Word: melodrama
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...seen this type of wartime melodrama too many times before. The officers are all cannibalistic monsters, the bedraggled rank and file scream cannon fodder, and the black and white cinematography, far from a stark, chilling revelation of the nightmare that is war, is predictable and bland...
...venerable genre that has been under-represented of late: the medical drama. CBS's Chicago Hope, created by David E. Kelley (Picket Fences), has name stars -- Mandy Patinkin, Adam Arkin, E.G. Marshall -- and provides familiar TV pleasures. It's a self-important but frequently entertaining mix of Ben Casey melodrama (should an operation be performed to separate two Siamese twins, even though both may die?) and St. Elsewhere-style modernism (the surgeons sing Midnight Train to Georgia around the operating table). Kelley tries to bring the format into the '90s: one early plot line involves a woman whose...
...movie might aim to be a Searching for Bobby Fischer in the Hood. But Fresh is so much more: a really good film, for a start, made with a subtle precision that suggests a Vermeer landscape of the ninth circle of hell. Fresh alchemizes the terrifying cliches of urban melodrama into annihilating poetry. A guarantee: the film's last shot -- just a boy's face, in ruins -- will break your heart...
...both of the NC-17 movies: their action and dialogue are natural, recreational, an expression of the characters' personalities. The sex is presented as play in The Advocate, the language as banter in Clerks. If they had been used in a threatening or violent fashion -- as a tool of melodrama, the way they are in most R-rated Hollywood pictures -- the board might have shrugged them...
What we really need is a Baseball Hall of Names. So much melodrama and vaudeville echo in the monikers of old-time players: Lu Blue, Pebbly Jack Glasscock, Orval Overall, Baby Doll Jacobson, Heinie Manush. Sometimes a player finds a namemate from another era and forges a powerful link in baseball's memory chain. So this year let us induct Harvard Eddie Grant and Parisian Bob Caruthers, Goose Goslin and Goose Gossage, Rollie Fingers and Mordecai Peter Centennial (Three Finger) Brown. Not to forget those matching tabloid headlines, Urban Shocker and Country Slaughter...