Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY. A suave beast (Patrick Bergin) tracks down his abused wife (Julia Roberts) after she has faked her death and escaped his clutches. A good idea for a feminist thriller soon degenerates, under Joseph Ruben's direction, into a wheezy lady-in-distress melodrama. Paging Barbara Stanwyck...
...month, the Chinese authorities insisted that it be withdrawn from consideration. (The Motion Picture Academy rejected the demand.) Nor have the Chinese allowed the film to be shown publicly on the mainland, though it has played to acclaim elsewhere in the Far East and in Europe. Suddenly, this spare melodrama acquired political significance. Zhang, 40, whose previous film, Red Sorghum, made him the brightest light of emerging Chinese cinema, became both an international cause celebre and a man without a local audience. "To get Ju Dou past the censors," Zhang says, "I have agreed to consider recutting some parts...
There is an air of semipermanent melodrama to Yeltsin's life and career that his own actions sometimes do little to quell. During a 10-day visit to the U.S. in 1989, Yeltsin marred an otherwise impressive performance with a gauche display of his erratic nature: his speech was badly slurred at a breakfast meeting in Baltimore, the combined result of Jack Daniel's and jet lag. That episode prompted Soviet analysts at the White House to dismiss Yeltsin as a lightweight and to underrate his political skills...
LIKE THE CAST, the musical numbers ranged from astonishingly good to merely puzzling. Rocca's solo number, "The Cutting Room Floor," showcased one of the performance's best voices in a song that combined humor and a touch of melodrama. (In Pudding shows, the comedy requires melodramatic relief.) Also impressive were Dietderich and Kaiser's well-executed "Deja Voodoo" and Tomarken and St. Clair's hilarious "Cats...
...likely to identify with some incident and feel a twinge of shame. Second, rather than fulminate against barbarian interlopers, Katz is candid about the waste, carelessness and openly tolerated thievery that made their raids possible. The TV business, he says, was not businesslike. Third, Katz does not exploit the melodrama of the takeover. He largely ignores the boardroom fighting and has the actual bloodless coup take place off-page. His real subject is what work means, whether to a honcho or to a coffee-cart handler -- how a job becomes an identity, so that losing it forces a person...