Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...they uncover. Nor do they condescend unduly to the queens and pawns in their investigation. The cops are just doing a job -- one that makes their off-duty lives look drab and irrelevant. Scenes of Tennison's wan private life are mere leavening agents in the acrid yet tangy melodrama that is her life on the force -- the only life she has, really...
...rest is more ordinary. Rigg is wonderful in quiet moments but awkward in striving for the unchained melodrama that Zoe Caldwell achieved in a 1982 revival. The balance of the cast, also from London, is workmanlike, save for Nuala Willis, whose keening songs redeem that most archaic of theatrical ploys, the chorus. The set, a vast wall of rusted metal panels that bang like thunder and tumble away at key moments, is effective but excessive, a tacit confession of shaky faith in the power of the play's words. That doubt is foolish. Medea is the greatest role ever written...
...last oppressed peon. Everything they do and say has been done and said before. But they simply refuse to admit it. The result is not epic cinema as David Lean defined it but as Bette Davis used to play it at Warner Bros. -- where history was a branch of melodrama and the subtler emotions were Xed out on the second-draft screenplay...
...Responsibility, trust and some form of commitment are essential elements in any sort of relationship, but Jean is incapable of exercising any of these character traits. His overarching sense of denial seems to pervade all of his actions. And the inconsistency of the film's basic structure-its exaggeration, melodrama and useless subplots-reflects this...
...source of the tragedy, make the drama. "Savage Nights" has received so much acclaim, including a host of Cesar Awards (the French Oscars), because it is the first film to confront the harsh, raw, smarmy side living with AIDS. It shows the character without apology, living the melodrama that we are supposed to believe is their lives...