Word: richler
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...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...
...JOSHUA'S DIFFICULTIES go way back. Richler bases his screenplay on his novel by the same name, something he did before more plausibly and palatably Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. But the novel itself is not that good to begin with. Not Richler's best work, it is a provincial rendition of the self-hating Jewish man's odyssey, his archetypal pursuit of the elusive non-Jewish woman (subtley known as the shiksa...
...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...