Stan Laurel

Stan Laurel (born Arthur Stanley Jefferson; 16 June 1890 – 23 February 1965) was an English comic actor, writer and film director, most famous for his role in the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy. With his comedy partner Oliver Hardy he appeared in 107 short films, feature films and cameo roles.

Laurel began his career in the British music hall, from where he took a number of his standard comic devices: the bowler hat, the deep comic gravity, and the nonsensical understatement. His performances polished his skills at pantomime and music hall sketches. Laurel was a member of "Fred Karno's Army," where he was Charlie Chaplin's understudy. The two arrived in the US on the same ship from Britain with the Karno troupe. Laurel began his career in films in 1917 and made his last appearance in 1951. From 1928 onwards he appeared exclusively with Oliver Hardy. Following his comedy partner's death in 1957 Laurel officially retired from the screen.

In 1961, Laurel was given a Lifetime Achievement Academy Award for his pioneering work in comedy. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 7021 Hollywood Blvd. In a 2005 UK poll to find the Comedians' Comedian, Laurel and Hardy ranked top among best double acts and seventh overall. In 2009, a bronze statue of the duo was unveiled in Laurel's hometown of Ulverston, Cumbria.

The Funeral (1996 film)

The Funeral is a 1996 American crime-drama film directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Christopher Walken, Chris Penn, Annabella Sciorra, Isabella Rossellini, Vincent Gallo, Benicio del Toro and Gretchen Mol.

The story concerns the funeral of one of three brothers in a family of gangsters that lived in New York in 1930s. It details the past of the brothers and their families through a series of flashbacks, concluding with a shocking scene of graphic violence.

Chris Penn won the best supporting actor award at the 1996 Venice Film Festival for his performance.

Plot

The film begins with the funeral of one of the three Tempio brothers. These men are violent criminals. Mourning the passage of their beloved brother Johnny are Chez and Ray. Ray is cold and calculating. Chez is hot tempered. Flashbacks show us that Johnny was more sensitive. Exposure to Communist meetings as a spy sway Johnny's opinions.

The chief suspect in Johnny's murder is rival gangster Gaspare Spoglia.

Ray and Chez swear revenge. Ray's wife, Jeanette, opposes the campaign of retribution and the violence it will bring, while Chez' wife, Clara, struggles to deal with her husband's obsessive nature.

Funeral (disambiguation)

A funeral is a ceremony marking a person's death.

Funeral may also refer to:

Film and TV

Music

Print

The Funeral (Grosz)

The Funeral (often The Funeral (Dedicated to Oskar Panizza)) is a painting by the German Expressionist artist George Grosz, completed between 1917 and 1918. The work combines elements of Futurism and Cubism to show a funeral procession in a modern urban city, as an infernal abyss populated by twisted and grotesque attendants. The painting is dedicated to the German psychiatrist and avant-garde writer Oskar Panizza, noted for his play Liebeskonzil, which draws on the first historically documented outbreak of syphilis and depicts God the Father as a senile old man. Although Panizza's works, in which he rejected all militarism and religious authority, were deemed blasphemous by both the Church and government of Emperor Wilhelm II, they were later admired by Grosz and other idealists of his generation.

The painting seeks to emulate medieval depictions of hellscapes, mainly through dramatic colourisation—in particular through its use of red light—as well as through the depiction of multitudes of layered distorted bodies and limbs, echoing the work of Bruegel in the 16th century. A skeleton representing the Grim Reaper sits on the coffin, drinking from a bottle. A mob of mourners gathered around him are presented as ugly, frenzied and as if ridden with alcoholism and late-stage syphilis.

-stan

The suffix -stan (Persian: ـستان‎‎ -stān) is Persian for "place of" or "country". It appears in the names of many regions, especially in Central and South Asia, but also in the Caucasus and Russia; areas where significant amounts of Persian culture were spread or adopted. The suffix is also used more generally, as in Persian and Urdu rigestân (ریگستان) "place of sand, desert", Pakistan "land of the pure", Hindustan "land of the Hindus", golestan (گلستان) "place of flowers, garden", etc.

Etymology and cognates

The suffix, originally an independent noun, but evolving into a suffix by virtue of appearing frequently as the last part in nominal compounds, is of Indo-Iranian and ultimately Indo-European origin: It is cognate with Sanskrit sthā́na (Devanagari: स्थान [st̪ʰaːna]), meaning "the act of standing", from which many further meanings derive, including "place, location", and ultimately descends from Proto-Indo-Iranian *sthāna-.

The Proto-Indo-European root from which this noun is derived is *steh₂- (older reconstruction *stā-) "to stand" (or "to stand up, to step (somewhere), to position (oneself)"), which is also the source of English to stand, Latin stāre, and Ancient Greek histamai (ἵσταμαι), all meaning "to stand" and Russian стан (stan, meaning "settlement" or "semi-permanent camp"). In Polish and Ukrainian, stan means "state" or "condition", while in Serbo-Croatian it translates as "apartment" (a Slovenian word "stanovanje" means apartment or other closed space of living is an obvious derivative of stan) in its modern usage, while its original meaning was "habitat". In Czech and Slovak, it means "tent" or, in military terms, "headquarters". Also in Germanic languages, the root can be found in Stand ("place, location"), and in Stadt (German), stad/sted (Dutch/Scandinavian), stêd (West Frisian) and stead (English), all meaning either "place" or "city". The suffix -stan is analogous to the suffix -land, present in many country and location names.

Stan

Stan may refer to:

People:

Stan!

Stan! (born Steven Brown on 16 October 1964 in Brooklyn, New York City, United States) is an American author, cartoonist, and game designer. He is sometimes credited as Stan Brown.

Biography

Brown was born and grew up on Long Island and attended Binghamton University. Brown began publishing fiction, cartoons, and games professionally in 1982, usually under the pen name "Stan!." He is the author of numerous short stories, novels, roleplaying products, comics and cartoons. He has served as a graphic designer and line editor for West End Games; an editor and game designer for TSR, Inc.; and an author, senior game designer, and creative director for Wizards of the Coast, Inc. He has also been the creative content manager at Upper Deck Entertainment.

In 2007, R. Hyrum Savage formed a subsidiary of his OtherWorld Creations with Brown called Super Genius Games. He has also worked as the creative content manager for Upper Deck Entertainment, and the creative vice president for The Game Mechanics, Inc. Brown is the Creative Director for Super Genius Games. He co-founded The Game Mechanics with JD Wiker, Marc Schmalz, and Rich Redman.