THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON RIBBING

“My daughter tells me the drawings are becoming less political and a bit ruder, which, I assured her, is my age.”

So goes the foreword to director Alan Parker’s third annual Film Diary, an irreverent, occasionally scatological book-calendar that he illustrates (see adjoining sample) and publishes as a holiday gift for friends.

Critics and British Film Year are frequent targets. Other victims: actors in explicit sex scenes (“. . . is my motivation subjective or objective?”), airline movies (a passenger expressing his opinion into a sickness bag), cheapie pictures (“This film is so bad I don’t think they’ll even sell it at the American Film Market”).

Parker also culled lines from a documentary he made for Thames TV, “A Turnip Head’s Guide to the British Cinema,” among them:

“If God was giving the world an enema, he’d choose Cannes as the place to administer it. Followed closely by L.A.” (Michael Klinger).

“The brain is the most overrated of all the human organs” (Woody Allen).

“I think I’ll work quite well in America. After all, Glasgow is an American city. It’s made up of people who couldn’t get on the boat” (Bill Forsyth).

“It took me a long time to catch on to the fact that when an (American) actor was going to his dressing room to do a line, he wasn’t going over his script” (Parker).

On journalists: “Sad, negative people who somehow never see the doughnut, only the hole” (Alan Marshall).

“Pauline Kael is the Joe McCarthy of the Film Industry” (Parker).