So far, all of the tributes I’ve seen for Rodney Dangerfield, who died yesterday at the age of 82, have made use of his famous “I get no respect” line to paint Rodney’s comic persona as an everyman loser, a guy who was constantly putting himself down. The words “self-deprecating” have occurred in so many of these pieces that I’m starting to think there’s some kind of contractual obligation involved with their usage.

However, I would argue that “self-deprecating loser” isn’t how most people of my generation experienced Rodney Dangerfield. Maybe that description was true of his stand-up act, but We who came of age in the ’80s first encountered his bug-eyed visage in the movies, specifically in two movies: Caddyshack and Back to School. He played a similar character in both, a fun-loving but unbelievably obnoxious guy with money to burn.

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Another icon of the silver screen has taken her final bow. This time, it’s Janet Leigh, a fine actress who will forever be remembered for a single scene in one of Alfred Hitchcock’s best-remembered films, Psycho. Leigh died on Sunday after a year-long illness, age 77.

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Another great Hollywood artist, composer Elmer Bernstein, has passed away at the age of 82. Bernstein probably isn’t too well known to folks my age. His themes aren’t as flashy as those of John Williams, and he was never attached to any big genre flicks like Jerry Goldsmith. Nevertheless, he contributed to a number of important classic films, including The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape. He also wrote the jaunty incidental music for Ghostbusters, without which Bill Murray’s antics wouldn’t be nearly as funny…

I’m a few days late in writing about this, but nevertheless I must note the passing of a Hollywood icon, the actress Fay Wray, who died this past Sunday at the age of 96.

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Given the huge amount of behind-the-scenes material now available to even the most casual movie fans in the form of DVD supplements and cable-TV programming, it saddens me to note how little of it pays tribute to film music. Music is one of the most underappreciated elements of quality filmmaking; while everyone oohs and ahhs over the latest visual spectacle to emerge from the special effects shops, only the most hard-core cinephile gives any thought at all to a movie’s score.

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I was planning to write this morning about one of the more eccentric aspects of living in Utah, namely the way Utahns celebrate Independence Day on July 3rd if the 4th falls on a Sunday (except, of course, for the rebellious “in-Utah-but-not-of-Utah” towns of Park City and Moab, which stubbornly insist on holding their festivities on the actual declared holiday). However, I’ve just read something on the ‘net that is far more important to me personally than all that theologically-inspired scheduling nonsense: the great Marlon Brando has died.

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There’s an old cliche that says you can’t sing the blues if you haven’t known pain. I don’t know if that’s literally true, but it’s pretty obvious that those who have suffered and overcome hardship are able to inject a certain richness of texture into their work, a level of emotion and complexity that other, more naive artists have a hard time achieving. If you want proof of that, have a listen to Ray Charles’ best-known song, “Georgia on My Mind.” If you have the means, listen to it on vinyl, with all the organic pops and scratches that come with that format. It’s a melancholy tune of lost love; performed by any other musician that’s all it ever could be. But when Ray sang it, there was much more going on there than mere sadness.

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Man, I hate how these things always seem to happen in cycles — you go for a while without hearing about anyone dying, then all of a sudden one day, familiar faces from our extended TV-and-movie family are dropping all around us. Today I read that actor Richard Biggs, who played Dr. Franklin on the TV series Babylon 5, died suddenly over the weekend. If you’re a fan of that show or of Mr. Biggs, you can read more about his passing here. I have to admit that I was only an occasional viewer of B5; I just never seemed to find the time for that one. But from what I saw of him, Franklin was a good character, a flawed man with an essential core of decency, and Biggs did a consummate job of bringing him to life. He was only 44 years old, just ten years older than myself. A damn shame.

I’m about to reveal levels of geekery that few people know I possess — once upon a time, I was a fan of Dr. Who, the longest running science-fiction television series of all time. If you’ve never seen Who, I won’t be able to explain its appeal. And if you have seen it… well, I probably still won’t be able to explain its appeal. Made in England on a budget of about $1.98 per hour of screentime, the show is largely an exercise in cheese — cardboard sets, silly storylines, dialogue consisting mainly of doubletalk and nonsense, and really, really primitive visual effects. I’m talking an extra-grande Pizza Hut CheeseLover’s Stuft Crust job here. However, there are times when it feels really good to eat one of those artery-clogging babies, and Dr. Who is much the same. If viewed with the proper mind set, it’s really a fun show.

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