Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...much for truth. Much of the book's melodrama comes from Roberts' account of abuse by a father he describes as angry, violent and a killer. The late Marvin Roberts, a horse trainer in Salinas, Calif., beat Monty with a chain, so goes the account, when the seven-year-old boy began to question rough, traditional training methods. These beatings, writes Monty, went on weekly for several years. Worse: during World War II, when Marvin worked as a policeman, Monty saw his father disarm a knife-wielding black soldier who was trying to hold up the Golden Dragon...
When Psycho first appeared, it was a shock. At first the picture seemed like a familiar Hitchcock melodrama of guilty escape: a woman, on the run with stolen money, stops for the night in a tatty motel, chats with the eccentric owner, takes a shower. And then, 44 minutes in, the movie goes a little mad. Exit leading lady, in a whirlpool of blood. New characters appear, are slaughtered or imperiled. What the hell is going on here? Audiences knew (it was one of Hitchcock's most profitable films), but the critics were annoyed, dismissive. It took a while...
...stopped resisting the idea of Leslie and Sarah as ludicrous and illogical, I began to appreciate them. Their characters were both the best-written and best-acted part of the play. With their entrance towards the end of the first act, they invigorated what had been a tedious melodrama about one couple's relationship (something we all see enough of at home) and turned it into a comic drama with abrasive edges. Leslie and Sarah put a necessary stop to Nancy's whining and Charlie's obstinance. They interrupted a fight which easily could have continued inconclusively for several years...
Bainbridge's spare style ensures that her work is entirely free of sentimentality or melodrama. What she doesn't say becomes almost more important than what she does; readers are left to decipher the twisted relationships of the characters--the fact that Myrtle willingly bears George's children because his highborn wife cannot, for instance--as best they can. There may be love in this novel, but there is little that is sweet...
American History X, a confused, randomly compelling family melodrama, is at the center of a Hollywood controversy--not, so far, over its grim subject matter but over the firing of director Tony Kaye during editing. Thus it's hard to know whom to blame for the film's choppiness, its mixture of rage and sentimentality, the stridency of some of the acting...