Turner Classic Movies is not only a great TV station, but is also serves as an archivist.  Their moving year-end “Remembers” montages highlight not just the famous faces we lost, but the character actors, cinematographers, writers, and other cinematic artists who didn’t get publication-spanning obituaries at the time of their passing.  TCM has footage of all of almost all of the artists we lost in 2011 and they’ve once again woven a touching tribute.

In 2011, we lost some good ones including Pete Postlethwaite, Peter Falk, Cliff Robertson, Jane Russell, Elizabeth Taylor, Laura Ziskin, and Sidney Lumet.  As far as editing goes, I think the “TCM Remembers 2010″ video is better, but they’re both worth your time so I’ve included both after the jump.

Producer Laura Ziskin has died from breast cancer at the age of 61.  Ziskin worked as a producer for over three decades and her filmography included Pretty Woman, What About Bob?, As Good as It Gets, and all of the Spider-Man films including the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man.  Furthermore, as Variety reports, Ziskin was one of the co-founders of the Stand Up 2 Cancer, an organization devoted to raising awareness and money for cancer research and prevention.  Tens of millions of dollars were generated from the telethons that aired in 2008 and 2010.  The family requests that in lieu of flowers donations be made to standup2cancer.org.

Our deepest condolences go out to Ziskin’s family and friends.

Andrew Garfield (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus) will play Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Marc Webb’s Spider-Man reboot.  Garfield’s casting follows months of speculation about who would don the webs.  Garfield was among the final list of contenders along with Jamie Bell, Anton Yelchin, Aaron Johnson, Logan Lerman, Alden Ehrenreich, Frank Dillane, Michael Angarano, and Josh Hutcherson.  Hutcherson had reportedly been offered the role yesterday.

Whether that’s true or if he turned it down is irrelevant (although I can’t imagine anyone turning it down).  Columbia Pictures has sent out a press release confirming Garfield as Spider-Man.  I liked Garfield in Parnassus, and he’s going to get a lot more exposure later this year when he’s seen in David Fincher’s Facebook movie The Social Network and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go.  Hit the jump for quotes from Webb and the producers regarding Garfield’s casting.  Spider-Man is set to open in 3D on July 3, 2012.

Update: We’ve been given some pictures and video from today’s event in Mexico where director Marc Webb and producers Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin made the big announcement.  You can see Andrew Garfield looked shocked as he stepped onto the world stage.  Hit the jump to check everything out.  It’s after the highlights from the press release:

The collapse and bald-faced fraud of Enron almost seems quaint today after all our banks took hundreds of billions of our dollars under both Republican and Democratic White House administrations.  But even though Enron now looks small-time, that doesn’t mean it lacks for outsized personalities and corporate intrigue.  Already brought to the screen back in 2005 with the Oscar-nominated documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”, Columbia wants to bring the story back with an adaptation of Lucy Prebble’s hit play, “Enron”.  Hit the jump to long for the good old days of corporate graft.