Word: melodrama
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Finally, the task of remembering Vietnam has fallen to a Vietnamese writer- director. The Saigon on view in Tran Anh Hung's The Scent of Green Papaya, recently nominated for a foreign-language-film Oscar, is serene, shimmering and stripped of melodrama. Set in two ominously tranquil periods -- 1951, a few years before the French collapse at Dien Bien Phu, and 1961, just before the U.S. buildup -- Green Papaya is seemingly apolitical. Yet in Tran's family drama one can see a society torn between East and West, passivity and passion, duty and will, ancient rites and modern desires...
...Tall Women opens off-Broadway. Out of the simplest and most familiar material -- a woman of 90-plus years coping with the infirmities and confusions of the moment and looking back on a life of gothic excess -- Albee fashions a spellbinder. Just when he exhausts the potential of naturalistic melodrama, a brilliant gimmick, part special effect and part structural surprise, lets him move into deeper philosophical terrain...
...press conference to explain his jarring assertion that the service of I.O.C. president Juan Antonio Samaranch in the Cabinet of Spain's dictator Francisco Franco decades ago was "bad" and "may not be worthy of sport." The same day, in a rehearsal of an attempt to outdo the melodrama of 1992 in Barcelona -- when an archer ignited the Olympic flame with a streaking arrow -- Norwegian ski jumper Ole Gunnar Fidjestol sought to soar down the slope and vault into the air as one of the final bearers of the Olympic flame on its journey to Lillehammer. But he crashed askew...
...haunted. It vibrates through a taut wire of memory from a long way off, even from the opposite end of a child's life. This is not sentimental music. The sound issues from the child as involuntary realist, the one who sees with defenseless clarity and transmits without melodrama or calculation. That child's transparency, a kind of wonder, can break the heart...
Alas, the competent production only underscores the root of Gilroy's problem: he is writing a no-longer-fashionable form, family melodrama, and is unable -- as indeed, he was unable even in Roses, for all its acute observation -- to invest middle-class conflict with enough poetry or subtext to have it mean more than the surface struggle. This kind of storytelling is now done by TV movies of the week...