Word: melodrama
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SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY. A suave beast (Patrick Bergin) tracks down his abused wife (Julia Roberts) after she has faked her death and escaped his clutches. A good idea for a feminist thriller soon degenerates, under Joseph Ruben's direction, into a wheezy lady-in-distress melodrama. Paging Barbara Stanwyck...
There is an air of semipermanent melodrama to Yeltsin's life and career that his own actions sometimes do little to quell. During a 10-day visit to the U.S. in 1989, Yeltsin marred an otherwise impressive performance with a gauche display of his erratic nature: his speech was badly slurred at a breakfast meeting in Baltimore, the combined result of Jack Daniel's and jet lag. That episode prompted Soviet analysts at the White House to dismiss Yeltsin as a lightweight and to underrate his political skills...
LIKE THE CAST, the musical numbers ranged from astonishingly good to merely puzzling. Rocca's solo number, "The Cutting Room Floor," showcased one of the performance's best voices in a song that combined humor and a touch of melodrama. (In Pudding shows, the comedy requires melodramatic relief.) Also impressive were Dietderich and Kaiser's well-executed "Deja Voodoo" and Tomarken and St. Clair's hilarious "Cats...
...Hollywood's taste for melodrama, you could see Clarice as an apt emblem of women in American movies. Patronized and endangered. Deemed too small, too soft to show muscle at the box office. Working -- or, more often, not working -- at the whim of the men who make the movies. According to the Screen Actors Guild, only 29.1% of all feature-film roles in 1989 went to women. The average male SAG member earned 60% more than the average female; of actors in their 50s, men earned 150% more. "It looks to me as though females get hired along procreative lines...
...likely to identify with some incident and feel a twinge of shame. Second, rather than fulminate against barbarian interlopers, Katz is candid about the waste, carelessness and openly tolerated thievery that made their raids possible. The TV business, he says, was not businesslike. Third, Katz does not exploit the melodrama of the takeover. He largely ignores the boardroom fighting and has the actual bloodless coup take place off-page. His real subject is what work means, whether to a honcho or to a coffee-cart handler -- how a job becomes an identity, so that losing it forces a person...