James Parker

The claim Philip Kindred Dick, California nutcase and sci-fi seer, holds on our imagination is a particular one. Dick’s signature as a writer is a sort of pre-epileptic hum or aura, an intimation of fast-approaching crisis. Something dislocates, something accelerates, a wire touches another wire and we know — quiveringly — that we have to […]

Hollywood made some healthy contributions to the “rogue cop” genre in the 1990s. One was Internal Affairs, in which Richard Gere, as a cop gone bad, was corrupt, porkily sexual, running rackets, and siring children like a Greek god. Gere’s character had no conscience; his ethical sense was entirely displaced onto the person of the […]

I could have walked out of Enigma. Not in anger — not in that state of congested indignation that sometimes forces cinemagoers to their feet, huffing and puffing and clawing for their coats in the darkness — but through simple lack of concern. Which surprised me, because almost any film set in England in 1943 […]

The vicious drought that struck California in the mid-1970s killed lawns, turned golf courses to dust, and created the modern skateboarder. A team of street riders from “Dogtown” — south Santa Monica — began hitting Los Angeles’s dried-out swimming pools in search of new curves and walls. And these desecrated bowls, filled suddenly with the […]

Don’t go see Human Nature in the art house. Stay away, if you can, from the like minds and the cineastes and the smell of Central American coffee. The place to see a film as fluidly daft, as limpidly out-there as this is at the mall, where you can slide from the theater’s darkness into […]

There is poetry — or a good rhyme, at least — in the fact that Disney’s new adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s 1845 novel The Count of Monte Cristo was written by a man better known as a producer and creator of TV game shows. Jay Wolpert has labored for decades in game-show land: Double Dare, […]

I suspect filmmaker Todd Solondz of being the sort of man who has difficulties with public transport. I imagine him staggering gray-faced off the bus with his sense of self almost erased by the stink and proximity of his fellow man; or hanging grim as a bat in the far corner of a subway car, […]

A young man named Anthony, inmate of an Arizona mental hospital, says a friendly good-bye to his psychiatrist and then prepares to shin down the wall on a rope of knotted sheets. Anthony’s stay at the hospital has been voluntary; but, as he explains to his psychiatrist, he must pretend that he is escaping for […]

It would be interesting, wouldn’t it, to watch oneself watching TV, to see the muddy mirror that the face offers the screen, the weird and slavish half-reactions flickering across it, the shadows of infant anxiety and sudden, twitchy brightenings–like a dreamer with his eyes open. I’d like to have had a camera trained on my […]