An English film director (and apparently super handsome guy) was found dead in a boarded up hostel last week, just three days after he started a project in which he planned to live like a homeless person for a week to draw attention to the homeless problem. Now, he’s either a martyr for his cause, a cautionary tale, or both. Or maybe Newcastle is just really gritty.

Friends believed that Lee Halpin, 26, who was discovered in a boarded up hostel on Wednesday morning, may have succumbed to hypothermia as temperatures reached as low as -4C overnight in the city.
But yesterday, detectives investigating Mr Halpin’s death arrested a 26-year-old and a 30-year-old on suspicion of being concerned in the supply of controlled drugs.
A Northumbria police spokesman said the men had been bailed pending further inquiries and that a report was being prepared for the coroner.
Mr Halpin, a Newcastle University graduate, had planned to spend a week experiencing life on the streets and on Sunday, the night before he embarked on the project, he made a video in which he said he wanted to “immerse himself” in the lifestyle.
“I am about to go and spend a week being homeless in the West End of Newcastle,” he said.
“I will sleep rough, scrounge for my food, access all the services that other homeless individuals in the West End use. I will interact with as many homeless people as possible and immerse myself in that lifestyle as deeply as I can.”
In the clip, Mr Halpin said he was producing the documentary as part of an application for a position on an Channel 4 investigative journalism programme.
He said: “I hope that you perceive this to be a fearless approach to a story. “It certainly feels brave from where I’m sat right now. [Telegraph via Gawker]

Obviously, it’s a pretty crappy story, and not just because of Lee Halpin’s rugged good looks. Maybe God just didn’t want such a handsome do-gooder down here making all the rest of us look bad. In any case, if there’s a lesson here, and I’m not sure there is, it’s that you should take care not to confuse making a reenactment look real enough for a movie with doing an actual, real reenactment, provided you value your own good health. Bear Grylls sells his survival techniques well by drinking his own pee a lot, but I doubt he’s ever that far from a PA with a space heater and an elephant gun. Stay safe out there, kids.

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Annette Funicello died today at 70, of complications from multiple sclerosis. Her body of work was a bit before my time, but IMDB tells me that she starred in five movies with “bikini” in the title and five with “party” in them, and for that she has my undying respect.

Annette Funicello, the most popular Mouseketeer on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” who matured to a successful career in records and ’60s beach party movies but struggled with illness in middle age and after, died Monday, The Walt Disney Co. said. She was 70.
She died peacefully at Mercy Southwest Hospital in Bakersfield, Calif., of complications from multiple sclerosis, the company said.

True story: my dad has multiple sclerosis (a much milder case than Annette Funicello’s, luckily), which is his excuse for smoking lots of weed.

Funicello stunned fans and friends in 1992 with the announcement about her ailment. Yet she was cheerful and upbeat, grappling with the disease with a courage that contrasted with her lightweight teen image of old.
The pretty, dark-haired Funicello was just 13 when she gained fame on Walt Disney’s television kiddie “club,” an amalgam of stories, songs and dance routines that ran from 1955 to 1959.
Cast after Disney saw her at a dance recital, she soon began receiving 8,000 fan letters a month, 10 times more than any of the 23 other young performers.
Her devotion to Walt Disney remained throughout her life. “He was the dearest, kindest person, and truly was like a second father to me,” she remarked. “He was a kid at heart.”
She also became a recording star, singing on 15 albums and hit singles such as “Tall Paul” and “Pineapple Princess.”
Outgrowing the kid roles by the early ’60s, Annette teamed with Frankie Avalon in a series of movies for American-International, the first film company to exploit the burgeoning teen market.
The films had songs, cameos by older stars and a few laughs and, as a bonus to latter-day viewers, a look back at a more innocent time. The 1965 “Beach Blanket Bingo,” for example, featured subplots involving a mermaid, a motorcycle gang and a skydiving school run by Don Rickles, and comic touches by silent film star Buster Keaton.
Among the other titles: “Muscle Beach Party,” ”Bikini Beach,” ”Beach Blanket Bingo,” ”How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” and “Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine.” [BigStory/AP]

I’m sorry it took a sad day like this to make it happened, but it sounds like I’m long overdue for a beach party movie viewing party. There will be so much swingin’ music and hip shaking. TMZ, meanwhile, takes care to remember the important things:

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Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher died today after a stroke at the age of 87. Remember her? She was the one they made that horrible movie about. Thatcher suffered multiple strokes prior to this one and had been suffering from dementia for many years, much like her conservative American counterpart, Ronald Reagan, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1993. It was never confirmed whether Thatcher’s dementia was Alzheimer’s, though her struggle with dementia was depicted (horribly) in The Iron Lady, where it was reduced to Obi-wan Kenobi-style advice from her dead husband Denis, played (wonderfully) by Jim Broadbent. My grandmother died of Alzheimer’s a few years back. I promise, helpful advice from dead people isn’t a big part of it.

LONDON — Margaret Thatcher was credited with restoring Britain’s reputation on the world stage and her close bond with US president Ronald Reagan was seen as a key factor in ending the Cold War.
From “handbagging” European leaders in demanding Britain’s money back to sending a task force to retake the Falkland Islands from Argentina, she cultivated the “Iron Lady” image to cunning effect.
When she took power in 1979 as Britain’s first female premier, Thatcher had little experience and even less interest in foreign affairs, with her main priority being to shore up the crumbling economy.
But that same year she approved the deployment of US cruise missiles in Britain, despite mass protests at home, as part of NATO’s efforts to counter what it saw as the growing threat from the Soviet Union.
When Reagan took office in 1981 she quickly formed a close bond with him.
Despite their different upbringings, the former Hollywood star and the shopkeeper’s daughter shared a free-market economic philosophy and a deep mistrust of communism.
“I have lost a dear friend… such a cheerful and invigorating presence,” she said in a video eulogy after Reagan died in 2004. “Thank you for your presidency, thank you for your testament of belief.”
But despite their shared distrust for Moscow and its allies, Thatcher was also the first Western leader to reach out to reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
In 1984, three months before he took power, Thatcher met him and declared “I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.”
Her Cold War judgment was not always so forward looking, though, as she told Gorbachev that “we do not want a united Germany”, just two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.
Yet it was a conflict over a windswept archipelago in the South Atlantic Ocean that was in many ways the making of Thatcher as a foreign policy player on the global stage.
British forces drove out Argentine invaders from the Falkands in 1982 despite Washington’s refusal to offer any support — a sore point between Thatcher and Reagan — ending a long period of post-imperial military decline.
“We have ceased to be a nation in retreat,” she declared afterwards.
Geopolitics professor Klaus Dodds of Royal Holloway University in London told AFP that the effect of her stance over the Falklands was “to give successive prime ministers the confidence to project British forces into various other theatres.”
“When you think about where Britain’s gone after the Falklands — Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya — a lot of that has come off the back of the Falklands,” said Dodds.
From then on she lived up to the nickname she was given by a Soviet newspaper after a tirade against the Soviet Union in 1976 — the Iron Lady — and deepened Britain’s strategic relationship with the United States.
That toughness manifested itself particularly in her increasing opposition to growing European unification. [AFP]

There’s a lot wrong with the right’s weird hero worship of Ronald Reagan, but my favorite part of their argument is how they always cite how Reagan and Thatcher “won the Cold War,” as if we all got a big trophy and rocked out to Jesus Jones and lived happily ever after forever and ever. So we won, huh? What did we win? A bunch of pain-in-the-ass Middle Eastern countries that hate us instead of Russia now (even though the ones in Afghanistan can’t really tell the difference)? I could see Reagan and Thatcher being heroes in the former Soviet Bloc and in East Germany, where they at least got an end to Stalinist Communism out of it, but here? Have you seen Top Gun and Rocky IV and Rambo III (originally dedicated to the Mujahideen, incidentally)? The Cold War was the best thing that ever happened to us. It mostly sucked for everyone else.

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Well this sucks. Just days after announcing that he’d be taking a leave of absence from his work to deal with cancer that had returned to his body – discovered after he fractured his hip last year – Roger Ebert has died at the age of 70.

Ebert, 70, who reviewed movies for the Chicago Sun-Times for 46 years and on TV for 31 years, and who was without question the nation’s most prominent and influential film critic, died Thursday in Chicago. He had been in poor health over the past decade, battling cancers of the thyroid and salivary gland.

He lost part of his lower jaw in 2006, and with it the ability to speak or eat, a calamity that would have driven other men from the public eye. But Ebert refused to hide, instead forging what became a new chapter in his career, an extraordinary chronicle of his devastating illness that won him a new generation of admirers. “No point in denying it,” he wrote, analyzing his medical struggles with characteristic courage, candor and wit, a view that was never tinged with bitterness or self-pity.

Always technically savvy — he was an early investor in Google — Ebert let the Internet be his voice. His rogerebert.com had millions of fans, and he received a special achievement award as the 2010 “Person of the Year” from the Webby Awards, which noted that “his online journal has raised the bar for the level of poignancy, thoughtfulness and critique one can achieve on the Web.” His Twitter feeds had 827,000 followers.

Ebert was both widely popular and professionally respected. He not only won a Pulitzer Prize — the first film critic to do so — but his name was added to the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2005, among the movie stars he wrote about so well for so long. His reviews were syndicated in hundreds of newspapers worldwide. [SunTimes]

I didn’t agree with him much about movies in recent years, but I always liked Ebert as a writer. He got a lot of flack for inventing the “thumbs up, thumbs down” system of reviewing movies, but I always saw that more as a hook to draw people in so they’d hear what he had to say than as an actual attempt to boil down complex reviews to a binary system. None of us really want to stamp a semi-meaningless letter grade or yes or no on the end of our complex thoughts on a film. But Ebert understood, even before RottenTomatoes, that people wanted reviews and ratings quantified, even if it was just in a superficial way, or as a hook to get them to read it. It’s a quirk of human nature, and he was just going with it. Much the same way the internet breaks things into lists not because internet writers love lists, but because something about the list format makes people more apt to read them. Obviously, he will be missed. Ebert still managed to outlive his old partner, Gene Siskel, who died in 1999 at 53, of a brain tumor. It’s sad to see so many film critics dying young. I blame our glamorous, devil-may-care lifestyle.

PS: I’ve seen countless news stories using pictures of Ebert post-jaw-loss to accompany the story of his passing. Really, you A-holes? You really think that’s how he’d want to be remembered, with most of his lower jaw missing from cancer? Somehow I doubt ithat.

PPS: I can’t believe I’d nearly forgotten this, but I do believe it was Roger Ebert who first introduced me (tangentially, via Drew Magary) to the wonderful work of Lindy West three years ago. Aw, and if I wasn’t feeling all squishy and sentimental about this five minutes ago, I certainly am now.

[be sure to check out his full obit over at his paper, the Sun Times. picture source = Shutterstock]

After all that fun we had in the last post about Steven Seagal’s bulletproof kimono, it’s now my duty to totally harsh your mellow with a reminder that life is terribly short and probably meaningless. Have fun on those TPS reports. Anyway, David R. Ellis, a stuntman-turned director responsible for Snakes on a Plane and Shark Night 3D, who also did stunts on Smokey and the Bandit and Scarface, who every movie writer seems to have had a pleasant encounter or two with, was found dead in his Johannesburg hotel yesterday at the age of 60. He leaves behind a wife, three children, and countless fake dead snakes.

The 60-year-old, a chameleon of the entertainment industry who worked as an actor and stuntman earlier in his career, was found dead in the bathroom of his hotel room in the upscale neighborhood of Sandton in Johannesburg.
Police said Tuesday that the hotel manager discovered Ellis’ body at around 1 p.m. Monday. Ellis, 60, was last seen Saturday in a restaurant by a friend, reported the South African Press Association.
“Nothing was found to be missing from his room and no foul play is being suspected at this stage,” said Lt. Col. Lungelo Dlamini, a police spokesman, told the news agency.
In the years since its release, occasional discoveries of smuggled or concealed snakes in airports or aboard airplanes around the world invariably draw comparisons to Ellis’ thriller. Fortunately for the frequent flyer, such occurrences are rare.

Yes, thanks for that fact, NY Daily News. Very important.

In 2006, Ellis mused on whether the stuck-with-snakes theme would work in other movies while talking to Brian Finkelstein, whose “Snakes on a Blog” blog helped publicize the movie.
“`Titanic’ would be good with a ton of snakes, and at the same time, the boat’s going down. That would be kind of cool,” Ellis said. “Or `Cannonball Run,’ with snakes in every car. Or, you know, there’s a lot you could do. `Top Gun’ with snakes in their planes.”

Basically, he seemed like a good dude with a great sense of humor. Between him and Huell Howser, this has been a terrible, tragic week for beloved, cult media personalities. And with Ellis gone, who’s going to direct my script for The Black Shark Knight 3D? Martin Lawrence plays a regular guy who travels back in time and becomes a knight who fights sharks. We miss you already, David Ellis.