Word: maudlin
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...first glance, "Strawberry and Chocolate" seems like a Cuban version of the Manuel Puig/Hector Babenco "Kiss of the Spider Woman." There is the flamboyant gay man, the uptight, straight Marxist and lots of political oppression. Straw-berry and Chocolate" also contains the maudlin elements of what in hack reviewer parlance is called a "feel-good movie." However, it is the critique of Cuban society as it stands and the glimpse into a decaying Havana which make Gutierrez Alea's film so pointed and topical. "Strawberry and Chocolate" makes a plea for tolerance, a virtue not much in evidence in Castro...
...buying his victim pose in maudlin new authorized...
...dealing with the slaughter of his mother, that boy grown up into a loving musician who is shot down, another boy coping with his father's grim disappearance -- are adapted from the Lennon saga. The parallels lend sporadic power to a sketchy plot with underdrawn characters and a maudlin message: the first act climaxes in a plea for universal brotherhood, the second in a ritual surrender of weapons by a multicultural array of street toughs...
...Angeles, even as she rages like a deranged diva, she shows endearing glints of awareness of her own tawdry emotional blackmail. A single image encapsulates the difference. When London's Norma, Patti LuPone, got her seedy protege back, by a suicide attempt, she collapsed into his arms in maudlin gratitude. The Los Angeles incarnation, Glenn Close, ends the act by lifting her bandaged arms above his embracing form, her fingers curving like talons to take him in. The former evoked weakness and despair, the rewrite an eerie grin...
...this might be impossibly fey were it not for the down-but-not-quite-out sensibilities of the two writers. Waits, the bard of last-chance saloons, has never taken deader aim at the line that separates the mordant from the maudlin. On the one hand, there's November, a bitter hymn to the month that "only believes in a pile of dead leaves/ And a moon that's the color of bone." On the other, there's I'll Shoot the Moon, in which Kathchen, daydreaming about her lover, vows to "be the pennies on your eyes" and "build...