Sad about Heath Ledger, an unflashily brave actor, and not much else to say about the passing of a star young enough to have shown only a penchant for eclectic movies and a quiet ambition, manifested of course most notably and again bravely in “Brokeback Mountain.” His death promises to be a new “Don Quixote”-like nightmare for Terry Gilliam, still amid the filming of the atrociously tiled “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” with Ledger as star. Variety has some details on the production and a nice roundup of other films whose production has been disrupted by tragedy here.

Update: The Times’ David Halbfinger makes a few calls to say that no one knows what will happen on the “Parnassus” shoot:

Mr. Ledger’s death leaves the producers with few desirable options: recast and reshoot, rewrite and adjust, or abandon the project altogether.

[…]

Brian Kingman, managing director of Aon/Albert G. Ruben Insurance Services, a leading entertainment insurance underwriter, said that only 18 days of filming had been completed on the film, suggesting that about $14 million had been spent, and that Mr. Ledger had been named an “essential element” under the film’s cast-insurance policy.

That means the producers would have the right to abandon the film and recoup their spending on the project before his death.

In the meantime we can savor those commenting on his death, like Bonnie Fuller, at the Huffington Post, in an essay entitled “Heath Ledger: Why, Why, Why?”, which begins this way:

It was just this past weekend that I rented the film, A Knight’s Tale, starring Heath Ledger, to watch with my youngest son who is six. I wanted to enjoy it with him because I figured that he was at an age where he would love its action and its fantastical play on the world of medieval jousting.

Never having met one, I’ve often wondered what the editors of magazines like “Star” and “Us Weekly” are like. Those dulcet sentences give me a pretty good idea. I would like to spend some quiet time with Bonnie Fuller and tell her about how the comma is used.

To watch “A Knight’s Tale,” Fuller had taken a deserved evening off after her last HuffPost epistle, titled and I’m not making this up, “Bye Bye Skinnies! Why Bumpalicious and Not Naked Stars Are Taking Over Monthly Mag Covers.”