Photo:Everett Collection
It’s heartening to read the clearly sincere tributes to Patrick Swayze, dead at 57 after a balls-out 20-month battle with pancreatic cancer. There aren’t many actors who could suffer aggressive chemotherapy and still film 13 episodes of The Beast, which debuted on A&E in January. Look, The Beast wasn’t much of a show, and it was hard to watch Swayze’s ravaged face in the role of an undercover F.B.I. agent. But he fought his battles on his terms, not at the dictates of a medical diagnosis. I met Swayze only once. He was doing Chicago the Musical on Broadway, singing and dancing as shyster lawyer Billy Flynn. As ever, he was muscular poetry in motion. Backstage, he shook my hand, stared hard, and called me out on my review of Road House, a 1989 B movie in which he played Dalton, the bouncer at a raucous club in rural Missouri called the Double Deuce.

(more...)

Photo: Eshelman/FilmMagic

I didn't know Natasha Richardson for long, but her vibrant joy in life hit me instantly. She was glamorous, gifted, deliciously theatrical, and sharp-tongued when she needed to be. Her eyes took you in, and if you passed the test, you were home. That vibrancy fueled her acting, though thinking of her right this minute is painful. Her tragic death yesterday in a freak skiing accident has left her family bereft. Their grief is inconsolable. The last time I saw her we were both speakers at a memorial service for a mutual friend who had died almost as unexpectedly. He was only 40. Natasha read a Rudyard Kipling poem with her customary eloquence and grace, fighting back tears.

Still, what struck me the most about her came later. She had invited a small group of us back to the Manhattan apartment she shared with her husband Liam Neeson and their young two sons. The group included several major names in the film industry, including Natasha’s mother—the legendary Vanessa Redgrave—and our friend’s parents and siblings. They could have been lost in these surroundings. They weren’t, thanks to Natasha. She surrounded them in warmth, but there was nothing morbid about the sympathy she offered. She gently coaxed them to talk, not about death, but the life of the man we were mourning. And, suddenly, he was there again, vivid in our memories. That’s the way I see Natasha now, making an exciting journey of her life, not just her career. My friend’s parents didn’t say goodbye after the service and never hear from her again. That wasn't Natasha's style. Loyalty was. Natasha stayed in contact, took them to dinner, continued the bond that comes with real connection. But what of our bond with her?

(more...)

Photo: Peterson/Getty
I had hoped he would stay alive if only to spite the doomsayers. For nearly a year the press has been writing premature obits for Paul Newman. His cancer treatments tipped them off. Asked about his health, Newman's reply was always a terse, “I’m doing nicely.” Now he isn’t. Now, at 83, he’s gone. I’m not going to say acting has lost one of its last legit icons. That’s obvious. "He set the bar too high for the rest us," said George Clooney, "not just actors but all of us." The funny thing is Newman was always slightly embarrassed by his fame, by all the awards he received for his philanthropy, and especially by the body beautiful and blazing blue eyes that made him a star. That’s why he took all the bullshit vanity out of his acting. A peak Newman performance—and I can think of dozens of them—radiated smarts, sexual cool, wry wit and a keen eye for the con just around the corner. Think of him as Fast Eddie Felson in Robert Rossen’s The Hustler, avidly going cue stick to cue stick with Jackie Gleason’s Minnesota Fats around the combat zone of a pool table. Twenty-five years later, Newman would win his only Oscar for playing the older, wiser Eddie in Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money, telling new kid Tom Cruise, “You’ve got to be a student of human moves. See, all the greats that I know of, to a man, are students of human moves.”

Newman was an honors student in human moves. The family and friends he left behind can tell you that. Start with his actress wife Joanne Woodward, who hated that he raced cars. And yet Newman conned her into putting up with it for 40 years. Newman was nothing if not persuasive. Ask his five surviving children, his neighbors in Westport, Connecticut, the kids with life-threatening diseases who benefited from the Hole-in-the-Wall camps he funded with profits from Newman's Own organic products. "I'm the only Oscar winner with his mug on a bottle of salad dressing," Newman told me once, laughing at the absurdity of it. Did everyone like Paul Newman? Hell, no. Obama man Newman was on a lot of right-wing enemies lists, starting with Nixon's. He wore the label like a badge of honor. The critic David Thomson was turned off by Newman's alleged "uneasy, self-regarding personality," and "a smirking good humor" that Thomson termed "more appropriate to glossy advertisements than to good movies." If, like me, you think that Newman was the leading litmus actor of his generation, the one who bridged the Greatest Generation to the boomers and beyond, there's no way you can't take his life personally and treasure it.

• 1973 Rolling Stone cover story: The Redoubtable Mr. Newman
• 1983 Rolling Stone cover story: Paul Newman Takes the Stand

(more...)

George Carlin's death on Sunday at seventy one reminds me of how much scrappy fun it was to see him anywhere. Yes, that includes movies. Many of them bad movies. Many of them merrily mocked by Carlin himself. But in a DVD week that gives us such flabby newbies as 10,000 B.C., Definitely, Maybe, and The Spiderwick Chronicles, we could do worse than punch a few Carlin movies into our DVD players to see the man in action again and hear his distinctive, hypocrisy-shattering comic voice. I'm thinking now of 1989's Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure in which Carlin played Rufus, the guitar-jamming guru (if only the Love Guru had a fraction of his wit) who arrives from the future to help Alex Winter's Bill and Keanu Reeves' Ted. Read his first words and you can hear him saying them:

(more...)

Are they kidding with these DVD releases:

Fool's Gold, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey in what still gets my vote as the worst romantic comedy of the year.

Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, another career crusher for the once-funny Martin Lawrence.

So I Married An Axe Murderer, a special edition of the laugh-free1993 farce that has no other purpose except to prove that Mike Myers once made a movie as bad as The Love Guru.

My suggestion is that we all pay homage to Stan Winston, the special effects master who died on Sunday at 62, by grabbing a few DVDs that represent his best animatronic creations. You could start with the movies that won him his Oscars. That would be Aliens in 1986, Terminator 2: Judgment Day in 1992 and Jurassic Park in 1993. Winston's T-Rex in that blockbuster made movie history. But it might be more of a tribute to watch a Winston film on DVD that never won the attention it deserved.

(more...)

Suddenly, whatever Indy 4 grossed or what DVDs come out today seem not to matter in light of the passing yesterday of the gifted director and actor Sydney Pollack, one of true gents in a movie industry notable for the absence of what Sydney had—humor, warmth and a non-showy way of letting his talent out. Sure, he won an Oscar for directing Out of Africa, and his 1982 Tootsie with Dustin Hoffman in a dress deserved that year's Best Picture golden boy way more than the solemn, self-important winner, Gandhi. But the open secret about Sydney Pollack was that he was the go-to guy in Hollywood for a filmmaker in a bind. Pollack and his Mirage Enterprises producing partner Anthony Minghella—both dead from cancer within two months of each other—were always there to help other directors realize their vision.

I had a habit of annoying Sydney whenever he announced a new directing project.

(more...)

The sudden death yesterday in London of Oscar-winning director Anthony Minghella is, of course, a grievous loss to the film world. At 54, with only seven features to his credit, including The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley and Cold Mountain, Minghella had so much more to show us about ourselves and the curves life throws at us. But the loss is greater for his family and friends. Minghella, to paraphrase the author John O’Hara, was “a gentleman in a world that has no more use for gentleman.” To know him was to be in the presence of a man with an elegant regard for the romance of film. Talking to me, a critic, he’d want to know what I didn’t like about a movie, his or someone else’s. His arguments, fiery but never hostile, were filled with joy in the discussion. Joy, however, was the last thing he was feeling on the day we first met. It was the first New York screening of The English Patient

(more...)

Roy Scheider died on Feb. 10th, at a hospital in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he'd been battling a form of blood cancer. He was seventy-five. The obits were respectful, befiting an actor with two Oscar nominations and a reputation as a pro. For days now, I've been thinking that we might have taken Scheider for granted as an actor. It's not that he never screwed up. He and Meryl Streep had zip chemistry in Still of the Night. And the special effects ate him up in Blue Thunder and 2010. But Scheider with his game on was hard to beat. His face and voice radiated authority. Close your eyes and think of what Scheider role comes to your mind first. I have three.

JAWS 1975

There he was as Martin Brody (see photo), the police chief who was scared shitless of the ocean, never mind a great white shark. That quirk put just the right human chink in the sheriff's armor and gave the role a warmth you never felt in the novel. Thanks to Scheider, we empathized. His acting was solid not showy. Who can forget his face when he first sees the shark emerge from the water? And his line,"You're gonna need a bigger boat." Scheider knew something then: "That role will be on my tombstone," he said. Damn near.

(more...)