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I'm getting old, all my childhood heroes die.
Here's to "trying to be someone's childhood heroes"
Without dancing on TikTok or pulling stupid faces for YouTube thumbnails
Yup, we can dream bigger and give bigger dreams :)

A silver lining in the tech progress is this : I remember watching movies from the 60s or the 70s, in the 90s, and feeling "damn, that looks old". I could only care about movies made after 1984, or something (and, men, did amblin and the "produced by Steven Spielberg-verse" give us good things to watch.)

I suspect that, now that movies are kinda "converging" in terms of visual, it will be easier to share the movies of our childhoods with the next generation.

Besides, they don't care that much about looks : I litteraly witnessed 10 year old kids getting hooked on my 1991 game boy !!!!

It gets worse. You start realising that the new heroes you're discovering are all younger than you.
... and they are not that interesting / relatable
You’ll fit right in on this site then. It’s mostly elderly Americans sundowning and posting about their youth.
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.
Give me a ping Vasily. One ping only please.

Sad.

A minute of silence for him. No echoes.
One of my favorite actors of all time. If you haven’t seen it, watch The Dish.
also the Event Horizon, his change of character is something you don't forget..
Even Horizon is a Warhammer 40k film that has nothing to do with Warhammer 40k.
Can you elaborate for those of us who don't know Warhammer?
In W40k the primary form of FTL travel is the Immaterium or Warp, a realm of pure psychic energy inhabited by the Chaos gods and countless demons. Spaceships traveling through the Warp need powerful protective shields lest they be possessed and consumed by said demons... which is exactly what happens in the movie.

https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Immaterium

That's always the role I remember first when I hear his name, because it seems so unusual for him and because he was so great in it.
Something that is burnt into me is saying "DO YOU SEE?", invoking the final lines of Neill in Event Horizon
"Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see."
It’s a wonderful little movie. Absolutely adorable.
He had a lovely gentle demeanor about him. He was good recently in the Untamed series.
RIP. Where he's going, he won't need eyes. Wait, perhaps that was an inappropriate quote to use.
Event horizon.
"Where we're going, we don't need eyes to see".
Remind me to never go to orbit around Neptune.
"What makes you think I'll miss?"
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.
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.
You made me think about the possibility of him being in The Thing - if he was chosen for that film, I wonder who he would have played.
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.
Possession is such a fantastically special movie, heavily due to Neill and Adjani’s performances.

RIP to a real one.

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.
It is a touchy subject. When you have it, you don't want to think about it all the time.
You misunderstand - the message is he was far more interested in living and what he could do with his life and genuinely found the cancer not interesting compared to other things.

He wasn't just being touchy and trying to change the subject.

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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)

Found this Sam Neill interview from 2017 commenting on that: https://www.aftonbladet.se/nojesbladet/a/91Pbw/sam-neill-abo...

"Many swedes orders pizza the day after their New Years celebrations to watch Ivanhoe."

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

It's a great movie too.

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.
I watched it every Jan 1 with some pizza
Ivanhoe is a story about a Russian farmer and his tool.
It was great fun to see him interact with fans (on twitter) 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?
Not them, but: It's a cozy/calm kind of movie. The cinematography is excellent.

Repeatedly being TV broadcast on jan 1st for many years turned it into a tradition for something to watch while being hung over.

It's also actually surprisingly good, as a whole.

The traditions are present in (probably) every European country. I think it's a combination of:

* One public broadcasting channel 40-50 years ago

* Someone decided to play a movie in the holiday period when most people sat around a TV

Norway has Tre nøtter til Askepott, Germany has Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel (they are the same Czech movie).

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.

Same, I was born in '81, and JP is a cornerstone of my childhood, more-so than any other movie I can think of. I saw that movie at the theatre more than any other, at least 6 times that summer.

My favorite was at a drive-in in Kentucky. We used to rent boats at Lake Cumberland over the summer, and one night we watched JP at a drive-in. I remember the drive back to the dock late at night, driving through the woods, and imagining it was a Jurassic jungle. Then, back on the houseboat, going reading through my "Making of Jurassic Park" book with a battery operated book light.

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 features a depiction of the future which might've seemed bleak when it was conceived, but is in many ways more hopeful (and dare I say gentler) 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.