Word: toy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...library, of course, is not a toy. But the students who oppose the proposed changes in Lamont have acted disappointingly juvenile in recent weeks...
...palm down on the table, causing a near panic as the players scrambled to reorganize their bingo cards. Tightly creased expressions reflected the seriousness of the occasion. Among ! the lucky charms and trinkets on display: six coins, one family photograph, one clay figurine, two rock crystals and 13 toy trolls. Two of the trolls belong to Smith. He confessed, "I need the money...
...subjected to an affected, overinflected reading and interspersed with voiced breathing and noises of laughter and singing that bordered on the maniacal. Rzewski accompanied one passage by slapping himself and drumming his fingers on the closed piano lid, another (about the imperfections of governments) with the squeaking of a toy horn. In these instances the effect was derisive, whatever the intention, but much of the work was compelling, and all of it provocative...
...because the work is more kitschy than kitsch, and second because it has been so often reproduced and discussed by a sensation-hungry and ideology-obsessed art world that its shock value has gone flat. The first time you go into a gallery and see a 7-ft.-high toy bear in a striped T shirt inspecting the whistle of a London cop, all done in painted wood, faithful to the last hair, by some European souvenir manufacturer -- Koons, who probably couldn't carve well enough to do his own initials on a tree, makes none of his stuff himself...
Based on a moldering script by director Barry Levinson and Valerie Curtin, Toys is informed by a sensibility still more antique: 1960s peacenik. It posits a conflict for control of a family toy company between a near holy fool (Robin Williams) and his uncle, a retired Army general (Michael Gambon) who wants to convert the plant to military-weapons production. Both are predictable types. Their employees are so sweetly innocent one longs for Hoffa's Teamsters to come in and give them mean lessons. But everyone's main function is to trigger special effects and lend scale to production designer...