Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even though both work from the same source, Henri Murger's 19th century novel Scenes de la vie de boheme, where Puccini draws his demi-monde of starving artists with heavy strokes of romantic melodrama, Kaurismaki chooses ironic distance and absurd comedy. The result is a witty but frustrating film, whose saving grace is the beauty of its images of Paris...
Kaurismaki resents the opera's sentimental excess, but it isn't clear what he proposes to replace it with. The film is too detached to be convincing as either comedy or melodrama. Kaurismaki's trio of impecunious artists (for some reason, the philosopher Colline has been banished from the film) seem trapped, almost frightened by the camera...
...fill in anyone who didn't hike over to the Science Center, the evening's entertainment was a screening of the classic melodrama, accompanied by running commentary from a chorus of Crimson Key members. During the film's first hour, most comments were sophomoric but harmless, consisting largely of sexual innuendoes and repeated references to the lead actress' ostensible ugliness. Several shouts foreshadowed the cancer that, by reel three, would take the young woman's life. As the disease progressed, a similar malignancy claimed the commentators' attempts at humor: as the hero aided his limping wife through a snowy lawn...
Newland is the hero of Edith Wharton's 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, and in his emotional corset he may seem a supporting player in life's melodrama, as far from the noisy concerns of our day as Polonius. The drawing-room virtues of reticence and gentility are considered dead in the Age of Prurience. Yet they still govern our lives whenever we check an impulse to explode in love or anger -- when we don't shout at a reckless motorist, or we keep quiet when we mean to proclaim our ardor. If Richard Kimble is a hero...
...Stratford, plus a novel Saint Joan that turns her trial into a modern-day government inquiry cum media event. For popular tastes there are Blithe Spirit, Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and the Jule Styne musical Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Newton is also directing a Victorian melodrama, The Silver King, presented as a Dickensian panorama. The other novelty is Carl Sternheim's 1911 satire of German bourgeois class anxiety, The Unmentionables, adapted to McCarthy-era America. The laughs it now evokes are mostly sentimental recognition for bygone jingles, not the disquieting humor intended in the original play...