Word: melodrama
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Forrester has other problems. A career thug attacks her and rapes her teenage daughter. Not very believably, she tracks him down and shoots him, bang-bang. Melodrama ripens as a shrewd cop attached to her department reports his progress in tracking down the killer, who of course is Lily herself. Will he turn her in? Not before he chews some scenery: "I am the law. Not the judges on their high benches too far from it to even smell it. I'm the one who gets shot at. The one who has to inhale the rotting flesh of the society...
...matters are left hazy. Before the election of 1864, Lincoln predicted, "I am going to be beaten, and beaten badly." Another fit of depression, or was he in real political trouble? He wound up, of course, winning decisively. Why? No clues here. The documentary spends far more time on melodrama, especially the events leading up to Lincoln's assassination. It's an effort to hype a story that, as The Civil War should have proved, doesn't need...
...BOTTOM LINE: Good direction and acting turn an old-fashioned melodrama into a wickedly entertaining movie...
...little too neat structurally, its moral and human issues a little too clear-cut: at heart it is old-fashioned melodrama. But Sorkin's dialogue | is spit-shined, and the energy and conviction with which it is staged and played is more than a compensation; it's transformative. And hugely entertaining...
...psychic links between the artist-outsider and the outlaw, the irrational constraints imposed on performers by aesthetic dunces in high places -- had immediate relevance for Carne and his colleagues. Now a wonderfully imaginative troupe of French origin, settled for more than a decade in Minneapolis, has found the melodrama surrounding the making of the movie just as rich a wellspring...