RIP Alan Parker
Posted: Fri Jul 31, 2020 10:39 am
Alan Parker, the versatile British writer-director and two-time Oscar nominee who came from the world of commercials to make such features as Fame, The Commitments, Midnight Express and Mississippi Burning, has died. He was 76.
With his range of eclectic movies — many ending on a downbeat note — Parker was fluent in several genres. "I like to do different things each time" as a way to stay creatively fresh, he said. He received the British film industry's highest honor, the Academy Fellowship, in 2013.
Parker, who directed 14 features and wrote six of those, was especially expert at music-oriented films: think Bugsy Malone (1976), Fame (1980), Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982), The Commitments (1991) and Evita (1996), with Madonna as Eva Perón. "If you can use music and images together, it's very powerful," he noted in 1995.
Parker also displayed a deft touch with such serious fare as the Oliver Stone-written Midnight Express (1978), a gripping tale about a young American (Brad Davis) imprisoned for five years in Turkey for drug-dealing, and Mississippi Burning (1988), about two FBI officers (Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe) investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers in 1964. Both films earned Oscar noms for best director and picture.
At the Academy Awards, Parker lost out to The Deer Hunter's Michael Cimino in 1979 and to Rain Man's Barry Levinson in 1989.
He also was not reluctant to push the aesthetic envelope. Angel Heart, his 1987 New Orleans-set horror thriller that starred Mickey Rourke, Lisa Bonet and Robert De Niro, opened amid controversy when it was initially rated X by the MPAA.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... 76-1294697
With his range of eclectic movies — many ending on a downbeat note — Parker was fluent in several genres. "I like to do different things each time" as a way to stay creatively fresh, he said. He received the British film industry's highest honor, the Academy Fellowship, in 2013.
Parker, who directed 14 features and wrote six of those, was especially expert at music-oriented films: think Bugsy Malone (1976), Fame (1980), Pink Floyd: The Wall (1982), The Commitments (1991) and Evita (1996), with Madonna as Eva Perón. "If you can use music and images together, it's very powerful," he noted in 1995.
Parker also displayed a deft touch with such serious fare as the Oliver Stone-written Midnight Express (1978), a gripping tale about a young American (Brad Davis) imprisoned for five years in Turkey for drug-dealing, and Mississippi Burning (1988), about two FBI officers (Gene Hackman, Willem Dafoe) investigating the disappearance of three civil rights workers in 1964. Both films earned Oscar noms for best director and picture.
At the Academy Awards, Parker lost out to The Deer Hunter's Michael Cimino in 1979 and to Rain Man's Barry Levinson in 1989.
He also was not reluctant to push the aesthetic envelope. Angel Heart, his 1987 New Orleans-set horror thriller that starred Mickey Rourke, Lisa Bonet and Robert De Niro, opened amid controversy when it was initially rated X by the MPAA.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ ... 76-1294697