Author: Ben Parman

  • A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich

    A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich

    Politicians, journalists and experts rarely agree, but they have all named the current opioid situation a plague. It’s an appropriate word, with historical and biblical connotations; in every generation, our country has been marred by the misapplication of drugs. Morphine after the Civil War, opium in the late 1800s, cocaine in the 1900s, amphetamines in…

  • What’s Up, Doc?

    What’s Up, Doc?

    “Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged,” writes G.K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy, “They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.” If…

  • The Snowman

    The Snowman

    Sometimes a film is good because of when we see it and sometimes because it’s just good; The Snowman is both. I can’t pinpoint the first viewing, but I was very young and it was totally overwhelming, in the way a piece of art is when it matches a piece of you. It was nearly…

  • Claudine

    Claudine

    “I have known this woman all my life,” Diahann Carroll writes in her autobiography.* “We grew up together in the same neighborhood.” Lest someone might interpret that statement as metaphorical, she continues: “much of the film was shot around 145th Street and Convent Avenue, the very same neighborhood where I was raised…Claudine and I were…

  • Carnival of Souls

    Carnival of Souls

    Nothing quite agitates an artist like asking to explain their art. Perhaps it is the perceived implication that they didn’t communicate effectively, or that you aren’t willing to fully engage with their work, or that you are only concerned with being right. For the artistic partnership behind Carnival of Souls, the agitation is simply the…

  • Sapphire

    Sapphire

    “We’re all the children of God,” a black sophisticate remarks to her boyfriend, after he has interacted with the police. “Forget it.” The exchange is brief — the actor isn’t even credited — but her sharp delivery slices right through a thick curtain of denial that’s always hanging around; the hypocrisy of a United Kingdom…

  • The Boys in the Band

    The Boys in the Band

    In June I went to the library to pick up Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, and while walking to the video section, I passed a display table of items in honor of LGBT+ Pride month. Perhaps it was a venial cynicism that heckled me from looking if The Boys were there, but after…

  • Take a Giant Step

    Take a Giant Step

    “The truth is the truth and should be spoken at all times,” proclaims Grandma Martin (Estelle Hemsley), from the top of a stairwell, no less. It’s a bold mandate, especially arriving near the beginning, even for a script that boldly chooses some volatile subjects. But Hemsley, who also starred in the Broadway production of the…

  • Klute

    Klute

    Early in Klute, Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda) returns home from an afternoon appointment with a John, has a bath, lights some candles, pours a glass of wine and sits at her kitchen table, smoking a joint with a clip. After a few drags she begins singing in a husky alto: We gather together to ask…

  • Black Girl

    Black Girl

    “Some boomerang, this story,” an inspector observes, in the novella Black Girl by Ousmane Sembéne, which he adapted for film. I won’t reveal the scene of the crime, but the inspector might as well be speaking of Sembéne’s story, and may be, in the way authors often delegate such meta-tasks to the characters. Black Girl…