ALAN HAIL

Like all sensible lovers of great acting, I was saddened by the death of Alan Rickman, way too young at 69, earlier this month.

Here in the Valley, Harkins Theatres is paying a very cool tribute to Rickman with a mini-festival of his films today only at the Valley Art in downtown Tempe: Love Actually (11 a.m.); Galaxy Quest (1:50 p.m.); Truly, Madly, Deeply (4:10 p.m.) and Die Hard (8:45 p.m.). (They’re also showing Labyrinth at 6:30 p.m., as a David Bowie tribute.) Tickets are only $5, and proceeds benefit Save the Children.

Great choices, but I would have included Sense and Sensibility, and one of my sisters always raves about a TV movie Rickman starred in called Something the Lord Made.

Anyway…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week our honoree is General Sarris, the menacing reptile-arthropod-whatever played by Robin Sachs in Galaxy Quest…

He was insultingly named, by the way, after the late auteurist critic Andrew Sarris.

SEX SHELLS

In honor of these admirable prehistoric turtles…

…fossilized in the act of having sex…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s pay homage to that colossal chelonian, that towering testudine, that really big freakin’ turtle, Gamera…

Developed in the mid-60s by Japan’s Daiei studios as a Godzilla knockoff, Gamera is an enormous, tusked, oddly endearing turtle who can fly, courtesy of his own rocket propulsion. My own favorite of the many Gamera movies is 1970’s Gamera vs. Jiger, released in the U.S. as Gamera vs. Monster X, in which the Gamster defends Expo ’70 in Osaka from this beast…

It’s amazing how much of the dialogue in the later stretch of that film consists of children yelling the name “Gamera” again and again.

RIP to uber-auteurist critic Andrew Sarris, departed at 82, and to the creepy, ever-reptilian TV and movie actor Richard Lynch, a perpetual heavy owing in part to a mug...

...he’d supposedly scarred by setting himself on fire under the influence of LSD, departed at 76.