Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Object of My Affection walks the tightrope on a number of boundary lines--hanging dangerously between comedy and melodrama, intelligence and triteness, and between politically correct and glaring offensive. But it never finds its "zone." The movie seems unnecessarily forced and cautious. "Laugh at this!" it tells you. "Cry now!" it yells. In between these climactic urges for audience emotion, The Object of My Affection stomps all over thin ice. Though mindfully tries for fluffy appeal, it ends up cracking under the weight of its cautiousness...
...Madness of King George and The Crucible. Whereas with those films, the attention centered on the passionate and dramatic acting, his sparse directing style makes this movie feel slightly sitcom-ish. The scenes don't particularly flow well (some parts scream for commercial breaks), and it jumps from melodrama to obvious comic relief without much attempt at subtlety. Hytner seems lost as to what genre the movie actually belongs in. Rare scenes echo with the light, schmaltzy appeal of a romantic comedy, some seem amateurish (reminiscent of high school plays), and others are bogged down in unnecessarily messy melodrama...
From the title alone, one can gather that Kara Walker's exhibit positions itself on a fine edge between mockery and representation, between historical narrative and cultural commentary. Rather than narrating history, Walker uses history as a backdrop for a less literal, though just as real, melodrama. Her work unabashedly analyzes the collective unconscious of the American psyche. What she dredges up--racist imagery involving bestiality, child abuse, feces and more--is not pretty. It is grotesque, disgusting, ingenious and eerily beautiful...
TIME played brilliantly to the new American appetite. The magazine turned the news into saga, comedy, melodrama. The very compression of early TIMEstyle, invented almost entirely by Hadden, lent it an urgency of mannered telegraphese. John Martin, Hadden's cousin and an early writer and editor at the magazine, left this account of Hadden at work: "Brit would edit copy to eliminate unnecessary verbiage...If you wrote something like 'in the nick of time,' five words, he might change it to 'in time's nick,' three words...At all times he had by him a carefully annotated translation...
...1990s, however, have indeed been a period when the great arguments about how society should be organized seemed settled. Democracy blossomed in South Africa and Russia; even Vietnam embraced capitalism. Nevertheless, life has not been boring. If the melodrama of history has been subdued, the melodrama of technology burns bright. We still live in interesting times...