Word: melodrama
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PACIFIC HEIGHTS. Weirdo Michael Keaton squats in a house and tries to drive the nice couple who own it crazy. Sound like Beetlejuice II? Not quite: this thriller concentrates on turning familiar fears into plausible melodrama. The result is one of the slickest haunted-house movies since Psycho...
Thus for the fourth time in five years Washington had failed to produce a budget by its own, self-imposed deadline. All concerned concede that Washington-style budgetmaking is a disgrace. Ideas for rationalizing the process, to curb both spending mania and cliff-hanging melodrama, have been as numerous as attempts to cure the common cold -- and just as ineffectual...
...modernist interpolations. They are inherent in the original and in the actual events it portrays. The villagers of Fuente Ovejuna took collective responsibility for the murder. When royal investigators sought the name of the culprit, villagers swore that the whole town did it. Moreover, politics never obscures the melodrama, a thoroughly satisfying tale of robberies, rapes and other cruelties ferociously avenged. If Lope de Vega cannot rival his contemporary Shakespeare for depth and subtlety of character, he is surely the Bard's equal for rumbustious plot. (And vastly his superior for productivity: whereas Shakespeare wrote 37 or so plays -- authorship...
CAMILLE. Charles Ludlam died of AIDS in 1987, but his plays' nutty mix of drag-queen melodrama, camp slapstick and sly deconstruction lives on. His longtime companion and collaborator, Everett Quinton, restages and stars in yet another of them at off-Broadway's Ridiculous Theatrical Company...
...sometimes writes good, quirky little exchanges, but precisely because his characters are so simplified, dramatic incident does not grow organically. So the film's movement is fitful and arbitrary -- all mood swings and unpersuasive melodrama. It makes you restless waiting for something to happen and restive trying to explain its emotional and narrative logic when it finally arrives. Lee needs to think things through. If he did, the A.D.L. would have nothing to say to him. And he might be a filmmaker worth conjuring with instead of an annual media sensation...