MusicChat
It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.
AshUnow
This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Mathilde the Guild
Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.
gavin6942
Raymond Aibelli is a promising medical student ready to begin a prestigious summer internship. But Susan, his mother, is immobilized by a broken leg, and his father Tom, a traveling salesman, makes Raymond stay home and take care of his mother, an unhappy woman."Spanking the Monkey" is a god film, not a great film. At he time of its release, it was a box office success, grossing $1,359,736 on a $200,000 budget. And what makes it remarkable today (2017) is how it launched the career of David O. Russell, who has become something of an Academy favorite.The film, on its own merits, is alright. Nothing outstanding, not a landmark film by any means. In fact, it is very typical of the independent movie scene of the 1990s. Although Ray is clearly a success, he is trapped in a world that has him treading water... not altogether different from characters we might find in Kevin Smith or Richard Linklater.
alianiara
I first came across this movie while looking up for incestuous movies in a boring day, but it was nothing like a low taste erotica. The whole concept of immorality attached to incest because you can never underestimate the influence of a parent, and the damage it can cause by the abuse of it.We are quite familiar in fact, about the negligent father type as in the movie. What we don't usually see is the poison of love as the mother in the movie, that suffocates with all tenderness.We see a promising MIT medical student stuck in the house with a blue mother, who infiltrates every aspects of his life and denies him access to the outside world, in the name of love. The boy could not say no, because the one he loves has that power over him, the attraction of the motherly love allures him daily to go backwards and crawl back into the womb. It is common and applicable to all of us, the growing sexual tension is but a external presentation. Also, for the mother, the fear of a separate and independent identity growing inside her child will constantly and subconsciously make her try to stop the child from his development, which without the intervention of rationality, could be dangerous.I don't usually see this kind of parental pressure addressed in movie and this is a good one.
Dutch1968
Given the budget limitations ($80,000), "Spanking the Monkey" manages to hold interest albeit with some poorly chosen scenes.The core of the movie is the relationship between mother and son. The rest of the cast exists to point the way to the inevitable.The philandering, materialistic, self absorbed husband/father illuminates the barren marriage.The fumbling sexual attempts of the son with the girl next door and her contradictory accusations of his sexual attempts as either too rough or not rough enough (gay), understandably confuse the son and provide the mother with a mentoring, nurturing sexual role for her son about how to sexually succeed with women.The mother, stumbling upon a bedroom sexual session between the son and the girl next door, reacts more in jealousy than in any maternally disproving fashion.The mother's flirtatious ways with the male neighbors, doctors, and ultimately with the girl next door's father point out that while she may be her son's mother, she is still a very desirable woman in the eyes of the rest of the male world.From the beginning through the end, you never believe the son and mother ever had a mother/child bonding. Both of them are intellectually superior, highly educated. The mother was young when she gave birth and she thinks of herself as her son's educational, intellectual and ultimately sexual mentor, not his mother.The teenage son's inability to "spank his monkey" combined with the boredom, liquor and medications downed by his mother provide the explosive elements that are just waiting to be lit. The mother's seductive smile and a slight hiking of her nightgown set off the explosion.This movie is nowhere near perfect, but it's compelling enough to let you sit through the unnecessary (e.g. stoner friends) and that's a lot more than you can say for most movies with a budget that is a thousand times greater.
Ponyboy Curtis
First off, I'd like to say I absolutely cannot wait until the December 6th release of Russell's masterpiece. This DVD release has been anticipated by viewers everywhere for way too long. It's finally here kids...A coming-of-age/ feminist/ incestuous/ misogynistic/ black comedy? Possibly all of the above, possibly only a few. There are three key players in this Solondzian dark comedy: the mother, the son, and the father. While son spends the summer tending for his severely underachieved (in the professional world) Ph.D. holding mother, he nearly misses his chance at an out of state medical internship while infidel father travels the country selling work-related training videotapes. Add a young teen down the road to question our protagonist's sexuality, accuse him of "being too rough" and a mother who stifles her son through critiquing his academic work and his sexual advances for also being "too rough," and you start to understand that Russel's film is essentially about power.The fact that mother and son engage in an incestuous tryst is predicated by his tenderness in caring for her bed-ridden body. There is talk of childhood "bath-time boners," and of course the vodka induced cheese throwing fiasco that precedes the actual act of incest. Incest, while expressed in sexual form, is about power. Mother attempts to exert power over her only child by seducing him, while her son believes that sleeping with his mother will in some ways kill the stranglehold she has on him. As a matter of fact, in one scene, he tries to have sex with her while strangling her. While the film is not ABOUT asphyxiation, there are certainly many players here who succeed in symbolically strangling the life out of everything that is "normal" about the nuclear family: masturbation, personal ambition, and marital fidelity to name a few...If you're looking for a film in the vein of something Solondz, you're in luck. If you want to get off to incest narratives, check your local adult bookstore. This film addresses incest in a darkly comical fashion, but never once attempts to arouse, or justify. "Spanking the Monkey," while superficially comical, examines relationships of power, control, and sexuality.
