Word: koontz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film's heart is the forced relationship between two dramatically different residents of the same New York apartment complex. Robert De Niro is Walt Koontz, a bigoted former cop, while Philip Seymour Hoffman is Rusty, a drag queen desperate for a sex change. When Walt suffers a stroke while trying to foil a robbery, he reluctantly turns to Rusty for singing lessons as therapy. Needless to say, the one-time enemies learn there's more to each other than meets...
Robert De Niro plays Walt Koontz, an almost parodistically macho security guard, who is felled by a stroke as he tries to prevent a robbery in his New York City apartment building. As part of his therapy he requires singing lessons to help him remobilize his frozen vocal cords. Rusty (Philip Seymour Hoffman), his transvestite neighbor, is recruited to tutor him, while we settle down to await their inevitable bonding...
...which is how the singing lessons actually work. That's apparently too static for him, and we see very little of the pair working together. Instead, he focuses on the boringly brutal criminals who keep looking for their lost loot, on the cute vagaries of drag-queen life, on Koontz's messed-up romantic and buddy relationships. All this points to the preordained ending, in which everyone learns to get along with everyone else. De Niro's is a carefully studied performance, which pretty much concedes the screen to Hoffman's showy mix of transgression and tenderness. He's fine...
...Dean Koontz and Stephen King sat down with a bottle of Scotch and tried to figure out the most bizarre ending to this family they could," says William Murray, Madalyn O'Hair's estranged older son, the one who converted to Christianity, "whatever really happened was probably more bizarre than that." Hyperbole is a Murray-O'Hair family trait, but the assessment is not totally astray. One day in August 1995, Madalyn, then 76, along with Jon, 40, and Robin, 30, vanished from the house on Greystone Drive, reportedly with breakfast still cooking, and were never seen again. Tax returns...
Intensity, by Dean Koontz (Knopf; 308 pages; $25), is expert schlock by a writer who has specialized in horror. No creatures from beyond the grave here, just that reliable old formula, babe in distress. Chyna Shepherd is the sole survivor after a fairly efficient thrill killer invades a house where she is a weekend guest and murders everyone else. She's terrified and unarmed, but naturally, instead of calling the cops, she stows away in the killer's motor home as he escapes...