'Tis the holiday season, and I've been busy readying myself for festivities, therefore I have not been blogging as much. So it is with a heavy heart that I catch up with a bit of bad news to begin with today. First off, Brittany Murphy passed away at age 32 of natural causes. Murphy's career was up and down, and most recently she had been bound to several direct-to-Lifetime telefilms that were ultimately forgettable. However, she will be best remembered as Shellie in Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City, as well as the offbeat Tai in Clueless. Her on again, off again filmography also contains roles in Girl, Interrupted and voice parts in Happy Feet and the direct-to-DVD favorite of the Adult Swim crowd, Futurama: The Best with a Billion Backs. Her voice talents will also be emblazoned into all of us adult animation fans' minds forever, as she was featured in a twelve year run of Mike Judge's King of the Hill as Luanne Platter. Also departing our world since my last post is science fiction legend Dan O'Bannon. The 63-year-old jack of all trades in the sci-fi medium passed away after a bout with Crohn's Disease. O'Bannon is best known for his writing, pumping out screenplays for Dark Star, Ridley Scott's classic Alien, Heavy Metal, Lifeforce and Total Recall to name a few. He also dabbled in special effects, most notably providing computer effects for Star Wars. O'Bannon would also occupy the director's chair for The Return of the Living Dead.
We would also lose the real life inspiration for Rain Man, due to a heart attack, this holiday season. Kim Peek, dubbed a megasavant in most psychology circles, was born with agenesis of the corpus callosum, commonly referred to as simply and erroneously autistic, despite the similarities between the two diseases. Peek gained fame from the bit of television other than Adult Swim that I frequent, being a few Discovery Channel specials and an appearance on Ripley's Believe It or Not!. However, Peek may be known eternally as the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman's Raymond Babbitt in Barry Levinson's Rain Man.
Finally, despite my unnatural emotional closeness to cinema and pop culture as a whole, the above names pale in comparison to the recent loss of a co-worker, John Fields. In fact, today, on Christmas Eve, he was laid to his final resting place. The saddest part of all, the night before he died of an asthma attack, I had stayed a little late to work with him, where we mostly talked about other co-workers, the lack of Willie Nelson Christmas songs, and our month long dissection of Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. So, in honor of the fallen, here is the "Bear Jew" scene from the flick. Rest in peace John.
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