Word: fiction
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...just movie fantasy, and meretricious to boot? That is the source of a debate over the film's veracity and verism -- a controversy echoing the rumpus over The Last Temptation of Christ, but with politics, not theology, as the sticking point. Mississippi Burning is a fiction based on fact; it invents characters and bends the real-life plot; it colors in the silhouette of events with its own fanciful strokes and highlights. In focusing on the agents, Parker and screenwriter Chris Gerolmo italicize the gumshoe heroism of white officials while downplaying the roles of black and white visionaries who risked...
...firmly in film history as it is in social history. It takes its cue not so much from the buddy films as from Warner Bros. melodramas of the '30s, like Black Legion and They Won't Forget, which seized some social-issue headlines and fit them into brisk, dynamic fiction. % It is movie journalism: tabloid with a master touch. And the master, the suave manipulator, is Alan Parker. By avocation he is a caricaturist, and by vocation too. He chooses gross faces, grand subjects, base motives, all for immediate impact. The redneck conspirators are drawn as goofy genetic trash: there...
MISSISSIPPI BURNING Historical fact, the murder of three civil rights workers in 1964, triggers a fervent historical fiction. Gene Hackman is canny and powerful as an FBI agent tracking the killers in director Alan Parker's angry, headlong film...
...more privileged, those scenes look like a science-fiction vision of civilization's breakdown, perhaps after a nuclear war. In fact, Mexico City has been described as the anteroom to an ecological Hiroshima. With 20 million residents -- up from 9 million only 20 years ago -- the Mexican capital is considered the most populous urban center on earth. Mexico City has been struck not by military weapons but by a population bomb...
...pulp fiction goes, Karen Carpenter is quite enjoyable. Cynthia Gibb (who lip-syncs Karen's syrupy hits like Close to You) and Mitchell Anderson are convincing as the sister-brother act. Director Joseph Sargent traces their rise to fame in brisk if superficial strokes. The film (which lists Richard Carpenter as executive producer) is blunt about the troubles the young stars faced: overprotective, underaffectionate parents (Louise Fletcher, Peter Michael Goetz), Richard's drug problems, Karen's growing obsession with losing weight. The scrubbed duo make drug abuse look positively wholesome, but the movie deftly grafts the morbid thrills...