Word: melodrama
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...Color of Money, he has made his own kind of buddy movie. Two men are bound by love or hate; one must betray the other and thereby help certify his mission. In the Nikos Kazantzakis novel and Paul Schrader's script, Scorsese has found a story vibrant with melodrama and metaphor. This Jesus (Willem Dafoe) is not God born as man. He is a man who discovers -- or invents -- his own divinity. And he is both tormented and excited by the revelation. This Judas (Harvey Keitel) is a strong, loving activist. He wants to overthrow the Roman occupiers, while Jesus...
True to the genre, Romero runs clever twists on mandatory horror-movie citations like the Psycho shower sequence (Mrs. Bates is a monkey) and The Old Dark House climax (Ella pulls the power switch). And at the end, Monkey Shines soars into that rarefied sci-fi air where melodrama meets metaphor. Romero, best known for Night of the Living Dead 20 years ago, has grown up here, grown past Hitchcock homages to fix on the war of mind and body that everyone ceaselessly wages. While he's at it, he has made the smartest dark fantasy since David Cronenberg...
...minute work for a speaking actor and small ensemble of synthesizers, amplified winds and wordless soprano voice, 1000 Airplanes resurrects the hoary genre of the melodrama. As a musical term, melodrama refers to a composition in which one or more actors recite to musical accompaniment. Schubert's world-weary Abschied von der Erde and Ralph Vaughan Williams' radiant An Oxford Elegy are examples...
...where A World Apart tries to be frank, Cry Freedom preferred to glorify its characters and tint them with melodrama. The values of middle class living were not questioned, and the relationship between the family and its Black servants was on a more monetary than emotional basis (e.g., the Woods leave money for the servants when they flee). It treated the escape from South Africa as an espionage thriller would, not as a struggle to leave a repressive regime. The film failed precisely because it sympathized totally with its characters and was unable to be critical of them...
...R.S.C. headquarters in Stratford-upon-Avon, George Farquhar's The Constant Couple and William Wycherley's The Plain Dealer, plus Noel Coward's Easy Virtue, ably done in the West End. At the National, Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun, a 19th century Irish separatist tract masquerading as a farcical melodrama, proves its author a deft orchestrator of tone and plot...