Word: melodrama
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Hispanic life also puts a different stress on the claims of individualism. The arts in America are absorbed by personal experience, the melodrama of the interior life, the spectacle of "me." Hispanic culture offers a counterweight in the claims of community and the shared impulse. You can see those asserting themselves in mainstream life through such means as the outdoor murals -- acts of public declamation in the tradition of the great Mexican muralists -- that are an essential part of the Los Angeles cityscape. Add to that sentiment the claims of family, the primal unit of Hispanic life. The Mexican poet...
...develop a movie, Spielberg-style, about a Hispanic family in the suburbs, coping the American way. Instead of a tragic figure, he would be playing Eddie Average. (Then perhaps Eddie II and III). It would be Close Encounters of a fresh new kind, and the vast audience watching the melodrama might also start to recognize a little bit of Latino in themselves...
...face of the unrelenting cynicism of those who take the time to put pen to paper on a regular basis these days, Cole's sentimentalism--what even he admits to be a weakness for sugary-sweet melodrama--is not only refreshing, but also provocative. It forces us to consider whether we measure up to standards set before us, for in deifying certain individuals, Coles seals off from us the escape route of searching for faults in those seeking to do good...
...Time: Scenes from a Service Economy, one of two offerings in the American Repertory Theater's spring festival currently running at the Hasty Pudding Theater, has a lot in common with television melodrama. As in TV, the dialogue is snappy, the plot fast-paced and the sex scenes never quite consummated. In fact, for TV junkies, Big Time has only one drawback--it actually costs money...
...smart and handsome, with a crinkly smile around the edges. It boasts wistful vistas and umber landscapes. Clouds stampede over the northern New Mexico terrain, where hillocks perch like adobe huts. The kiss of two fine brown faces is silhouetted by an orange sunset, flaring into sympathetic melodrama. Night falls, and there's a rope of rainbow in the sky; a frosted moon smiles behind a scrim of mist. It makes for quite a pretty show. Nature has rarely gone to the movies in starker, more glamorous clothes...