Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...sometimes writes good, quirky little exchanges, but precisely because his characters are so simplified, dramatic incident does not grow organically. So the film's movement is fitful and arbitrary -- all mood swings and unpersuasive melodrama. It makes you restless waiting for something to happen and restive trying to explain its emotional and narrative logic when it finally arrives. Lee needs to think things through. If he did, the A.D.L. would have nothing to say to him. And he might be a filmmaker worth conjuring with instead of an annual media sensation...
LIFE DURING WARTIME. A stern 16th century John Calvin provides a running commentary in Keith Reddin's wacky melodrama-cum-farce about home-security salesmen who double as burglars. At San Diego's La Jolla Playhouse...
Reddin's play, at the La Jolla Playhouse, is much the more complicated of the two -- and certainly the wackier. Instead of a naturalistic kitchen-sink drama, this is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melodrama-cum-farce, featuring fantasy sequences, flashbacks, ghosts, tall tales, quoted swatches of e.e. cummings verse and repeated incursions into a contemporary setting by a bearded and costumed Calvin. He recites his writings on predestination and free will and inveighs, sounding suspiciously like a televangelist, against the iniquities of Pop culture. The "war" of the title is not an event but a metaphor. It refers...
After Budapest, Ash's accounts get even better. In describing the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, he avoids the melodrama that has plagued so many other accounts. He tells of one German man who crossed the East-West border several times, just for the hell of it. And he tells of thousands of East Berliners, picking up their 100 Deutschmarks "greeting money" and going shopping for the first time...
...prospect of his downfall set off a fresh round of amazement among Trump watchers, who only four months ago had savored the melodrama of his separation from his wife Ivana and his affair with the model Marla Maples. The distress of Donald, the biggest self-promoter of the past decade, was too poetic to resist. TRUMP IN A SLUMP declared the New York Daily News. UH-OWE! said the city's Post, which dubbed Trump's new casino "the eighth blunder of the world...