Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...when they know how easy it is to be tripped up. Are they self-loathers who want to bring themselves down, knowing they would get found out sooner or later anyway? Or are they overtaken by grandiosity, the need to be at the center of their own melodrama? Former Cabinet member Robert Reich didn't make things up until he left office. But then he packed his memoirs with numerous vivid scenes, including a Congressman jumping up and down screaming and an attack by cigar-puffing capitalists at a lunch, which Slate magazine showed in an Internet minute...
...Bible plays like wild melodrama: a father commanded to sacrifice his child, an ark in a deluge, God's son betrayed and murdered and reborn. Ideal material for Martin Scorsese, as he proved in The Last Temptation of Christ, his mean-streets-of-Jerusalem story of a tormented Jesus. By contrast, Buddhist texts are static and serene, antidramatic. And the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet is the ultimate good fellow, not a goodfella. So what can Scorsese find to make his own in KUNDUN...
...Lost World out of his mouth by once again tackling human suffering. In Amistad, the story of a shipful of African slaves and their struggle for freedom, he pulls out all the stops, pouring on the pathos and the pity, spooning on the sympathy and drenching it all in melodrama. Spielberg has apparently decided to stop making films and instead to start performing "filmmaking." Despite a number of excellent performances, what could very well have been a poignant and emotional tale is so concertedly and self-consciously delivered that it just comes out muddied and misconceived...
...this sounds as if it could be the stuff of which melodrama is made--or as if it could be a heart-wrenching and uplifting success. As it happens, it's neither. Bent lies somewhere in between, neither a failure nor the transcendent triumph it aspires to be. The film suffers from a number of structural problems which distract from its central themes. It's too slowly paced, weighted down by scenes consisting either entirely of dialogue, or of silent, slow and repetitive motion--there's little action and much less spectacle. And, since most of the movie's lines...
Anyone accusing early Mozart of levity should listen to the second moment of this concerto from the composer's 21st year. Though here and elsewhere Mozart (wisely) rejected the melodrama of the salon, only here does he replace it with fine arioso writing. The music lost some of its poignant punch, frankly because of some tuning problems in the orchestra, but was still smile-inducingly lovely...