Free association with obituaries

Bernardo Bertolucci died a week ago at the age of 77, and I've been to busy to get around to mentioning it. Bertolucci won an Oscar for directing The Last Emperor, which I have to admit is a movie I've never seen. If I were going to do the Blind Spot series that a bunch of other bloggers do, I'd have to pick this one, although I'd have to come up with a bunch of other movies.

TV actor Ken Berry died over the weekend at the age of 85. He did do a couple of movies, including the Disney titles Herbie Rides Again and The Cat from Outer Space. One wonders what the suits at Disney were thinking with the latter one; I assume that with the success of the original Love Bug they wanted to milk the funny car for all it was worth. I think I saw Herbie Goes Bananas once. Or was it Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo?

New Zealand director Geoff Murphy died yesterday aged 80. The title that jumped out at me was Young Guns II, a movie that I think I saw back when I was in college and somebody rented it from the video store. For some reason I found myself looking it up a month or so ago, and saw that according to the TCM Shop it was scheduled for a MOD release two weeks ago. But the TCM page says it's on backorder. It also made me wonder what ever happened to Casey Siemaszko from the original Young Guns, who wasn't in the sequel. Wikipedia implies he's still acting, although it's been mostly guest appearances on TV for the past several years. Oh, and Murphy also directed Freejack, oh my. That one also got a Blu-ray release last month.