Author: Ben Parman

  • The Trouble with Angels

    The Trouble with Angels

    I wasn’t sure about writing this review until reading a back issue of Film Comment wherein Joan Rivers listed it as one of her guilty pleasures. Please don’t ask for an explanation of that, as I’m not a fan of Joan Rivers, and there is nothing about which to feel guilty in liking The Trouble…

  • The Green Pastures

    The Green Pastures

    Whiteness in America, Michael Eric Dyson writes, is the result of “breaking down or, at least to a degree, breaking up ethnicity, and then building up an identity that was cut off from the old tongue and connected to the new land.” Whiteness takes many forms; it informs, establishing a social stronghold, and when that…

  • Downhill Racer

    Downhill Racer

    In junior high, I was given the most fantastic textbook. That might seem an oxymoron to you and maybe I had low standards at the time, but it was an English textbook, and what I remember are the short stories, several of which among the best I’ve ever read. One of them, published in 1980,…

  • Paris Blues

    Paris Blues

    Paris Blues has many shades, but only one is visible to us: a whole crew wrote and rewrote the script, and in receiving the reports on these various drafts, there is much to mourn. Primarily, Sidney Poitier, “whose story this ought to be,”* dropping to third billing, after Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, cast as…

  • The Miracle Woman

    The Miracle Woman

    As an average American high school student, in addition to being tested on what I could remember, I was tested on what I would become. There were personality tests, aptitude tests, career tests; all sorts of fraudulent fortune telling, wherein I provided information and the test provided speculation. The results were consistent: I should be…

  • I Knew Her Well

    I Knew Her Well

    I Knew Her Well opens with a landscape shot of a beach, steadily panning across the sand and continuing onto the body of Adriana Astarelli (Stefania Sandrelli). We are primed to assume that, like many others before and after it, the film is objectifying women. But the shot is a masterful preview of a piece…

  • The Landlord

    The Landlord

    “If you didn’t sweat so much nobody’d take you for a landlord,” Fanny (Diana Sands) tells Elgar (Beau Bridges). “You could pass for a human being.” Actually, The Landlord does pass for a human being, in how it says one thing, means another, thinks another, but all with a body language that doesn’t require translation.…

  • Brief Encounter

    Brief Encounter

    The first film review I ever wrote was of Brief Encounter, for a Wisconsin Lutheran college newspaper. The review is, mercifully, lost to us, and so I find myself writing another, having seen and lived a lot more in the time between. Yet even now, as then, if someone asks what my favorite film is,…

  • Remember the Night

    Remember the Night

    Anyone who tries to write comedies for the screen will inevitably spend some amount of time hating Preston Sturges. The man was actually a hen who squeezed out golden eggs with enviable regularity: Sullivan’s Travels, Palm Beach Story, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, Unfaithfully Yours. “You can’t replace someone like Sturges,” reminisced director, writer, and…

  • The Last of Sheila

    The Last of Sheila

    “Showing off,” writes Steve Martin in L.A. Story, “is the idiot’s version of being interesting.” The Last of Sheila is populated with L.A. idiots who show off, show people in fact, who don’t know how to just show up, to be present, to be personal. They are smart — or at least they are smart…