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I'm getting old, all my childhood heroes die.
It gets worse. You start realising that the new heroes you're discovering are all younger than you.
You’ll fit right in on this site then. It’s mostly elderly Americans sundowning and posting about their youth.
"Mostly"? Nah. A HUGE number of contributors are from a myriad of countries.

Using "myriad" loosely. Don't be that "Well acshually" guy.

So sad. Jurassic Park had a tremendous impact on me as a dino obsessed teenager ( was 13 when it came out). RIP.
That I have a DevOps company working entirely on Linux can be directly attributed to realizing as a kid that Unix was a real thing and I needed to install it on my own computer. Interesting it was soon after this movie came out that FreeBSD and Linux were becoming popular.
Today New Zealand has lost a national treasure.

Haere atu rā ki te okiokinga.

Give me a ping Vasily. One ping only please.

Sad.

One of my favorite actors of all time. If you haven’t seen it, watch The Dish.
He had a lovely gentle demeanor about him. He was good recently in the Untamed series.
To this day, Event Horizon is one of the scariest premises to a horror movie I have ever watched. And it's thanks to Sam Neill's performance that it lives rent free in my head.

Love this guy. Gonna miss him :(

RIP. Where he's going, he won't need eyes. Wait, perhaps that was an inappropriate quote to use.
Event horizon.
He was great in it - horribly underrated movie though I concede the gore at a 8 or 9 out of 10 is not for everyone. The deaths were supposed to be far gorier and the film of the prior crew was to be longer and harder to watch until the studio stepped in.
Hunt for the Wilder People was fun, as was Reilly, Ace of Spies.
Loved Hunt for the Wilder People.
I honestly didn't know he was a Kiwi until I saw Hunt for the Wilder People. Absolutely fantastic movie.
He's originally from Northern Ireland and spent much of his life in NZ (although he has spent time in the USA, Australia and other parts of the UK.)
I’ve watched “In The Mouth of Madness” so many times. It is in my top 3 most re-watched horror movies list. Perfect Lovecraftian horror, and Sam Neill was perfect in it.

Do you read Sutter Cane?

It's a great movie! One of the best attempts at capturing a Lovecraftian vibe, maybe only bested by The Thing or his excellent Event Horizon.
I watched Possession (1981) a few weeks back. One of the weirdest films I’ve ever seen. His acting was so different from his later stuff.
One of my favorite horror films of the 1980s, Andrzej Żuławski's 1981 Possession.

One quote I heard about it, is that some movies are about madness, and other movies seem to be themselves mad, and Possession is one of those movies. It has this immediacy to it, and an unease that only grows in quantity and tenor. And you genuinely do not know where it is going. Believe me when I say this.

It might be Sam's most memorable performance, for me. The movie seemed to drive its entire cast and crew to exhaustion or worse.

Do not under any circumstances watch the old American cut, the initial release. It was re-edited with scenes out of order and has this bizarro solarization effect at random intervals. It's really really bad. The modern blu-ray and others have the actual movie.

Ah, that sucks. I’ve always enjoyed him.

One of the inevitable features of getting older. All my cultural icons keep checking out.

As a kiwi he was the best of us. Creative, talented, willing to roll up his sleeves, maker of exceptional wine. Haere ra
An absolute legend. I thought he'd be around for longer. Thanks for making Jurassic Park what it is, Sam.
"I would have liked to have seen Montana..."

You are forever in our hearts, Vasili.

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I’m in Montana now, and I spent the weekend with a very energetic palaeontologist who has unearthed many dinosaurs.
I saw him interviewed once and they asked about his cancer and he said that he did not find it very interesting. He said something to the effect of he finds living interesting and there's far more interesting things to talk about than his cancer. Paraphrased I don't recall exactly.
RIP. Here in Sweden the headlines mention primarily his role in Ivanhoe, a movie that has aired on Swedish TV almost every New Years for over 40 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivanhoe_(1982_film)

He posted this video message to the Swedish people for New Years 2023: https://www.svt.se/kultur/ivanhoe-skadespelarens-nyarshalsni...

Great movie.

I have only ever seen the 1950s Ivanhoe film and part of a... I think it was a 1990s TV miniseries. I'll have to watch this.
Ivanhoe is a story about a Russian farmer and his tool.
It was great fun to see him interact with viewers regarding this every/many Jan 1. He kind of embodied that global village spirit.

E.g.

https://x.com/TwoPaddocks/status/1212188526348890112 (2020)

I am relaxed, fit , and ready to fight the dreary Ivanhoe once more.

https://x.com/TwoPaddocks/status/1080048522492145664 (2019)

SWEDEN ! I have strapped on my body armor, renewed my courage, got my evils back, and am braced once again to Sweden's MOST HATED. And this year I WILL WIN . #HappyNewYear2019 #Ivanhoe

https://x.com/TwoPaddocks/status/947971082018889728 (2018)

Yes, my annual disemboweling seems to please Swedes every year. #Ivanhoe

Etc, going back to 2015.

That was mentioned in the Guardian piece as well-- can you help explain the particular appeal of this film in Sweden?
Jurassic Park was the first movie I saw as a twelve year old boy at the cinema, and it not only made me a huge fan of the series but as a boy I was really into dinosaurs and it was really something to see them being "real" on a big screen for the first time.

"I have a theory that there are two kinds of boys. There are those that want to be astronomers, and those that want to be astronauts[...]That's the difference between imagining and seeing"

Thank you for everything, doctor Grant.

I really appreciate the attempt by Chris & Jack to make Julysixth Park a thing.

I enjoyed Star Wars, but I kind of feel like a lot of my feelings towards it are just reflected nostalgia from the writers and comedians who grew up a generation before me.

Jurassic Park may not have been the first movie I saw in theaters, but it was still one of the movies of my childhood. The magic of it, and the experience of where we saw it -- the Mesker Park amphitheatre, in an outdoor showing, and then walking back to the car in the dark, past the Mesker Park Zoo, looking into the dark foliage and imagining dinosaurs.

I'll never forget Neill as Damien in Omen III.

I'd very much like to forget Neill as Damien in Omen III. Chilling.

Good performance, not really a good movie. It was a bit of a letdown after parts I and II, but he was well cast. The writing wasn’t there: didn’t quite stick the landing.
So sad to hear this. Hard to imagine anyone else playing Dr. Alan Grant in Jurassic Park.
If someone here likes horror movies I highly recommend watching his work in Possession (1981) and Mouth of Madness (1995).

If you prefer a more family focused comedy, go with Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016), from the same director of the excelent What we Do in the Shadows.

Bicentennial Man is one of my favourite films of his (also Robin Williams). There's an interesting subplot in there on right to repair which is very much relevant today. It also depicts a future 30 years away which might've seemed bleak when it was first conceived, but is in many ways more hopeful than what we actually got.
RIP. Recently watched Series 3 of The Twelve, and thought "No way is he in his 70s", and had just finished reading his autobiography "Did I Ever Tell You This?" - delightful read.