It was a deadly weekend to be famous, that’s for sure. As one commenter already pointed out today, famous people tend to die in threes: Bill Walsh, Tom Snyder, and of course, ABC 13’s Marvin Zindler from Houston, who -- while still tied-up with breathing tubes, in his hospital bed, and very pissed off at 24-Hour Fitness -- gave and gave until the very end.

But another one squeaked in there among those three: Ingmar Bergman. And on the ghoulish scale of celebrity worthiness -- better understood via the annual look-who-died-this-year montage at the Oscars, where the undulating volume of applause determines deceased stars' statuses -- Ingmar Bergman’s was way up there. (Our sister site, LAist, has a great tribute of the writer/director, which you can read here.) Sure, the Academy Award-winning director's style was sometimes synonymous with parodies of pretentious movie-making, but his work still totally astounds and entertains. His pretty, pretty movie-making skills were evident with such flicks like Fanny and Alexander, Smiles of a Summer Night (one of his only comedies, reason that this song entered our lives), Persona, and The Virgin Spring (inspiration for the grisly rape-revenge film The Last House on the Left), to name a few.

But (arguably) his best work was the striking and red-soaked Cries and Whispers, which focused on three sisters, one painfully dying of cancer. The opening scenes are beautiful and awful at the same time:

And we hope that at least one of our many SF movie houses will have some sort of retrospective. And soon.