Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Coordinating Beethoven's music with the story poses another problem. The relentless melodrama of the film contrasts with the composer's work to an unintentionally comic effect. And of course, we hear plenty of the Fifth Symphony at crucial intervals...
...with jealousy, revenge, gunfire, deadly sea swells and lust in a lighthouse, all set in the tiny Newfoundland community of Witless Bay (one store, one restaurant, a sawmill and a drydock) just after the turn of the century. The author writes well against this florid grain, producing extravagant melodrama in language that is strict, laconic and evocative...
...Three stories that begin as cliches but soon go wild and wily. A gallery of tough guys who minor in philosophy. Career-defining turns by John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman. Peppery dialogue that brings macho swank into the '90s. Quentin Tarantino's adrenaline rush of a melodrama is a brash dare to timid Hollywood filmmakers. Let's see, he says, if you can be this smart about going this...
...legal and rhetorical overemphasis on race in the past generation (busing, affirmative action, quotas, punitive political correctness) has ended by compounding the oldest American melodrama. What should have been, at most, a temporary tactic (like Lincoln getting Congress to suspend habeas corpus during the Civil War) has become a permanent installation of bad principle -- a way of life...
...flow of emotion with these absurd statements which seem to make light of the situations at hand. When Gray Sexton writes that her mother, in workshops, "never embarassed me [Linda], even when I had written something truly terrible. Never once did she laugh at my nalvete, my cliches, the melodrama...," the reader may wish that her mother had been more critical...