Filmmaker John Hughes, the director of such teen-centric classics as The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, and Ferris Beuler’s Day Off, died today at the age of 59. Hughes passes just as a series of celebrity deaths have reminded us how nothing inspires geyserous outpourings of nostalgia like the mortality of our former heroes. But I think it’s fair to say that Hughes’ work has continued to inspire the same steady stream of deeply personal affection from its viewers since day one.

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With their burglar-versus-serial killer shocker The Collector opening in theaters nationwide today, filmmakers Marcus Dunston and Patrick Melton were kind enough to sit down with me for a revealing chat about the making of their unforgiving new flick, their love of Italian horror legend Dario Argento, the state of the Saw franchise, and just what went wrong with their proposed remake of the William Castle classic The Tingler.

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Fellow followers of cinema lost an icon today when it was announced that David Carradine was found hung in a Bangkok hotel under mysterious circumstances. Whatever ends up being the cause of his demise, make no doubt — this was a beloved icon from a fine acting family pedigree whose loss can be felt across the globe. From his early days as Caine in Kung Fu through his legendary years with Roger Corman and beyond, Carradine was a presence who was hard to dismiss. He worked with the likes of Scorsese and Altman, yet is known for his numerous b-movie performances just as much. Though the modern world recognizes him from Tarantino’s Kill Bill series (a role originally slated for Warren Beatty), the actor always seemed to be one you could rely on to bring a certain high standing regard to any role — especially ones that riffed off his wizened tough guy roles of old. Most recently he was seen on the big screen in Crank High Voltage as a horny old Asian gangster whose appearance seemed straight out of Big Trouble in Little China. Carradine fans will miss these kind of wild casting choices that only seem right for this kind of on-screen legend.

But why mope when we can celebrate? Therefore, The All Movie Guide commemorates the immortal man behind Caine with this collection of clips and trailers, starting with his stint in Death Race 2000 — “Frankenstein the legend. Frankenstein the indestructible… Ripped up, wiped out, battered, shattered, creamed and reamed. A dancer on the brink of death. Frankenstein - who lost a leg in 98. An arm in 99. With half a face and half a chest and all the guts in the world…” In the name of Mr. President, America loved you, David Carradine.

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The film scoring community lost one of its giants when French composer Maurice Jarre passed away on March 29th in Los Angeles at age 84. Born in Lyon, Jarre abandoned an engineering degree from the Sorbonne, to the profound shock of his family, to study music with Arthur Honegger at the Paris Conservatoire. He fell in with the music that was being written by other young, French composers of his generation — Pierre Boulez, Marius Constant and Georges Delerue — and Jarre’s earliest concert works share with them a concern for 12-tone derived methods of composition. In 1950, the Théâtre Nationale Populaire opened in Paris, and producer Jean Vilar named Jarre its musical director. He served in this capacity five years, establishing a name for himself as a composer for the stage. Jarre also worked with choreographer Roland Petit during this time, and developed a populist, melodic style in addition to the more advanced music he already knew. Jarre would later comment that this was the happiest time of his life, and the experience presumably laid a good foundation for his career as film composer.

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Shortly after graduating from college, I began to obsess about a movie that I must have watched on cable about 500 times growing up. The title of that movie is Super Fuzz, and for a while it seemed like it was something that I had dreamt up when I was stricken with a bad case of chicken pox. None of my friends had ever heard of it, and no video store in Southwestern Michigan had it for rental. But it had to be real, right? After all, I could still hum the theme nearly two decades later. Scouring the Internet, I managed to track down a videocassette of Super Fuzz, and — oddly enough — it was every bit as fun as I remembered it to be. Childhood favorites can often be slightly embarrassing upon later reflection, and while no one could ever mistake Super Fuzz for high art, the goofball comedy still possessed a charm that, for me at least, proved impossible to resist. Sure it’s nothing more than a low-budget, lowbrow cop comedy shot on the cheap in Florida, but something about the catchy theme and unabashed corniness of it all, not to mention the sight of a frazzled Ernest Borgnine floating on an over-sized chewing-gum bubble during the awesomely ridiculous climax, just clicked with me. It was my first real movie memory, and to this day the mere sight of Borgnine still takes me right back to my childhood living room.

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This month, the world lost a cinematic giant. Claude Berri, perhaps best known to Americans for directing the twin outings Jean de Florette and Manon des sources, but in fact a legend in European production circles for bringing to the screen works by directors including Roman Polanski, Jean-Jacques Annaud and Patrice Chereau (to name but a handful), died of a cerebral-vascular problem at the age of 75. In many ways and on many levels, this could be said to mark the end of an era, given the degree to which Berri’s name was synonymous with intelligent European cinema from artists with singular visions including his own. (And I even include his enjoyably bawdy romp Le Sex Shop in that consideration). Berri will be missed. In memoriam we present this look back at ten outstanding European films that might never have come to fruition without his involvement, with the hope that other producers will follow suit and continue to carry the torch he lit.

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I’m a veteran of the laserdisc era.

I was thinking about that as I pondered the first decade (or perhaps even 11 years) of the DVD, which 2008 marked, on December 24 of the year.

To a lot of people under the age of 25 — and actually, to just plain a LOT of people — the “laserdisc format” won’t mean too much, because at the peak of its popularity, around 1996 or so, there were never more than about a million laserdisc players in use in the United States.

Those with longer memories, or who spent time in Japan (where there were several million players in use, even in the 1980’s), however, will remember the format: LP-size platters, usually silver on both sides (distinctly non-compact discs was the best way to summarize them), massively heavy, and usually in fairly flimsy LP-size jackets, all containing visual programming (movies, TV shows, still-frames, but in the end mostly movies). They were never overly popular, partly owing to the cost ($25 to $100 list, in a $15 CD marketplace), their cumbersome size, some production problems, and the fact that one couldn’t record in the format. As a clue to their lack of visibility, until the 1990’s laserdiscs were hardly ever mentioned in mainstream video advertising, except as an after-thought.

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One of the most diverse talents in modern filmmaking, Danny Boyle has shacked up with the greedy set (Shallow Grave), run with the junkies (Trainspotting), watched paradise wither (The Beach), shown us the end (28 Days Later), and followed the journey for a new beginning (Sunshine). Yet while Boyle’s films are often impressively varied in terms of both genre and tone, they all retain a certain intensity and visual aesthetic that makes them instantly recognizable as his own.

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