Word: monkeyed
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...needle-crucified" son, Raoul, who functions as a sort of Christ figure. Raoul's disappearance has forced his father to reassess his own life in terms of his childhood religion (the Protestantism of the Berne fathers) and a strange breed of reverse-Darwinism. Perversely apprenticed to the "monkey-man," he has come to view young people as diseased mutations, prone to an universal sickness that is dragging mankind towards extinction...
...begins his narrative with those familiar short sentences: "The Juan March stood off the docks of Palma harbor. I needed coffee." Like so many would-be Hemingway heroes, though, he sees the role largely in terms of self-indulgence. He has a finca and a Mercedes and a pet monkey, and he boasts of his romantic adventures in a prose style that would embarrass even the creator of Across the River and into the Trees. Of Nina, he writes: "Call it love, call it madness -it may have been both...
Prine's balladeering also includes social comment, as in Sam Stone, a song about a veteran returning from "the conflict overseas with a Purple Heart and a monkey on his back." The chorus is a quasi lullaby from a child's perspective: "There's a hole in Daddy's arm where all the money goes . . ." Another song tells of a man killed in a car accident because he had covered his windshield with flag decals: "Your flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore/They're already overcrowded from your dirty little...
...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...
...GRANTS Mrs. Portnoy is definitely TV, with sprayed hair, straight nose, facile mannerisms. Karen Black as the Monkey manages to convey sexual elasticity but is pretty hommed in by the rest of the film, as is Jack Somack who as the father has a great constipated look...