Word: portnoy
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Admittedly, the subject of this film--Jewish identity in the New World--is pretty well worn; everybody from Ernest Hemingway to Phillip Roth has used it with varying degrees of success. The distinctive feature of the topic in this film is that, unlike Robert Cohn or Alexander Portnoy, the principal character never undergoes a genuine identity crisis. Jake never really denies his Jewishness; upon learning of his father's death, he dons the ceremonial Jewish mourning shawl, and even his girlfriend, Mamie Fein, is Jewish. Jake's Jewishness never comes into question because he never departs from the Jewish community...
...office. Last spring Brown, working with the help of the FBI, which conducted more than 100 searches of suspected pirates for stolen prints, got indictments against 16 of them. Last month a Los Angeles jury convicted Budget Films, Inc. of selling stolen prints, including those of Paper Moon and Portnoy's Complaint, to collectors and theaters in South Africa. Fines against the company and two of its owners could total $46,000, and the two face jail sentences that could add up to 41 years each...
...Deceit. She has not sought out safe, sympathetic parts. She has played the teasing Faye Greener in The Day of the Locust, the honky-tonk waitress Rayette Dipesto in Five Easy Pieces, the low-down and libidinous Myrtle Wilson in The Great Gatsby, and the victimized Monkey in Portnoy's Complaint. Right now she is within hailing distance of being what she calls "a first-rank star...
...Professor W****** J***** B**** as he expounds on Samuel Johnson. I am no longer an aspiring Norman Mailer, drifting through classrooms in search of a good fray. Now I'm more like a Philip Roth character, working out my intellectual frustrations alone in my room, the same way Alexander Portnoy allayed his sexual troubles. Harvard encourages intellectual masturbation...
...live and that are all around us and with telling them on the analyst's couch, while trying at once to discover and to hide some essential self. Now Roth has brought Dr. Spielvogel back, and for nothing so much as to minister to writing and writers themselves. If Portnoy's Complaint taught us about a whole new malady through a novel, then My Life as a Man tries to teach us about the malady of the novel itself...