Word: melodrama
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Soderbergh's adaptation of A.E. Hotchner's novel-memoir is episodic, and that mutes the melodrama inherent in Aaron's encounters with crime, illness and loss. Aaron must improvise his response to events without fully understanding them, and that comes closer to the truth about boyhood than most movies do. It was a directorial mistake to bathe the images in a soft glow. But that visual error is not compounded psychologically. The film has a tough core, and in a time when movies about the troubles of little boys are a sentimental subgenre and dysfunction is being too easily overcome...
...Rocky, 8. The boxing match is a chess match, the plucky challenger is 3 1/2 ft. tall, and his ultimate opponent is an Apollo Creed kid with killer moves and no-soul eyes. Zaillian, whose early screenplays (The Falcon and the Snowman, Awakenings) turned real-life psychodrama into italicized melodrama, underlines the emotions here too, as if the subject weren't strong enough to hold the interest of a Nintendo child or a Home Alone parent...
Next stanza: In the Line of Fire, a just-above-par melodrama about a Secret Service agent haunted by having botched his protection of John F. Kennedy nearly 30 years ago in Dallas and now assigned to shield the current President from a would-be assassin. Frank Horrigan (Eastwood) is your basic borderline burn-out with questionable social skills. He's a beast from the past, Clintosaurus rex, who believes that the things he knows about people will compensate for his diminished physical resources. His opponent, Mitch Leary (John Malkovich), is your basic twisted genius, a rogue warrior with dead...
...third time (after Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood) he has dropped an esteemed female lawyer he had nominated or considered for a Justice Department post. This time the Administration's relative inaction in the face of opposition to the Guinier nomination allowed the controversy to bloom into full-scale melodrama...
...best movie Shakespeare. The skirmish of will and wit between Benedick (Branagh, never so charming a screen presence) and Beatrice (his wife Emma Thompson, here tart and intense) plays like a prime episode of Cheers. The characters' passions seem not revived but experienced afresh. There is wrenching melodrama in the perfidy that estranges the innocent lovers Hero (Kate Beckinsale) and Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard, a wonderfully vulnerable puppy-lover...