Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...shaggy story the older woman relates. It is about the friendship of headstrong Idgie (Mary Stuart Masterson) and ladylike Ruth (Mary-Louise Parker), two young women of the 1930s, and it involves home cooking, wife beating and a murder. It is an uneasy blend of (among other things) whimsy, melodrama, the Ku Klux Klan and feminist sentiment that coexists rather awkwardly with the modern story. Like most movies that wish mainly to warm our hearts, FRIED GREEN TOMATOES is basically a lie. But it works. In part that's because all the actresses ground their archetypal characters in strongly realized...
...political savants who have been denouncing this zippy melodrama hadn't already existed, Oliver Stone might have invented them, because they fulfill his one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory. Hyper down, pundits! Don't deny Stone the right due any artist: to interpret history through his own prism. And give moviegoers the chance to make up their own minds about who shot President Kennedy. The only thing that Stone's dazzling assemblage of political-science fiction attempts to assassinate is complacency...
...political savants who have been denouncing this zippy melodrama hadn't already existed, Oliver Stone might have invented them, because they fulfill his one-size-fits-all conspiracy theory. Hyper down, pundits! Don't deny Stone the right due any artist: to interpret history through his own prism. And give moviegoers the chance to make up their own minds about who shot President Kennedy. The only thing that Stone's dazzling assemblage of political-science fiction attempts to assassinate is complacency...
This past was prologue to his most outsize challenge: explaining the Kennedy assassination to his own satisfaction. Or anyone else's. JFK, the electrifying melodrama opening nationwide this week, attracted brickbats months ago when a long article in the Washington Post cataloged historical "errors and absurdities" in Stone and Zachary Sklar's screenplay. Assassination scholars ragged Stone for his naivete, his use of discredited testimony, his reliance on suspect "experts." A TIME critic said that if Stone's film "turns out to distort history, he may wind up doing more harm than homage to the memory of the fallen President...
MALA NOCHE. Come to the wild side of . . . well, Portland, Ore., for a drugged-out slice of lice in artfully grungy black and white. The first feature by Gus Van Sant, who was later beloved by critics for Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, this 1988 homo-erratic melodrama remains his boldest and best...