Word: melodrama
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...sure is that it's the first big Hollywood-style project from the director of Run Lola Run, the cunning micro-melodrama in which the same events are played in three variations and the entertained viewer is in and out in 76 minutes. If Tykwer's use of pixelated photos, split screens and cartooning in Lola gets you thinking that The International will offer a fizzily anarchic reimagination of the thriller genre, fuhggedaboutit. Running or stumbling a full two hours, this is a medium-IQ sample of spy dystopia - dour, sit-throughable and generically entertaining...
...members of the Motion Picture Academy are still filling out their ballots, but right now the Anglo-Indian melodrama Slumdog Millionaire is the strong favorite to win the Oscars for Best Picture, Directing and Adapted Screenplay. It has already snagged top prizes from the producers', directors', writers' and actors' guilds. It's also earned nearly $80 million at the domestic box office--far more than the combined take of three of its Best Picture rivals, The Reader, Frost/Nixon and Milk. (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which absent Slumdog might have been the film to beat, has grossed more than...
...Both Morel movies were produced and co-written by Luc Besson, who's a one-man French film industry. He earned his early rep as a writer-director with Subway, a vivacious crime melodrama, then made the Hollywood-influenced thrillers La Femme Nikita and The Professional (which introduced Natalie Portman) and the Bruce Willis sci-fi hit The Fifth Element. Rarely directing movies anymore, he's produced nearly 70 of them this decade, most set in Paris, many in English, including the Transporter series and a couple of Jet Li action adventures. Besson is Hollywood in another...
...received infectiously enthusiastic reviews from the critics; and, most important, it boasts an emotional energy that lifts moviegoers out of their seats, making them eager to tell their friends about the experience. Slumdog is not a standard indie film: glum, poky, wee. It's a sprawling epic, saturated in melodrama and romance, and capped by a big, Bollywood-style production number. People aren't seeing the movie as homework; they're seeing it because they've heard it's something that Hollywood too rarely gives them: a film they can fall in love with...
...Obsession. His most enthralling epic is Tokyo Olympiad, a record of the 1964 Olympics that stands with Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia as the great art-reportage of the summer games Xie Jin, 84, a preeminent director in Mao's China, is best known for Two Stage Sisters, an assured melodrama about a country girl who joins a rep company. During the Cultural Revolution the film was charged with advocating "the reconciliation of social classes," and Xie Jin (like most other Chinese directors) made no films for a decade. After rehabilitation, he did the international hit Hibiscus Town...