Word: ben
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This is not a matter David Kepesh (Ben Kingsley) particularly likes to dwell on. And why should he? He's a fit man in his sixties, a Columbia professor and a minor "public intellectual" (hateful phrase, that one) in New York. (Indeed, the film opens with him in conversation with Charlie Rose, who does an excellent imitation of himself.) Dave has a convenient, purely sexual relationship with Carolyn (Patricia Clarkson), who gives a lovely, knowing performance as a woman of a certain age. He has a good friendship with a poet named George (a wise and excellent Dennis Hopper). Polymathically...
...conviction that the result of this conflict can only be the terrible muddle that finally elbows aside the previously preoccupying sexual shambles. That's especially true of The Dying Animal, when mortality settles on the wrong person at the wrong time. There are things wrong with Coixet's movie. Ben Kingsley is, of course, a fine actor, but in this instance there seems to me something smug, held back, in his work. Roth's Kepesh, at least for a time, has more spritzing fun with his minor celebrity life than Kingsley's does. The latter seems insufficiently surprised and confused...
...movie, surely figures that in the blogosphere age, no film can be too inside--it's where everyone is. He's been there all his life, as the son of (Jerry) Stiller and (Anne) Meara, a comedy duo of over a half-century's duration. It's in Ben's genes to make fun of show business, as he did earlier in the priceless male-model comedy Zoolander, and to see it in a fun-house reflection: Stiller and mirror...
...clearly not on African Americans; it's on the actor's belief that he can play anyone.) But Lazarus and the others out there in the jungle don't evolve or devolve; they are figures from an SNL skit or the director's own very smart Ben Stiller Show back...
...There were letters to answer, writings to translate. Even a non-Russian-speaking guest could chip in. On a summer visit, I was dispatched to pick raspberries for dessert. We ate them with ice cream. The Solzhenitsyns spoke Russian at home, but they were good Vermonters; they kept Ben & Jerry's in the freezer...