Sure Thing

My wife requested that I look to kinder, gentler pursuits as we creep ever closer to The Election. To that end, I have stopped my daily run through the "president's" tweets, making snarky comments on as many as possible, all beginning with "Dude -." Build up, don't tear down was her suggestion. Which leaves me more times for things like this:
Celebrity obituaries.
When I worked at a video store with my best friend and roommate, he had this sure thing. No, it wasn't the Rob Reiner classic rom-com of that same name, but rather a film that was a little more off the beaten path: Birdy, starring Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage. It tells the story of childhood friends who serve in Vietnam, both returning home wounded. One inside. One outside. Did I mention a soundtrack by Peter Gabriel? Whenever a customer would come in and start complaining that all thirty-two copies of Top Gun were already reserved or rented, my friend would go to the shelf and pull off the VHS cassette of this, his sure thing. Placing it on the counter in front of the customer, he would stake his reputation on their enjoyment of this film, and then insist that if they didn't like it, he would give them a free rental.
In all the years I saw him do this, he never had to give away that free rental.
Alan Parker directed Birdy. He also directed Midnight Express. And Mississippi Burning. He was nominated for Best Director for both of those movies. If you imagined that straight up intensity was his forte, then you might not have seen Bugsy Malone, the all-kid musical gangster movie starring Scott Baio and Jodie Foster. Or maybe you didn't know that Fame was a film before it was a TV show. Perhaps you didn't catch the name of the guy who directed Pink Floyd's The Wall. And maybe now you believe you have Alan Parker pigeon-holed as the director of musicals. He did direct The Commitments and Evita.
Hard to find the musical component to Shoot The Moon, but he did that too. The story of a marriage disintegrating doesn't have much to sing along with, and it's not easy to dance to. But it is another intense look inside the lives as they fall apart. And there was Angel Heart, pitting hard-boiled detective Mickey Rourke against Robert De Niro's Louis Cyphre. Okay, maybe that one wasn't too subtle, but it was Alan Parker frame for frame.
Mister Parker went to the big screening room in the sky last week. His body of work carried me through the eighties and into this century. He will be missed. That's a sure thing. Aloha, Alan.