparently he improvised or re-wrote most of his lines in Robin Hood, making it hilarious.
No, it's Leonard Nimoy. This is a Trek TOS satire, and he's the alien sidekick who hates his catchphrase "Live Long and Prosper" or, in this case, "By Grabthar's Hammer, you shall be avenged".
Nimoy had a reputation for being quite sick of being Spock. It was even the title of his biography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Not_Spock
But on the other hand, that might just be an oldish man not really feeling comfortable playing an immature character (that's part of Han's charm, really).
I'd wager his dislike of the Han Solo character had more to do with working with George Lucas.
(Jason is fighting the rock monster)
Jason: Alexander, you're supposed to be my adviser, advise me!
Alexander: Well, you're just going to have to figure out what it wants. What is its motivation?
Jason: It's a rock monster, it doesn't *have* any motivation!
Alexander: Well, there's your problem, Jason, you were never serious about the craft!Closet Land - HN should love this one: a dystopian science fiction film approaching censorship, surveillance, and torture. It's a single setting with only 2 actors, and sometimes feels like a very intense play.
Truly Madly Deeply - An oddly appropriate film about accepting death, where he plays a tired ghost who come back to haunt his significant other, which I found bittersweet but overall heart-warming.
Rasputin (1996) - I actually watched this during a Rasputin streak, and think that his performance is possibly the best Rasputin on film - he breathes a lot of humanity and realness into the character (compare with, say, the great but completely monstrous version with Christopher Lee). Other aspects of the film are uneven, but it's still very much worth it.
I also remember being excited to learn that he was directing a movie recently (A Little Chaos). Haven't seen it, but the reviews are convincing - it's sad that he leaves us while he was still very much in a creative period.
- Mayor Quimby
And I am married to a children's librarian who has read them all, so I've already heard the criticism, to which I answer I don't read much fiction, but I enjoy watching it. I like to condense my make-believe.
That aside, I think if you hadn't read the books, you might consider it more convincing since you weren't expecting it; which I didn't, and in retrospect the build up was pretty good given how Harry starts getting tired of hearing people put those two lines together and started finishing it himself to move past that part of the dialog.
I've read that Rowlings let Rickman in on it fairly early so he could understand the motivation and avoid just being a rock-monster.
I read that too. I just went and found a source for it too: http://herocomplex.latimes.com/movies/harry-potter-alan-rick.... It contains this amusing tidbit:
> “It was quite amusing, too, because there were times when a director would tell Alan what to do in a scene and he would say something like, ‘No I can’t do that – I know what is going to happen and you don’t,’” said “Potter” producer David Heyman. “He had a real understanding of the character and now looking back, you can see there was always more going on there – a look, an expression, a sentiment — that hint at what is to come … the shadow that he casts in these films is a huge one and the emotion he conveys is immeasurable.”
But in the movies, I thought it worked extremely well. And that's entirely due to Alan Rickman. Usually the movie is worse than the book, right? Alan Rickman's Snape was so perfect, and he managed to convey everything about Snape that the books wished they could.
Now I'm tempted to go back and rewatch all the movies in a row just so I can pay extra attention to Snape.
"You did, when you murdered my boss."
The only really bad guy I can remember he was playing was the judge in Sweeny Todd.
The Sheriff was also a proper villain, doing whatever he could to try and ensure he ended up on the throne.
I concede on Snape.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19655_5-famous-late-bloomers....
This article makes it seem like he was struggling to be a success long after he should have quit. They just have a completely wrong definition of success.
But as I know from my work on electronic medical records 2005-2007, most medical software is a godawful clusterfoo if you so much as scratch the gilding on the GUI with your fingernail. So if you have a bit of runway in front of you, there's a lot of money to be made in medical software that even does as little as keeping a unique, secure identity record for 300 million patients.
I obviously don't, or I'd be doing it already.
I was thinking more along the lines of just keeping a list of hundreds of millions of unique integers, and linking as many identifiers to them as are necessary. If you have a keyed database, it is essential to have unique keys for indexing.
Identity records all over have all kinds of problems, mostly due to stupid assumptions--like assuming that a SSN always uniquely identifies one individual.
Today has been a dark, dark week for the world of performance art. He will be missed.
I was recently surprised to learn that pancreatic cancer is becoming treatable, at least in some cases:
Rickman will be missed. He managed to put a lot of life into any story.
It's time for tea. Epic tea.
Like many really famous actors, at some point in his career it just became Alan Rickman, in <MOVIE-TITLE-HERE>
But that was okay. His Die Hard appearance was phenomenal. I'll never forget the movie Galaxy Quest.
I cannot miss Alan, for I did not know him. But I liked a bunch of art he created, and I will be sad thinking that he will not be able to create any more of it.
Dammit, this makes me really sad.
At least we still got the Kardashians and EDM. /s
RIP Hans Gruber :')
GP likes to believe his generation was God's gift to Earth and seems to forget the generation above his probably didn't like rock and roll. Classic baby boomer.
Losing Bowie, now Rickman, 2016 starts with a heavy heart...
His expression of surprise was real in Die Hard as the stunt crew dropped him on the count of one instead of three!
Bethany: Were they sent to Hell?
Metatron: Worse. Wisconsin. For the entire span of human history.
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/844382#vp_2
We're still very far away from guaranteeing long lifespans. Bowie and Rickman pass away at 69, but Doris Day is still around at 91. Gene Wilder is 82. Mel Brooks is 89. Age Vigoda is 94. Longevity is still a crapshoot.
(with Stephen Fry, David Mitchell, Emma Thompson and Alan Davies)
This is a semi-dupe of this, btw: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10900974 (different source but same real-world event).
Personal aside: When driving, my partner and I always refer to a certain town west of London as Alan Richmansworth, I think simply because it is nice to think about him. Sad news.
Very sad month, I have to admit.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tubular_Bells_II#Master_of_Cer...
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101597/?ref_=nm_flmg_act_53
Guy of Gisborne: Why a spoon, cousin? Why not an axe?
Sheriff of Nottingham: Because it's DULL, you twit. It'll hurt more.
Really loved this actor. Sad to see him go. He brought us so much enjoyment over the years. Thank you, Alan!
That assumes that reason, not emotion, is the primary motivator, no?
> Until then, I do my best to keep any ideological or religious influence from trying to exert itself upon them.
'Be nice to others' is ideology (albeit very weak). I imagine that you don't keep that from them.
I don't think 'Be nice to others' is ideology. It may be part of an ideology, but I don't think that it an ideology in itself.
'Be nice to others' is also not a totalizing idea in the same way that Christianity is - not everything in the world happens because somebody was or was not nice to others. Christianity takes as its base that everything is/was the will of their god.
By the way, I wasn't asking to challenge you... I'm just a big fan of childrens' fantasy!
A lot of the more recently written books my kids read now are formulaic crap, but at least they're reading books.
Tamora Pierce has written a number of kid appropriate fantasy books with solid writing and strong female characters. I have seen countless grade school girls get hooked on her work. Some of her books just start to get into more mature relationship themes, but it's enough to embarrass your kid a bit, not scar them.
As a child I enjoyed C.S. Lewis, but was personally affronted when I got to the last Narnia book and discovered that good story had been compromised for christian allegory. Lewis won't make your child a bible thumped any more than Pullman will make them an atheist. Just make sure you know what your kid is reading, and find opportunities to discus the material with them critically!
Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea series is another excellent option. I believe when I read it in grade school I found the pacing too slow, so I skipped ahead a lot and inferred a number of plot points. Nonetheless, I'm certain I enjoyed it the first time, it influenced my view of fantasy literature, and I have returned to reread the series multiple times since.
The Hobbit is a great kids book.
Alison Croggon's Pellinor series is less well known, but perfect for pre/early teens that love fantasy.
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia Wrede feature a princess who runs away from home to work for a dragon. Solid writing, strong female characters, Pratchett-esque subversion of fantasy tropes. Fun and appropriate for grade school kids.
Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones
That's off the top of my head. Of these books I consider Pullman, Le Guin, and Tolkien to be literature (worth an adult's time), while the others are just fun and well written.
J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbit
None others really come to mind, although I'm sure that they must exist.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/armenws/9516176127/
That's a pretty hackerish reference for a film made in 1988 that wasn't particularly about computers or tech. There was probably a BSD fan at the company that created the computer screens. FreeBSD 9.2 had a tribute to this in it's boot screen:
https://mebsd.com/make-build-your-freebsd-word/freebsd-9-2-d...
Besides that, all people still currently living have not died.
Parent didn't put it in time terms. Just noted that everyone who ever lived, has also died ("A && B", as opposed to "A then B").
>Besides that, all people still currently living have not died.
Yes, though one could say that those people are still "living", not yet in a state having "lived" (past tense), as parent put it.
You might have e.g. "lived in London" (if you don't know, so it's a settled thing and a specific period of your life). Or "I've lived in poverty", etc.
But "I've lived", period, without such a qualifier is not that common or useful when one is still alive.
In this case, though, it's not "Everyone who has died has died", but "To have lived means you're dead".
The same way that "to be a corpse means that you've died". That's not a tautology (it's not "to be a corpse means you're a corpse"), just informs us of a prerequisite for the other thing to happen.
Either way, the statement as given does not support the unstated implication that everyone now living will eventually die.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." I wondered if that ratio needed updating. It does, but not, it seems, in the direction I expected.
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
I'm a hacker. I found this interesting (and sad).
I'm not sure much more explanation is required. If you disagree, you can downvote the story and / or not click through.
OK, this is completely wrong. There are several cancers which do not kill THAT fast in the first place, and several that can be cured with pretty good confidence. And it's often a matter of how soon you detect it - if you find it at Stage I, you have much better odds than if you find it at Stage IV.
Please stop generalizations like this.
Much process has been made in heart disease, but cancer? Not so much. is really the problem, as early stage treatment has gotten vastly more effective over the last 20 years (My father succumbed to metastatic cancer in 1994, I pay some attention to the overall progress in addressing cancer).
If it's metastatic, you've had it... doesn't quite trip off the tongue.
Very true, however, Stage I cancer is still localized, Stage IV cancer has spread to other organs.
To your point though, Lance Armstrong beat cancer after it had metastasized. He was an exception. He was in stellar condition. I doubt most folks would be able to endure what he could.
For colon cancer, bleeding is sometimes unnoticed or written off as hemorrhoids, so it is ignored and given time to grow and spread. This, I believe, is the chief reason why it's so lethal (there are exceptions, of course). Colon cancer is curable if found early enough. Sharon Osbourne has been cancer free for 13 years only because she caught it early.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cancer_mortality_rates...
Prostate cancer has a 0.8% mortality rate in 5 years. Very few types have even 50% five-year mortality rates these days.
I suspect we're looking at these guys with their dyed hair, fit bodies, plastic surgeries, etc and thinking they're much younger than they truly are. These are 70 year old. They're old, old men. They died only a few years before the men in my family typically do. They just didn't look very old, nor were any photos release of them looking sick.
I always find it amusing how Charlie Watts gave up on all this with the Stones and just doesn't dye his hair and doesn't dress like a 1970s hipster woman or have a woman's haircut. He has this very dignified look, but certainly looks older than the other Stones. He's easy to spot. If he died tomorrow, no one would act surprised because he, well, looks old.
http://images.popmatters.com/news_art/r/rollingstones-80s-50...
http://www.gq.com/gallery/charlie-watts-style-photos-rolling...
EDIT: HN won't let me reply (goddamn posting too much error), so I'll reply here:
Avg male lifespan in the US is 78. So yes, while your father is an exception, its not remotely typical. Most men don't even hit 80, let alone reach their 90s.
I work with the occasional 70 year. Yes, they are absolutely old men. They can't remotely keep up with guys in their 50s and early 60s, let alone 30s and 40s. There's a reason retirement age is usually pegged at 65.
Age manifests very differently in people.
I wouldn't say that late sixties is midlife; it's well into the end-of-life period.
Aaron Ramsey (Footballer player for Arsenal, UK) has a reputation for apparently killing off famous people when he scores. Whenever he scores someone famous tends to pass away, of course it is a big coincidence, but he did score yesterday too.
Also scored last week, and David Bowie passed away.
If you google it, he scored the previous day of the deaths of Colonel Gaddafi, Steve Jobs Osama Bin Laden and Whitney Houston, among others.
“Patterns in death, patterns in misfortune – those are things that help us try to understand the universe or reality in a way that makes sense of it,” explains John Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who has written about the concept for Psychology Today. “In general, we’re very uncomfortable dealing with randomness.”
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/celebrities-dont-really-die-3s...
I'm probably misremembering the details, and I can't immediately find a source, but I thought this was interesting.