Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...novel is saved from melodrama by the presence of the camp's founder, the "Chief," who disdains Boatner's poetic, dense voice for simple words, hard and clear. After the death of a boy at camp, he intones, "We thank you for all that's left to the living. Help us see what it is and where to find it." A prayer...
...barbershop, pool hall, Greyhound bus station, coin-operated Laundromat and quiet residential streets. Several double-wide trailers and late-model automobiles, all seized from real-life crime scenes, sprawl around the town. Even the movie theater, the Biograph, is a monument to real-life crime. Its main attraction, Manhattan Melodrama (starring Clark Gable and Myrna Loy), was showing at the Biograph in Chicago when the bank robber John Dillinger was shot dead outside the theater by FBI agents...
Fortunately for Poole, and for Thomas Palmer's second novel, a way out eventually materializes. What could have become a drawn-out absurdist melodrama with yuppie trappings veers instead into an adventure story with nightmarish resonances. Poole is at first willing to suppose that his imprisonment was simply a bad dream. After all, he reappears in his suburban house to find that his wife Carmen has not noticed his absence. Another explanation occurs to Poole: he is going bonkers...
...alone, in an acting empyrean, in George Cukor's 1937 Camille. As the selfless courtesan Marguerite Gautier, Garbo transforms her face into a life- and-death mask, and Dumas's melodrama into classical tragedy. Every calculated audacity -- the hint of disintegration in the eyes, the dry little laugh exploding into a tubercular cough, the weight of a thoughtful passion that gives substance to every line of dialogue -- testifies to Garbo's acute, intuitive knowledge of screen acting, and it allows her to play Marguerite at high pitch and with perfect precision. At the end, as she dies reconciled with...
Then Baldwin and the Whiffles -- an Ur-nerd quartet in plaid cummerbunds and smug smiles -- launch into a rendition of Sh-Boom at the charm-school talent show, and Cry-Baby takes off to parody paradise. It becomes a real musical (new songs, production numbers) and a careering melodrama: Grease with grit. Cliches collide, and so do jalopies; lightning strikes; the jailhouse rocks. Lovers lose themselves in a French-kissing dance that would have been banned on Bandstand...