Word: benjamin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...that it doesn't try. Scenes are lifted from the book, hung on the Hollywood sets, trimmed in language, and left to dry. Example: Benjamin and the Monkey (Karen Black), Portony's Gentile juicer brought to life, lie in bed after sex, and Benjamin virtually lists Portnoy's scatological memories. But nothing happens visually in the scene, except for Benjamin's lips moving in a glib monologue...
...conscience has been excised, so that not only don't we see the others as Portnoy does, but we don't see alex either. Aside from Portnoy's voice-over now and then, about the only thing indicating that this is the visualization of a monologue is that Dick Benjamin looks alike as both the older and younger Portnoy. But it might have been an overnight, not an insight...
...book began with Portnoy explaining his mother's influence as well as her ubiquity: "She was so deeply embedded in my consciousness that for the first year of school I seem to have believed that each of my teachers was my mother in disguise." The movie begins with Benjamin listening to Some Young Thing in his office as he mentally strips her: Portnoy not as mother-flustered, but as girl-hungry...
...Richard Benjamin as Portnoy is no more credible with his clothes off. He looks the part: his high, shiny cheeks and full, wavy hair give him the bright man-child appearance to complement the 33 -year-old character's infantile emotions. But when Benjamin opens his mouth, he seems about as out of place as Howdy Doody in Hamlet. His readings of Roth's lines are pure balsa wood...
...majority of the members-21 out of 41-also abstained. Chancellor Willy Brandt, leader of the Social Democratic Party, grandly described the vote as opening "a new phase in the history of the Federal Republic." That may well be so, but, reports TIME'S Bonn Bureau Chief Benjamin Cate, the result was a triumph for neither Brandt nor Rainer Barzel, head of the opposition Christian Democratic Union...