Word: prequel
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...casts for slick, violent musical parables. Now, in THE COMMITMENTS, he turns Roddy Doyle's novel about a Dublin band into a rousing entertainment. It has the larkish wit and edgy camaraderie of the Beatles' first film, A Hard Day's Night, to which it might serve as a prequel: a kid on the dole (Robert Arkins) organizes a fledgling group devoted to covering '60s rhythm-and-blues songs. How fervently these members of the Irish underclass wish to be black! And how it must have tempted Parker, who in his recent films (Mississippi Burning, Come See the Paradise...
...matter how interesting a character is, there is usually one right story about him or her, and a good writer finds it the first time. Shakespeare got just one play each out of Hamlet and Macbeth, and it is hard to imagine what remained for a sequel -- or prequel...
...also the movie epic's first moody hero, father to countless sacred screen madmen. And in the picture's political wrangling and massacre scenes, we see hints of American history in the late '60s and American movies today: a preview of Viet Nam and a prequel to Platoon...
...Director David Leland's Wish You Were Here! In the course of writing the film Personal Services -- a raffishly surreal account of Cynthia Payne's career as a divinely unhypocritical London madam that illuminated American screens early this year -- Leland learned enough about her early life to offer this prequel. And a marvelously uncluttered tale...
...Prequel" is one of those smarmy coinages, like "brunch," that make a self-respecting user of language want to wash his mouth out with whisky. Brunch can be avoided by not getting out of bed before noon on Sundays, but prequel -- ptui! -- probably is inevitable for works such as Richard Condon's rowdy new novel, a report on the formative years of the author's lovable but dumb Mafia assassin Charley Partanna...