Mick LaSalle  Chronicle film critic Mick LaSalle tells you what
he really thinks    Not long ago, I was at an appreciation for
someone who died about 30 years too soon, and I was impressed by
the turnout.  Then I started looking at the other people in
attendance and realized that, in the normal order of things —
that is, if this person had lived to be 80 — about three
quarters of that crowd would not have been there, because they
would not have been HERE enough to be ANYwhere.  They would have
been dead.  Some, long dead.  So it is with celebrities.  Had
Ernest Borgnine died at — forget 50, say 71, like Nora Ephron —
there would have been tons of appreciations.  But when someone
makes it to 95, a lot of the people who really cared are already
gone, and the grieving element is muted by the fact that . . .
well, come on.  95.  It’s not like the person was cheated by
life.  Imagine if Nora Ephron lived to be 95 and hadn’t made a
film in 20 years.  People from another world would have been
doing her obituary — or