Bruce’s Reviews > Madly, Deeply: The Diaries of Alan Rickman > Status Update

Interesting to have watched a film and thinking “why is his thumbnail black?” then reading the diary entry explaining about the door crushing. The health issues and corollary deaths of all his friends is hard to read.

Compelling name-dropping and location-moving as I am aghast at the schedule. What a life.

Amazing work ethic, and by and large, I find his politics are something I can embrace. Amazing career, relationships, and battles.

My initial sense of this being a mashup of Dead Like Me deals with Arthur Dent, with a cosmology that gets revealed due to "just wait and see" in a Groundhog Day kind of way. I'm sure it's just my current mood, but it seems overly stretched out with detail and character reveals. Will the lawyer discover he wasted his life with efficiency and coldness? Of course it will happen. Will I care? Yet to be discovered.

End of 2001. Interesting that I note things like "where was I when this was happening?" and the relevant birthdays and special occasions of my life with whatever Rickman was up to. Seems he was absolutely born to play Snape, from everything he writes. I'm glad it got him the big money, even though I doubt he took it as seriously as other roles of more repute. He did nail it, and he loved the people he worked with.

Details about working on Galaxy Quest. I would have loved to see the first cut of that, as it sounds like the suits decided to cut a lot of Rickman's scenes and change the focus of the film completely. It was supposed to be a much darker film, also have an R rating (Sigourney Weaver's over-dubbed "Well, FUCK that!" during the chompers scene.) 1999 was very short, for entries. Did he not write much, or left out?

I never expected to enjoy this invitation to voyeuristic delight so much. Rickman proves via his unframed choices to remember things that make me sorely miss him even more than I already did. I would have loved to have met him, with hopefully no risk of stressing him out with an over-used tag-line or fan-boy gushing. Truly a good human being who knew why he was here, and did his level best to fulfil that mission.