“My friend Pete and I are doing this thing where every night we are going to watch one of AFI’s top 100 movies.”<\/p>\n
“How many you going though?”<\/p>\n
“Well I only have Star Wars<\/em> and <\/em>Tootsie<\/em>, so we just keep watching those two over and over.”<\/p>\n I’m fairing better than Liz Lemon<\/a> in my quest to watch the AFI 100, but, when Sydney Pollack died last week, Tootsie<\/em> was my go-to movie as well. It’s not on my my list<\/a>, but I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered.<\/p>\n Verdict: it certainly is, though for reasons entirely different than I recall. I was 11 when I saw the film in the theater and, at the time, enjoyed it primarily because Dustin Hoffman played a man who dressed up like a woman. It was only watching the film as an adult that I recognized that Hoffman does no such thing: he plays a man (Michael Dorsey) and he plays a woman (Dorothy Michaels), but at no time does he play a man playing<\/em> a woman, at least in the sense of talking in an unbelievable falsetto, over-sashaying, and never letting the audience forget that there’s a y-chromosome underneath the pantyhose (all while we’re supposed to believe that everyone in the film is hoodwinked).<\/p>\n Apparently the Tootsie<\/em> script is used as an example in all the screenwriting books (so says Lemon), and it’s clear why: the whole thing hangs together remarkably well, even given the preposterous premise. Yes, enduring the “It Might Be You” montage sequences is like getting a gnat in your eye, but the rest of this film is sublime. 9\/10<\/p>\n