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Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Alan Parker - Angela's Ashes (1999)

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Based on the best selling autobiography by Irish expat Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes follows the experiences of young Frankie and his family as they try against all odds to escape the poverty endemic in the slums of pre-war Limerick. The film opens with the family in Brooklyn, but following the death of one of Frankie's siblings, they return home, only to find the situation there even worse. Prejudice against Frankie's Northern Irish father makes his search for employment in the Republic difficult despite his having fought for the IRA, and when he does find money, he spends the money on drink. Written by KB-26 (IMDB).

Single Link

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http://www.filesonic.com/file/55874267/Angela'S_Ashes-Alan_Parker.srt
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http://www.filesonic.com/file/55868850/Angela's Ashes-Alan Parker.part2.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/55869088/Angela's Ashes-Alan Parker.part3.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/55887146/Angela's Ashes-Alan Parker.part4.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/55887222/Angela's Ashes-Alan Parker.part5.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/55870476/Angela's Ashes-Alan Parker.part6.rar
http://www.filesonic.com/file/55887018/Angela's Ashes-Alan Parker.part7.rar
no pass

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Alan Parker - Birdy (1984)

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Plot: Based on William Wharton's transcendent novel of the same name, this film is about many things: friendship, war, and, of course, birds. The framing device is an effort by a horribly scarred combat soldier (Nicolas Cage) to break through to his best friend, Birdy (Matthew Modine), hospitalized after seemingly being driven mad by fighting in the Vietnam War. Cage then flashes back to their boyhood, where Birdy, a canary aficionado, was considered the school weirdo but managed to be a solid companion nonetheless. Directed by Alan Parker, it works best as a coming-of-age story, but misses the bizarre psychological transferences of the book, in which Birdy imagines himself within the world of canaries he creates in his bedroom at his parents' house. Modine is brilliant as an out-of-it misfit enraptured by his own little universe.

* In the novel, the veterans served in World War II. This was changed to Vietnam for the film.

* Birdy's real name is never revealed. (It was never revealed in the original novel, either.)

* First use of the skycam in a feature film. It was a camera held by wires supported by four cranes and controlled by computer, and was used in Birdy's dream sequence of actually being able to fly.

* The soundtrack was composed and recorded in one weekend. Peter Gabriel used tracks from his third and fourth albums as bases for much of the music, including excerpts from "Not One Of Us", "Family Snapshot", "The Family and the Fishing Net", and "San Jacinto." One cue was simply an instrumental version of "The Rhythm of the Heat", and the main theme was a variation of "Wallflower."

* Then-unknown Danny Glover was scheduled to make a speech as a bit player, but because he kept botching his lines his scenes had to be cut from the movie.

http://www.filesonic.com/file/45425839/Birdy.1984.DVDRip.XviD.AC3.CD1-WAF.avi
http://www.filesonic.com/file/45425841/Birdy.1984.DVDRip.XviD.AC3.CD2-WAF.avi
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no pass

Friday, June 25, 2010

Alan Parker - Come See the Paradise (1990)

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Plot Synopsis:

In 1942, over 100,000 Americans were interned in prison camps.....In America.

Portraying one of the shadier details of American history, this is the story of Jack McGurn, who comes to Los Angeles in 1936. He gets a job at a movie theatre in Little Tokyo and falls in love with the boss's daughter, Lily Kawamura. When her father finds out, he is fired and forbidden ever to see her again. But together they escape to Seattle. When the war breaks out, the authorities decide that the Japanese immigrants must live in camps like war prisoners. Written by Mattias Thuresson.

Alan Parker - Angela's Ashes (1999)

Alan Parker - The Commitments (1991)

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Quote:

I must confess that this is my favorite movie of all time, and the music plays a large part of why I enjoy it so much. Don't expect stellar acting in this movie unless you want to be let down--though make no mistake, the acting is certainly adequate. The key players in this movie were not chosen for their acting abilities, but rather for their musical talent. The people you see on stage in the movie are the same people who play the music you hear. (If you appreciate soul music, do not pass up the chance to purchase The Commitments Vol. I and Vol. II.) And what a talented assembly of musicians they brought together for this movie. Most astonishing is the lead vocals of prodigy Andrew Strong (playing lead singer Deco Cuffe) whom, at 16 years old at the time of filming, possesses "a voice that Bob Geldof would starve for."

More than anything, this film is about hope. It is about the hopes and dreams of a handful of poor north side Dubliners striving to beat the odds and make something of themselves. The film follows the near-rise and eventual fall of a band that, on the verge of a record deal, could not bear to watch success interfere with their destiny to remain destitute.

But was destitution their destiny after all? "Success of the band was irrelevent," the main protagonist and band manager is told moments after the band breaks up. "You raised their expectations of life--you lifted their horizons!" And indeed, the epilogue reveals that, even though the band itself was a failure, virtually every band member had acheived a greater level of personal acheivement than they had hoped for before they had joined the band.

This is a movie about the raw appeal of soul music; it is a movie about Dubliners; it is a movie about the economic conditions in general that grip Ireland; it is a movie about poor folks who endlessly toil in the vain hope that they can make ends meet. But more than anything, it is a movie about how hope alone can be the ultimate salvation of of those who have nothing else to look forward to.

Alan Parker - Bugsy Malone (1976)

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At first the notion seems alarming: a gangster movie cast entirely with kids. Especially when we learn that "Bugsy Malone" isn't intended as a kid's movie so much as a cheerful comment on the childlike values and behavior in classic Hollywood crime films. What are kids doing in something like this?

But then we see the movie and we relax. "Bugsy Malone" is like nothing else. It's an original, a charming one, and it has yet another special performance by Jodie Foster, who at thirteen was already getting the roles that grown-up actresses complained weren't being written for women anymore. She plays a hard-bitten nightclub singer and vamps her way through a torch song by Paul Williams with approximately as much style as Rita Hayworth brought to "Gilda." She starts on stage, drifts down into the audience, arches her eyebrows at the fat cats (all about junior high school age), and, in general, is astonishingly assured. And her performance seems just right in the film; "Bugsy Malone" depends almost totally on tone, and if you put kids in these situations and directed them just a little wrongly the movie would be offensive. But it's not, and it's especially right with Foster.

It tells a gangster story we know almost by heart, about the tough new gang that wants to take over the territory. Da Boss (a kid named John Cassisi who looks like he was born wearing a carnation in the lapel of his pinstripe) recruits hired guns to help protect his turf. Bugsy Malone (Scott Baio in training for John Garfield) is the guy he's gotta have. But maybe even Bugsy can't help, because the other gang has a dreaded new weapon. In Al Capone's day, it was machine guns. In Bugsy's movie, it's marshmallow guns. They open up on you with one of these, and you got more than egg on your face. Old-fashioned weapons like custard pies are useless in a one-on-one situation.

Halfway through "Bugsy Malone," I started wondering how anyone ever came up with this idea for a movie. Alan Parker, who wrote and directed it, claims his inspiration came while he was watching "The Godfather." I dunno, I think the movie has more insights into kids than into gangsters.

When kids play, it's real. That's one of the things we lose when we grow up: the ability to turn the backyard into the OK Corral. The kids in "Bugsy Malone" don't behave as if the material is camp or a put-on. For them, it's real -- especially the indignity of catching a marshmallow in your ear. And so in an uncanny way the movie works as a gangster movie and we remember that the old Bogart and Cagney classics had a childlike innocence, too. The world was simpler then. Now it's so complicated maybe only a kid can still understand the Bogart role.

http://rapidshare.com/files/267934805/Bugsy.Malone.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/267940768/Bugsy.Malone.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/267946802/Bugsy.Malone.part3.rar
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http://rapidshare.com/files/267959925/Bugsy.Malone.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/267966684/Bugsy.Malone.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/267973099/Bugsy.Malone.part7.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/267975731/Bugsy.Malone.part8.rar

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Alan Parker - Shoot the Moon (1982)

Quote:

All George Dunlap (Albert Finney) wants to do is to give his 13-year-old daughter a typewriter for her birthday. It is hardly the impossible dream; it isn't even an unreasonable request. But George recently walked out on his wife Faith (Diane Keaton) and their four daughters, for all those vague but somehow imperative reasons for which people leave people these days, and Daughter Sherry (Dana Hill) is not buying any of them. Nor is she covering her confusion with forgiveness. Better just not to speak to the creep. When Faith tries to avoid a scene by keeping George out of their handsome old Marin County house, George breaks in and pounds up the stairs to confront his eldest. She fights off his blend of bewildered love and rage. He spanks her. She threatens him with a scissors. They end in a sodden tangle of bodies and emotions on her bed.

By this time the whole house is in an uproar, but as George staggers back down the stairs, a little voice rises above the others and, trying to control its hysteria, makes the sweet, placatory offer that has never been refused before: "Daddy, can I make you a hamburger with onions?" Up to this point the scene has been fine, a well-made representation of the craziness that is bound to burst forth in even the most civilized of separations. But that one line confirms a thought that has been building from the beginning of Shoot the Moon, namely that something rather special is at hand: a movie that attends the way real people respond to the realities of ordinary life.

Throughout, the moviemakers observe all kinds of quotidian events in the sundering of the Dunlaps without turning them into heavily fraught symbolic moments: the children clamoring for eye shadow as their mother tries to put on makeup for a party; the nervous chipperness of George's lady friend (Karen Allen) when she meets the children for the first time; and their attempt to give her a fair chance without being disloyal to their mother; George self-consciously trying to be brave in front of them and not being able to keep the self-pity out of it; the puzzling way nostalgia has of flaring up as quickly as anger in the confrontation between former mates.

Concentration on the telling detail is a way good writers have of avoiding both melodrama and sentimentality, which blanched the hard truth of Kramer vs. Kramer. As he proved in Melvin and Howard, Bo Goldman is a very good writer, a man whose world appears to be filled with mild eccentrics and funny overheard remarks that he gets down just right in his mental notebook. His specificity seems to have disciplined Alan Parker, who in the past has liked to stress the ugly metaphorical overtones in his material (in Midnight Express he kept insisting that the whole world is a Turkish prison, when really only Turkish prisons are Turkish prisons). Except for reaching for too big a finish, a fight between George and the man who has taken his place in Faith's life that is too brutal for what has gone before, Parker controls himself here.

Finney's fuzziness, that slightly out-of-focus quality he often has onscreen, here serves his befuddled character perfectly. Keaton has the courage to let tiredness show in the lines around her mouth and eyes, to stipulate that she is the victim in this situation and then get on to other more interesting situations. Nobody ever tries to explain why the nice, successful Dunlaps are breaking up. These days, who knows? All anyone can say with certainty is that theirs is now among the most familiar of passages, and that Shoot the Moon is the best chart of it the movies have yet drawn.--Richard Schickel, Time Magazine, 02-01-82