Word: parker
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...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, and sometimes lost, their lives to help fashion a free America...
...movie, finds the Mississippi mirror distorting: "The movie makes the FBI too good to be true. It is a dangerous movie because it could lead to complacency. Things haven't changed that much." Says David Halberstam, who covered the 1964 Freedom Summer for the New York Times: "Parker has taken a terribly moving and haunting story and he has betrayed it, turned it into a Martin-and-Lewis slapstick between the two cops. It's a bad movie: 'Mississippi False...
...Parker dismisses all indictments: "Our film isn't about the civil rights movement. It's about why there was a need for a civil rights movement. And because it's a movie, I felt it had to be fictionalized. The two heroes in the story had to be white. That is a reflection of our society as much as of the film industry. At this point in time, it could not have been made any other...
...dodged the bullets that Mississippi Burning has walked into. Nobody mistook it for a documentary. Few criticized it for ignoring or caricaturing the Vietnamese. Instead, Americans recognized and responded to the grandeur of its hallucinogenic fever. Platoon was crazy from the inside, a surrealist's scribbled message from hell. Parker's film is quite another thing: an outsider's report, not autobiography but psychodrama, with a texture as real as newsreel. And yet its plot skeleton bears similarities to Platoon. In both films, two strong men fight to establish American values in a hostile country, and to claim the soul...
Gerolmo took the idea to his friend Frederick Zollo, an off-Broadway producer-director, who sold it to Orion. Several directors were proposed -- Milos Forman, John Schlesinger -- before Orion suggested Alan Parker, 44. His films (Midnight Express, Fame, Birdy) resist classification by content, but in style they are as easy to spot as a fist in your face. Bang on! That is both Parker's strength and limitation, which has the dervish precision of the ace London commercials director he once was. But he had never made a film with such daunting logistics as this...