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.
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
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"
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.
Sam Neill did a super podcast with Marc Maron a few years ago. He came across as a really stand-up bloke - genuine, funny, smart and kind; and every obit I've seen today seems to echo all that. It's well worth a listen. https://www.wtfpod.com/podcast/episode-1202-sam-neill
I have rarely had such displeasure from hearing such an interesting interviewee having to cope with such a cretinous interviewer. I’m very surprised you recommended this.
Besides his role in Jurassic Park, I will always appreciate Sam Neill’s understated but important role as Borodin, the reliable and loyal First Officer in The Hunt for Red October. His character’s death (a change from the book) added emotional weight to the story.
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.
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.
The part I liked in Event Horizon was Laurence Fishburn's character seeing the logs of the crew going crazy and immediately turning it off and saying, "We're leaving."
Probably the smartest decision made in a horror film. Time to get out of Dodge.
Yeah! Its a great movie if you dont try to nitpick stuff, which is hard for me to do on a lot of things too.
Neill: We can't just abandon this ship, we just found her
Fishburn: I have no intentions of abandoning her. We will get far enough away from it and blow it up. Fuck this ship.
* Their Southern Cross is more astronomically accurate (it includes Epsilon Crucis) our one omits it
* They have an additional seven pointed star to represent the six territories/states of Australia, the seventh point being added when they took control of Papua to represent anything else they added to the federation as time went on
* Their stars are white, ours are red
But fully agree, I loved that it the Union Jack was replaced with the Aborigine flag at Sam Neill's behest, because after all, it _is_ the future right?
Pretty sure it's "But I LOVE what he did for the Australian flag." - he is a kiwi but that's arguably the Aussie flag with the colonial bit replaced with the local one
It's got white stars, it has the seven pointed "Commonwealth star", and astronomically, it's more correct as it includes Epsilon Crucis.
Our flag has red stars, no bonus commonwealth star, and for some reason, whoever designed our flag decided that ε Cru could go fuck itself.
And I love him to bits for insisting that in the future, Australia would surely have a) become a republic and b) embraced the Aborigine first peoples. It's a remarkably hopeful vision of the future for a movie where he ends up running around without eyes saying creepy shit.
Hell, it's why one of our former PMs had a referendum to try to replace our flag.
He got seated under an Aussie flag once at an international big important meeting, thus he decided to spend $21 million getting people to vote on whether or not to adopt a flag that looked like the logo a meat company would stick on a frozen leg of lamb being exported to the EU [0]. We ultimately voted against the meat wrapper.
My personal preference was for either the Black Jack [1] (because I loved how it co-opted the Union Jack with Māori design elements - the curved white koru) and tbh, we do love the colour black, or...
...Seeing as we're having a bit of a silly referendum anyway, good ol Laser Kiwi [2] (the white feather thing is the silver fern/ponga, adopted as our national plant when pteridomania was running rampant in the British Empire, and is often used as a logo for national sports teams, and for naming several female sports teams - Silver Ferns, White Ferns, Black Ferns), because who doesn't love the idea of shooting lasers out of your eyes?
John Oliver had a lot of fun with the whole debate. [3]
Oh, and fun fact, I believe during the anti-ICE protests, some Minnesotans were inspired by Laser Kiwi and brought about Laser Loon. [4]
You have a power plant capable of generating the energy needed to take you to relativistic speeds (at minimum) or punch holes through spacetime (a couple hundred orders of magnitude more) that’ll radiate a Hiroshima per second in waste heat (at 99.99999% efficiency converting energy into movement). You can certainly power a couple light bulbs.
Yeah but you save a couple bucks per ship if you cut the lighting to the absolute minimum required to keep crew shrinkage at an acceptable rate, and across the entire fleet that adds up to a nice bonus.
Rest in peace. Like many here, his performances were hugely influential on my childhood (and adulthood). One I haven’t seen mentioned here yet is Merlin.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !!!!
First time I saw him was in Riley Ace of Spies. A great series that was on PBS. Last series I watched was Untamed. He was one of my favorite actors and a credit to his profession. Sad to learn of his passing.
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.
i saw him around a lot on tv and so on as an australian, just genuinely a pretty good bloke. like i dunno what to say i don't know if i've ever cried about an actor dying before
i'd love to say he was awesome in every role but he always seemed super honest in his performance and i think that hurt him a lot when he had to play bullshit characters lol.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.