Word: roth
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gross overestimate. The average Democrat, grumbles one businessman, "brought a set of underwear and a $20 bill with him and did not change either one." Merchants who relied on the Republicans to be big spenders were also disappointed. "We will be lucky if we break even," says Sheila Roth, who ran a souvenir booth in the lobby of the Fontainebleau Hotel last week. Two exceptions: button sellers did a brisk business, and some delicatessens did well during the Democratic gathering. "You would be surprised how many Democrats came in to buy bread and cold cuts to take to their rooms...
...Rosssellini's classic neo-realist film of post-World War II. Allied occupation of Italy. With Socrates, made by the Italian master for French TV (a Boston premiere). CENTRAL SQUARE CINEMA II. Paisan: 8:05, Socrates: 6, 10. Portnoy's Complainst. A vile reduction of the mythically pornographic Philip Roth novel about a successful Jewish lawyer and civil libertarian who couldn't help privately pulling his putz. Gone is the gloriously-guilt-ridden self-consciousness of the main character, replaced with the smirk of writer-producer-director Ernest Lehman. PI ALLEY, continuous every two hours from...
PERHAPS THE main reason why the narrative voice of Roth's Portnoy often worked so well is because Alex consciously impersonates familiar faces. Like Portnoy's mother, who laughed hysterically when he limitated characters from a radio show, we can see people we know filtered through the consciousness of a fellow sufferer. Lehman's version surveys the scene with as much distance from Alex as from anyone. Alex's guilty conscience has been excised, so that not only don't we see the others as Portnoy does, but we don't see alex either. Aside from Portnoy's voice-over...
...movie is constipated, but doesn't look so great. Lehman simplifies so much throughout that we'd hardly have known without checking that Roth was hitting middle-class as well as Jewish. Once or twice Lehman films something so outrageous that it manages original humor (the congregation tossing their yarmulkes into the air, applauding Alex in a bar mitzvah fantasy sequence). But most of the outrage is collected and muffled in the dialogue...
...Lehman was going to make it a film for the ears, he could at least have been faithful to the book. Roth's Portnoy eventually loses and gains inhibitions in Israel: he loses paranoia in the Homeland where everything is Jewish ("I am playing in a sea full of Jews! Look at their Jewish limbs moving through the Jewish water!") but he also loses his potency. Internal restrictions replace imagined outer ones. And kvetching gets you nowhere...