Word: melodrama
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...most frustrating thing about Sweettable is that it contains the seeds of a good play--or several good plays, for that matter. Ribman never decided whether he was composing a metaphor for modern Europe, a guilty-secrets melodrama, a French philosophical play or an English drawing-room comedy. So he tosses elements of all these genres into his pot, and serves up the dramatic equivalent of broccoli cheese pasta--limp, stringy, with an occasional lumpy mass that may once have been a theme or plot twist now rendered unrecognizable by incompetent writing. Sweettable is talking-head drama of the worst...
What does all this leave to the imagination? What quarter remains for fantasy, for risque comedy or high melodrama? Do big-screen heroines engage in safe sex? Bisexuality was a popular metaphor in '70s entertainment, but it is hard to picture a film like Sunday, Bloody Sunday being made now. Its sexually ambivalent central character would clearly be a villain. Five years ago, Beyond Therapy, an amiable stage comedy about bisexuals, was well received in London, but audiences at screenings of the forthcoming movie version are uneasy with it. Even to blase sophisticates, bisexuality is becoming ethically questionable...
...totalitarian regime has its brutal side (storm troopers set farmhouses on fire and destroy exile camps to stifle dissent; a rebellious teen is caught and brainwashed). But for the most part, the melodrama is muted, the mood somber and contemplative, the complexities rich. A KGB colonel (Sam Neill) turns out to be one of the movie's most articulate and charming characters. And, despite the anti-Communist theme, the film is a subtle refutation of Reagan-era optimism. These Americans, after all, are not can-do patriots but meek, dispirited folks who simply want to get along. "Just surviving," says...
...remarkably creative friendship. Only one problem proves insoluble: O'Neill's third wife Carlotta. Commins takes careful note of her offenses: after O'Neill breaks a knee and lies helpless in the cold, she crows, "How the mighty have fallen!" and abandons him. These scenes of marital melodrama almost rival the works from the master himself...
...third feature as writer-director (after Seizure and, in 1981, The Hand) laced his usual hip rants on pharmacology with a smart, anguished newsphoto montage of one more Third World nation torn by civil war and shadowed by the looming hulk of American weaponry. This was the gallivanting political melodrama Salvador. Stone dedicated the film to his recently deceased father. "I remember one conversation we had right before he died. He said, 'You'll do all right. There'll always be a demand for great stories and great storytellers.' So finally he forgave me for going into the film business...