Word: plautus
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sure, whenever the grave and lovely Rae Dawn Chong appears as Sarah, the young black woman Mark falls in love with, this pact is broken. But she cannot overcome the cliches of mistaken-identity comedy that were stylized when Plautus was a pup. Or enliven the film's sermon that even in enlightened environments like Harvard, racial stereotyping and unconscious prejudice still exist. The approach is too comfortable, the tone patronizing. The N.A.A.C.P. has greeted Soul Man with protests; one suspects it is not so much because the movie's heart is in the wrong place, but because its heart...
...only a very cursory one at Shakespeare's. The Comedy of Errors, upon which The Boys is loosely based, never was one of the Bard's greatest creations anyway-he hadn't traded in his slapstick for lofty rhetoric and sublime poetry yet. Besides, he cribbed the plot from Plautus, who in turn had lifted it from the Greeks, so Rodgers and Hart were obviously working within a clearly established tradition...