Brian Mark Blue, formerly Brian Henke, died on Saturday, March 8, after a long battle with cancer. He was 37 and is survived by his young daughter, Isabella, and his sisters, Heather Wildin and Hillary Brestar, among his many loved ones. (For a full accounting, please visit Brian’s obituary is here.)

On Friday, March 14, I attended his memorial service, arranged by Hillary and Heather.

Brian was one of the most enthusiastic people I have had the pleasure to know. He was one of the first people I met when I moved to Seattle in 1995 and started working at Scarecrow Video. I was down on the floor putting out new additions to the inventory when my defining moment came. I was merely an observer – I didn’t even catch the conversation that led up to it, it was some testosterone movie or bizarre cult film that Brian was trumpeting with all the enthusiasm and excitement he brought to any discussion of a film that captured his heart – but I remember the response vividly. Ariana, his good friend and co-worker, simply eyed him with a look of appreciative amusement and said, “Brian, you are such a boy!” He simply beamed with his cat-that-caught-the-canary grin. The key there is that she said “boy” and not simply “guy.” While the word carries with it a hint of adolescence and immaturity, I think it captures something pure and youthful and fresh in Brian. As those who knew him would surely agree, Brian’s unrestrained enthusiasm and excitement made him seem younger than his years, someone who still responded to the jaded world with eyes wide open, ready and willing to be surprised and enchanted whenever he was.

I worked with Brian for three years at Scarecrow. I saw countless films with him. I was at his wedding to Holly Blue (Brian took his wife’s name, explaining: “How could I ask a woman I love to take the name Holly Henke?”). And when I left the store in 1998, I trained him to take my position. At the time, Scarecrow was teetering on bankruptcy and leadership was in a state of chaos and denial. The stress was making me miserable and, with mixed feelings and a great deal of anxiety, I gave my notice. The owner, George Latsios, treated my departure like some kind of betrayal and barely acknowledged me as I said my goodbyes on my last day. I was feeling all but abandoned when Brian and Holly invited me to spend the evening with them and gave me a tremendous amount of support. They probably had no idea how important that was to me, but it meant the world to me.

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Kon Ichikawa died on February 13, of pneumonia, at the age of 92.

He directed over 80 films in a career that spanned more than 70 years. He entered the Japanese film industry in 1933 as an animator, directed by first feature (Musume Dojoji, aka A Girl at the Dojo Temple) in 1946 and (according to the Internet Movie Database) his most recent feature (The Inugamis) in 2006. Yet, apart from a few key features, his filmography is less well known and certainly less available stateside than the films of many of his colleagues.

The Kon Ichikawa never secured the international reputation of fellow studio professionals Akira Kurisawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Yasijiro Ozu, but the versatile director made an indelible mark with two of the most powerful anti-war dramas made in or out of Japan. The lyrical and introspective The Burmese Harp (1956) follows the odyssey of a Japanese soldier in Burma during the waning months of World War II who steals the robes of a Buddhist monk to make his way back to his platoon and undergoes a spiritual transformation as he witnesses the destruction and wholesale death left in the wake of battle. After a career of studio assignments, largely satirical comedies and melodramas, this passion project from Ichikawa made an impression on critics in Japan and became his first film to be seen outside the country, picking up a prize at the Venice Film Festival and securing distribution in the U.S. and Europe.

Fires on the Plain made three years later, stands in stark contrast, stark being the operative word. Based on the novel by Shohei Ooka (who drew from his personal experiences as a soldier and POW) and scripted by Ichikawa’s wife and collaborator, Natto Wada, it too takes the form of soldier’s journey through the battlefields of World War II, this time an island in the Philippines in 1945 as the Americans drive the Japanese out. The striking photography and imagery is the unmistakable work of the same creative artist, but otherwise Ichikawa takes a very different path. Where the serenity amidst death of The Burmese Harp is about the healing of wounds caused by the war, Fires on the Plain is a grim and gruesome and at times macabre autopsy of its (selectively Japanese) victims. Read more »

I just learned that screenwriter and novelist George MacDonald Fraser, author of the “Flashman” ribald historical romps and screenwriter of Richard Lester’s The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers (not mention Lester’s screen version of Frasier’s Flashman novel Royal Flash), died Wednesday at the age of 82.

His major claim to fame is a dozen comic novels featuring Sir Harry Flashman, accidental hero and rotter of the first order whose instinct for self-preservation was matched only by his blind lust and sexual adventures. the character, appropriated from “Tom Brown’s School Days” (he was the school bully who tormented hero Tom), winds up at the center of major historical events in each novel, such as the Charge of the Light Brigade in “Flashman at the Charge.” He brought that same sensibility and penchant for deflating heroic postures and aristocratic dignity to his collaborations with Richard Lester.

But in addition to these (and other) cheeky historical satires, he wrote serious memoirs (such as “Quartered Safe Out Here,” about his experience as soldier in Burma in World War II) and even a book on Hollywood’s historical epics (“The Hollywood History of the World“) that arrived at the almost contrarian conclusion that, for all of the liberties that studio costume dramas have taken with history, they got it right more than they got it wrong. Considering how much Fraser loved and respected history, his argument demands some attention at the very least.

Obituary in the Telegraph:

The fag-roasting bully of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Thomas Hughes’s 1857 tribute to Dr Arnold’s Rugby, was last seen being expelled for drunkenness. Age had not improved him. Fraser’s appropriation in 1969, Flashman, joyously confirmed him as a thoroughgoing rotter and cad of the first water.

The book and its 11 sequels purported to be the memoirs of General Sir Harry Flashman, VC, discovered in a saleroom at Ashby-de-la-Zouch and entrusted to Fraser for editing.

This device allowed Fraser to pilot Flashman through a picaresque series of encounters with some of the choicest episodes of Victorian history. Thus, the first novel took as its background the First Afghan War – for Flashman an odyssey of self-preservation justified by his being the sole survivor of the Retreat from Kabul.

(…)

George MacDonald Fraser was born at Carlisle on April 2 1925. His father was a doctor, his mother a nurse. George was educated at Carlisle Grammar School and Glasgow Academy, where his performance as Laertes was distinguished by his unscripted defeat of Hamlet in the pair’s duel.

In 1943 he joined the Border Regiment and served as an infantryman in North Africa and with the “Forgotten” Fourteenth Army in Burma. He was eventually commissioned in the Gordon Highlanders.

Some of his finest writing is contained in his graphic recollections of his Burma service, Quartered Safe Out Here (1992), in which the affectionate portrait of his Cumbrian comrades demonstrated his keen eye for character and acute ear for dialogue. John Keegan, in The Sunday Telegraph, justly called it “one of the great personal memoirs of World War II”.

Read the complete obituary here. Also, obituaries in The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Washington Post.

For more background and information, check out The Flashman Society, and the GMF biography therein.

Thanks for the heads up on this, Nick!