Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Part hardboiled thriller, part sensitive melodrama, with tears for the ladies and gunplay for the guys, the novel borrows a potent narrative trick from Kenneth Fearing's noir classic, The Big Clock: Schwartz tells the story from complementary viewpoints that must sooner or later collide and clash. In their grief and remorse, the three lead characters start out locked in separate universes. Ethan, insulated in his study, ceaselessly revisits happier days while simultaneously dreaming of revenge, despite a father who drilled him in nonviolence. Grace drifts in an existential darkness amid her bright perennials, her spirit crisping and withering leaf...
...want to be. It was historic. It changed things. Alice Roosevelt Longworth once explained the scandal-plagued President Warren Harding to a friend: "Harding was not a bad man, he was just a slob." For six years, Bill Clinton's countrymen have thought that for all his messiness and melodrama, he was a basically good fellow, our Bubba, our flawed and favored good ole boy. But after this speech, with its sullen anger and trimming, a chord may have been broken, an estrangement begun. Something tells me "He's not a slob...
...Shumways--Philip, three sisters and their parents--track him separately into obsession. Philip's childhood is burned away, cauterized, by the loss, and the half-formed man whose personality coalesces is shadowed and deepened. The story has a dark, dreamlike quality, and author Reiken tells it with no melodrama nor any word out of place...
Decalogue is different; stuff happens. This series--with each 53- to 58-minute episode dramatizing one of the Ten Commandments through the lives of the residents of a Warsaw apartment house--revels in the convolutions of melodrama. There are two brutal killings, a few attempted suicides, even a car chase. A perfect child dies. Another child is told, Chinatown-style, that her sister is really her mother. At times Decalogue plays like a Polish Melrose Place...
They make a strange menagerie, the Hal Hartley clan. The people in his odd, alert comedies (Trust, Amateur, Flirt) inhabit some Long Island of the mind, where Amy Fisher-style melodrama rubs up against working-class angst. They are part strong, silent types, part East Coast neurotics. They revel in their own contradictions; one Hartley heroine, a nymphomaniac virgin, explains the anomaly by saying, "I'm choosy." His creatures will sit mute and mopey, then turn endlessly articulate once they get going. Self-conscious but not self-aware, skeptical yet wildly romantic, they have a horror of the personal commitment...