Word: new
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Quixote and Pancho Sanza (the fun is figuring out who exactly is more deluded), you have the returning Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (now officially married), Slinky Dog, the incontinent Hamm, the still neurotic Rex and the ever-prone-to-PDA Bo Peep. The sequel adds a few new ones--most notably, Barbie (Mattel realized they lost a major marketing chance when they refused to let Pixar use their infamously-proportioned doll in the first film). Also in the fray are Wayne Knight's villainous Al McWhiggen, a proprieter of a nearby toy store who dreams of selling Woody...
...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...
...sounds contrived, and it is. Worse, the plot suffers from a pervasive staleness. It's as if Schumacher, who both wrote and directed, simply recycled bits and pieces of old scripts. Flawless deals with weighty stuff in tolerance, illness, identity crises, but it doesnt bother to say anything new about these issues. The audience can see the films "can't we all just get along" plot devices from a mile away...
...director, Schumacher effectively conveys the down-and-dirty grit of New York, but as writer he should have spent more time exploring the down-and-dirty grit of his protagonists. The screenplay itself does precious little to expand upon the two stereotypes of a bigot and a drag queen. That task falls into the actors hands. Fortunately, De Niro and Hoffman have very capable hands indeed, and they almost manage to elevate the script in spite of itself not quite, but almost...
...seems to be using West as a vehicle to make his attack on the university system in general, when he writes "For his intellectual charade reflects the political sickness of the modern academy, which has thrown over its traditional calling to the 'disinterested pursuit of knowledge' and assumed a new institutional identity as an 'agency of social change.'" Horowitz ends with the statement that "The Cornel West Reader is a testament to the intellectual vacuum that a progressive education creates...