== “The Monkey’s Mask,” a brief excerpt from my latest movie review ===
. . . Co-producer Domenico Procaccio’s last Australian film “The Monkey’s
Mask,” will soon have its theatrical release in New York City on July 27, and
in Los Angeles in August 2001. Released on March 30th this year in the
United Kingdom, the movie generated quite a buzz after its continent-sweeping
openings in Italy, France, Australia, Canada, and Japan last year. Shot on
location in Sidney and Brisbane, this noir thriller is adapted from the verse
novel by Dorothy Porter, which has acquired an international cult reputation
since its publication in 1994, and is subtitled “an erotic murder mystery.”
. . .
. . .
Since he has more than 25 films to his credit, it is likely that Procaccio
is familiar with the 18th century British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who
called drama “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which
constitutes poetic faith.”
When sitting in a theater, an audience willingly suspends disbelief. They
know that everything happening on stage or on screen isn’t real, but the
script writer, actors, and audience all enter into a conspiracy “of poetic
faith” in an attempt to bring to life a quasi-reality that will transcend and
communicate some perception about life in this world.
You may need poetic faith to sustain you at times during a film based on a
prize-winning novel in verse that stars a dick who is a dyke. Though the
action sizzles when Jill, a lesbian private investigator (Susie Porter) lets
her libido loose with Diana (a racy, intellectual, married poetry instructor
played by Kelly McGillis), and their nude sex scenes are beautifully done,
Jill’s murder investigation of a nymphomaniac co-ed should be more
compelling.
For starters, it’s hard to accept the idea of a sleazy underbelly in the
poetry scene. Yes, the POETRY scene.
The offbeat idea works well in Porter’s novel but the hard-boiled behavior
of the poets and their partners doesn’t ring true here on screen. Except for
Mickey, the lovely young nympho victim, the film’s poets and academics are
middle-aged, unfashionable, and unprepossessing, thus realistic. But how
many poets would share Diana’s and Mickey’s fondness for strangulation as an
orgasm extender? That’s taking publish or perish too literally.
"I never knew poetry/ was about/ opening your legs/ one minute/ opening your
grave/
the next/ I never knew poetry/ could be/ as sticky as sex/."
[Dorothy Porter’s lines from “The Monkey’s Mask”]
Another irritation is the poetry:
the pretentious stanza on grief that a star recites, while a flute
accompanies him during his bookstore appearance; purple passages left to
frighten Jill on her answering machine; and the “victim” verses Mickey
recites in a videotaped reading are laughably lousy. According to the
script, the student poet is ambitious enough to have had sex with Australia’s
top poets, publishers, and critics, hence most of them are present at this
event, applauding trivial recitations such as “O, I love you, I love you” and
sentence fragments crammed with four-letter-words.
Dorothy Porter herself is a fine poet. Maybe a subliminal message here is:
bad poets deserve to die.
See the film for its superb acting -- but read a book if you crave good
poetry.
===== brief portion of my film review ====
http://members.aol.com/nonstopny/10event/10door.htm
==== a brief excerpt from my movie review =====
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