One of cinema's most beloved comic actors has passed away, and Minister for Culture Ed Vaizey has announced that the BFI are taking over most of the responsibility from the soon-to-be abolished UK Film Council.
When it was announced in July that the UK Film Council was going to be abolished, Clint Eastwood wrote a very angry letter. Now if I know anything it's that when Dirty Harry says jump, you'd better bloody jump.
And jump they did. Albeit, up and sideways.
From next year the British Film Institute- not the UK Film Council- will distribute lottery money to film makers. The organisation shall have to expand to accommodate the extra responsibility as all of the functions of the now-defunct council, bar the encouragement of inward investment, shall now become their call.
According to today's Guardian, Vaizey has "reaffirmed that lottery funding for film would rise from £27m to more than £40m by 2014 and said there were no plans to change the tax credit scheme which has encouraged Hollywood studios to make films in the UK."
Plans for the BFI to partially merge with the UK Film Council were made over a year ago, but now it has been confirmed that the former shall actually swallow the latter. Film London is to continue the job of attracting Hollywood to Britain.
What better news could we have asked for on the day we are promised that the sky shall fall on us, shitting down cocaine rain?
And on a grave note:
Yesterday, Leslie Nielson, aged 84, passed away peacefully in his sleep. He was in a hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, suffering from a complication of pneumonia.
After a varied acting career which began in television and spanned 62 years, Nielson was best known for his role as Doctor Rumack in Airplane! (1980), an surrealist disaster spoof from directors Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams of Kentucky Fried Theatre fame. The movie's modest intentions were dwarfed by its success, taking Golden Globe for Best Comedy and a Bafta for Best Screenplay, but more notably it boosted Nielson to stardom; his comic turn typecast, you could say, and repeated in many features to follow.
Nielson's comic roles were characterised by a sharp, deadpan delivery in utterly absurd situations.
Here are some of his most remembered exchanges:
Rumack: I won't deceive you, Mr. Striker. We're running out of time.
Stryker: Surely there must be something you can do.
Rumack: I'm doing everything I can... and stop calling me Shirley.
Rumack: Captain, how soon can you land?
Captain Oveur: I can't tell.
Rumack: You can tell me. I'm a doctor.
Captain Oveur: No. I mean I'm just not sure.
Rumack: Well, can't you take a guess?
Captain Oveur: Well, not for another two hours.
Rumack: You can't take a guess for another two hours?
Rumack: You'd better tell the Captain we've got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.
Elaine Dickinson: A hospital? What is it?
Rumack: It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now.
(In The Naked Gun series, Nielson played Frank Drebin, inept cop)
Frank: It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
Jane: Goodyear?
Frank: No, the worst.
Frank: Just think; next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.
Mayor: Now Drebin, I don't want any trouble like you had on the South Side last year, that's my policy.
Frank: Well, when I see five weirdos, dressed in togas, stabbing a man in the middle of the park in full view of a hundred people, I shoot the bastards, that's *my* policy!
Mayor: That was a Shakespeare-In-The-Park production of 'Julius Caesar,' you moron! You killed five actors! Good ones!
Finally:
One for the road... (or... air?).
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