“On the fair green hills of Rio / There grows a fearful stain / The poor who come to Rio / And can’t go home again.” So wrote Elizabeth Bishop, although a visitor to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is just as likely to find something eerily beautiful in the apparition of the favelas, or slums, […]
James Parker
James Parker is the American Prospect's film critic.
Posted inFeatures
Scorsese’s Low Score
Let us hearken back to a time when gangs ruled the world. Gangs sizing each other up, puffed with pride, wagging their weaponry, painstakingly stylized in diction and dress. There were the Bowery Boys and the Forty Thieves, the Plug Uglies and the Dead Rabbits, the riders of Rohan and the Uruk-hai, the hobbits, the […]
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And the Winner Is …
One leaf fibrillating on an otherwise naked bough, and a wind that seems to stain the lungs with ice: It’s that time of year, so let’s start rounding it up, let’s start making our lists. Best films of 2002? Surveying the movie landscape of the past 12 months, it’s hard to see the peaks and […]
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All Joking Aside
It’s well known that stand-up comedians are among the most miserable bastards on God’s green earth. What a wound it must be, the need to make people laugh, to stand pinned in the never-to-be-dimmed spotlight of one’s own vanity, clicking and ticking with gags, bits, asides, routines and one-liners, living and dying by the noises […]
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Bloody Good Fun
Dr. Hannibal Lecter is the premier Hollywood monster of our time — even scarier, in his way, than John Travolta. Fish-eyed and slightly phosphorescent, wearing an expression of icy beatitude, he hovers monklike behind his sheet of perforated plastic (which recalls the captivity of laboratory locusts), bodily contained but limitless as to his mind. Nothing […]
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Show, Don’t Tell
The great god of laughter, his sides forever split, is not pleased by black comedies, for the simple reason that they tend not to be very funny. The comedy of blackness is usually a kind of local anesthetic, something frozen, producing not humor but a dead-skinned tolerance for the horrible; and there is no situation […]
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A Not-So-Novel Approach
When a well-made film whistles past me without touching, when I’ve sat down and presented the astonished bull’s-eye of my brain to the filmmaker only to hear the arrow go harmlessly by my left ear, I have to assume that it was aimed elsewhere — that I may not, in fact, be the target audience. […]
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No Surer Signs
One approaches the films of M. Night Shyamalan with the slightly hysterical goodwill of a parent attending a school play. Senses gaping, disbelief suspended a mile high, one so wants the evening to go well. And if clumsiness and mawkishness should rule the hour, well, so what? We’ll clap like seals and go home happy […]
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A Party of One
Tony Wilson, narrator and protagonist of the fictionalized documentary 24 Hour Party People, is a hard man to pin down. Club owner, record label boss, self-proclaimed “serious journalist,” daring entrepreneur, terrible businessman, style guru, buffoon, manipulator, facilitator, wide-eyed fan: He’s here and he’s there, a creature of contradiction. The people around him, when grasping for […]
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Plumbing the Depths
There are many reasons to applaud K-19: The Widowmaker, not the least of which is that it is such a hellish bummer. Here’s the scenario (and it’s based on a true story): In 1961, with the Cold War glacially raging, the Soviet nuclear submarine K-19 puts out to sea. Untested, undermanned and undersupplied, it is […]
