Word: richler
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This season, which ended last week, was typically eclectic. Among the offerings were a musical setting of Mordecai Richler's brash comic novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Composer Salzman's Stauf, an anagrammatical updating of the Faust legend co-written by Michael Sahl. The highlights, though, were The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a moving minimalist meditation by British Composer Michael Nyman based on a case history in Neurologist Oliver Sacks' best seller, and Harry Partch's 1959 Revelation in the Courthouse Park, a quirky blending of Euripides and Elvis Presley, scored for an unorthodox...
...could keep track of all the couples who had met and married at the G, but everyone knew one of the reasons for the blossoming romances: the Tattler, the house newspaper that treated everyone as an enticement. When Canadian Novelist Mordecai Richler visited what he called "Disneyland with knishes," he remembered how, thanks to the paper, "the painfully shy old maid and the flat-chested girl and the good-natured lump" were transformed into "sparkling, captivating" Barbara; Ida, the "fun-loving frolicker"; and Miriam, a "charm-laden lass who makes a visit to table 20 F a must...
...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...
...deal, Richler wrote a bad book. His film, on the other hand, is a disaster. The man couldn't cut good screen dialogue with a Bowie knife and his facility with visual humor ends at the level of the dated "Expose Yourself to Art" poster. Clearly, Richler is treading in unfamiliar territory (he told a Toronto journalist he would be sticking to novels in the future). Joshua is a case of what experts call genre envy...
...Second, Richler's onscreen "writer" (aren't they supposed to be sensitive?) is demolished by James (Once Upon a Time in America) Woods in a typically overheated ax murderer's job of acting. His nostrils perpetually flaring and his mannerisms obstinately childish even at "significant" moments (like the awful scene where his writer-pal dies), one thought sums Woods up: he gives great stereotypes. As Mr. Ackroyd would say: "The essence...