Word: melodrama
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...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...
That is the story. (Tarantino wrote everything except the Butch episode, which was created by the director's occasional collaborator, Roger Avary.) But it is presented out of chronology, so as to alternate fierce melodrama with behavioral comedy, and vengeance with revelation. Tarantino pulls the string around one story while setting up the next in the bustling background. He played neat tricks of a similar sort in Reservoir Dogs. "It's not like I'm on this major crusade against linear narrative," he says. "What I am against is saying it's the only game in town...