...and of Nick Broomfield's Leonard Cohen documentary Marianne & Leonard: Words of Love...
RIP to the magnificent Rip Torn, somehow both chameleon and virile star persona, passed on at 88. Out of everything from King of Kings to You're a Big Boy Now to The Cincinnati Kid to The Man Who Fell to Earth to Cross Creek to City Heat and much more, some of Torn's most memorable performances are, for me, in otherwise misfired movies: His blustery senator in The Seduction of Joe Tynan ("I'm readin' from my pad..."); his loathsome, macho psychotic kidnapper in 1982's A Stranger is Watching; his good-naturedly full-of-it old salt in the lightweight 1985 John Candy comedy Summer Rental; his corrupt yet curiously likable Texan villain in 1987's Nadine.
My favorite Torn character of all, though, was Bob Diamond, the ebullient defender of Albert Brooks in the afterlife in 1991's Defending Your Life. Of his absence during one of the hero's hearings, Bob later apologetically explains that he was "trapped near the inner circle of fault." I hope that's not true for Torn now, and I hope I have somebody like Bob defending me.
I never met Rip Torn, alas, but I did once briefly meet Walter B. Russell Jr., the Korean War hero and Georgia State Representative that Torn played in 1959's Pork Chop Hill. That should count for something.
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