Word: mawkishness
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...American director might have struggled more self-consciously with the concept of a filmed Hair, unearthing the despair and shame, the horror and uncertainties of the late sixties. But Hair is too light a vehicle for that kind of agonizing exorcism it would have been mawkish, shallow posturing. Someday an American director will film that scraggly mess. But for now, Milos Foreman keeps Hair cheerfully scruffy...
There has never before been a sitcom written with the dramatic depth of this one. Other shows may have serious (usually mawkish) scenes or deal with topical issues; Taxi is about serious people. Though the drivers are in some ways conventional TV characters, they are also lost souls, losers set back by life's rude shocks. They dream hungrily of finer things-of love or loftier careers-and when their dreams collapse, they turn to one another for support. In the opening episode, a surprisingly melancholy sitcom premiere, one driver (Judd Hirsch) takes off for Florida to attempt...
...read than seen. The devices he used to break fresh ground in the '30s are old hat now; even if his themes of the injustice of American society and the innocence of Sacco and Vanzetti are true, they are buried in the inevitable and agonizingly slow lurch towards a mawkish, yet depressing conclusion. Anderson's plays are strongly reminiscent of another expression of his times-Socialist Realism art. Like that famed WPA stuff, Winterset incorporates bold, tradition-smashing design with a sense of social justice; and like a Socialist Realism mural in a post office, it looks heavy and over...
...movie. After you've seen your fortieth Peter Lorre imitation that's not even close, enthusiasm simply wanes. Nonetheless, "Casablanca" (1942) remains one of the best films to emerge from Hollywood in the age of talkies. This film is a stellar example (oops) of great acting rescuing an otherwise mawkish plot. Bogie crystallizes his persona in "Casablanca" as Rick, the disillusioned, cynical tavern-keeper. Ingrid Bergman was never more beautiful, and Claude Rains, the aforementioned Lorre, and Dooley Wilson head a marvelous cast. Really great films can be rated by how many times one can sit through them and truly...
...wife confronts her, screaming, "You're a good person." Isabel flees her whole new world. There will be another job and another man for her, but before that she must go back to Margaret Casey. It was not the old woman's spiteful tongue, her sloth, her mawkish novenas or her copies of the Sacred Heart Messenger that Isabel hated. It was that her father loved Margaret, with an engaged love for the wretched of God's earth, those who spend their lives trying to keep a little space at the edge of the table. From...