Word: maudlin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...present- day Philippine politics and, as such, is well told in Impossible Dream, Sandra Burton's history-as-I-lived-it account of the assassination of Aquino's husband Benigno and its aftermath. As TIME's Hong Kong bureau chief from 1982 to 1986, Burton soaked up the Philippines' maudlin, heart-tugging, cutthroat, rumor-mad, pious, unethical spirit. Her book is not only the expected political thriller, full of intriguing Filipinos and meddling Americans, but a bizarre feudal drama set in a land where Sancho Panza, not Don Quixote, tilts at the monstrous windmills...
Perhaps Updike attracts more serious appelations because his tone is often so harsh, his attitude so scornful of those he writes about. But Tyler's unrelenting compassion for her characters is intense but not maudlin. We should not mistake her sweetness for light...
MORE THAN OCCASIONALLY the Weep-o-meter shoots past "melancholy" to "maudlin". In one scene the young Woody figure--actually a character named Joe--escapes from a spanking when news that a little girl has been trapped in a well prompts a gush of empathy and remorse from Joe's family. Hand me the Kleenex, please...
...thus reducing Desdemona to a walk-on? Director Franco Zeffirelli never quite answers that question. The flamboyant Italian's 1983 cinematic version of La Traviata widened the opera's scope with tender reminiscences only implied in the libretto. In Otello, however, flashbacks to the Moor's slave childhood are maudlin, and Zeffirelli's camera, jumping edgily from storm to massed choruses to brawls and bedrooms, tires the mind. As Otello, Tenor Placido Domingo is in robust voice, and Bass Justino Diaz makes a splendidly vile Iago. Yet Zeffirelli's presumption in heavily editing Verdi's taut masterpiece serves neither movie...
Admittedly, the play does intermittently descend into a maudlin sort of melancholia, aggravated by its overtly economic swipes on upperclass values. It isn't enough, for instance, for Jean to tell Julie that "love is a game we [the servants] play when we get time off front work;" he has to reiterate it to Kristine to the audience, and to himself. These, however, are faults of the playwright, not the cast, and encumbrances which the actors manage to handle well. Norris is particularly careful to keep his monologues from turning into didactic speeches, so that the characters dominate the themes...