Word: melodrama
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...course, Richard Pryor does have the right to cull interesting events from real life, mix in some exaggeration and good old-fashioned melodrama and call it art. And, of course, it would be much more vainglorious and self-glorifying for anything called, say, Down and Out With Richard Pryor, to be more than a made-for-TV movie...
Most movies about low-life Americana condescend to their subject with lots of sweat, foul patter, fat ladies and idiot giggling. This lurid and intermittently seductive melodrama (based on a true story) just observes Brad Sr. and his mob dispassionately, like slime mold under a microscope. They execute their robberies, and their victims, with soulless professionalism; their gangster grimaces register starkness without sexiness. Brad Jr. and his pals are hardly more exemplary. Talking tough, swigging beer, waiting for something bad to happen, they could be the Whitewood Gang in embryo...
...almost always result not from invention but from rediscovering something the playwright meant to say. That kind of respectful reading underlies Rumanian Expatriate Lucian Pintilie's eclectic, visually daring version of Ibsen's The Wild Duck at Arena Stage in Washington. The play is frequently seen as a domestic melodrama in which well-intentioned people cause calamities; the climactic suicide of a dreamy adolescent girl is generally staged with perverse beauty, as a sentimental symbol of how adult reality crushes freedom of spirit. Pintilie, who brings an Eastern European's Marxist sensibility, has exposed a vein of social criticism about...
...Forster's A Room with a View is like A Passage to India in miniature. But in his later novel, the sexual hysteria loosed in Miss Quested by her visit to an exotic land results in major melodrama. Lucy's milder--and curable --case of the same malaise creates only a delightful Wildean farce. At least that's all it does in this movie version of Forster's minor and diverting novel. The formality of James Ivory's style suits this spirit admirably, counterpointing and controlling the theatrical overplaying he encourages among his players. Maggie Smith as Lucy's dithering...
James Earl Jones, one of America's foremost classical actors, is appearing at the Goodman Theater in Fences, a new play by August Wilson, author of the Broadway melodrama Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. Wisdom Bridge Theater, which last year toured in Britain and played a summer season at the Kennedy Center in Washington, this week is reviving a much praised multimedia Hamlet. Directed by Robert Falls (who last month shifted from the artistic directorship of Wisdom Bridge to the same slot at the bigger-budget Goodman), this Hamlet employs a slide show, blues and rock sequences, video monitors...