Word: montrealer
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SCHLOCK IS A MISUNDERSTOOD art, especially in the hands of Mordecai Richler, Montreal novelist and author of the screenplay for the new film, Joshua Then and Now. After the following hatchet job, I daresay you'll agree...
...here is where Joshua Then and Now comes in. Richler's Joshua is the fact-based story of a poor Jewish writer growing up in Montreal who, by pluck and a marriage above his station, rises to most-envied-status to live among wealthy WASPs in the city's posh suburb of Westmount...
...trouble is, Richler can't make fun of the condition because he suffers from it. He harbors so much anger, presumably owing to his own mother, or to his own miserable upbringing in Montreal, that his novel gets bogged down by sheer malice. The fictional Joshua's mother is absurd--a vain, floozy stripper--and his coarse father (adequately played by Alan Arkin, in the film's only good performance) lives a cliche. Richler's story of Jewish lust/angst was better served by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint...
Warren, a Holworthy resident, has an i.d. from a Montreal acupuncture school, which he got from a one-time student of the school. Warren installed his own mug shot in place of its former owner's and assumed the donor's name and 1962 birth date. Dr. Warren has managed to buy liquor from even the usually suspicious liquor store owners...
Some of the city's older hotels became casualties. The Regis, just off the Reforma, collapsed on itself; also hard hit were the Diplomatico, the De Carlo, the Versalles, the Montreal and the Principado. About six others reported less severe damage. At least ten major government buildings were affected, including the ministries of marine, labor and commerce, as well as the complex housing the state-owned Telefonos de Mexico. The destruction of government offices did not distress a cynical cabdriver, who commented, "Maybe there...