Word: melodrama
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...Governor's divorce and remarriage in the far West; a rich candidate's cabbageheaded stupidity in the Southwest; the hold on a Midwestern senatorial candidate by agents of an Arab oil state. The true purpose of these cliches and intrigues is to supply Power with some paranoiac melodrama of the kind that is nowadays never absent from movies about American politics. Pete may be involved, either as unwitting coconspirator or victim, in something more menacing to the commonwealth than a few dirty political tricks. These dawning hints of complicity give him an excuse to renounce political expedience and square himself...
...movie's ideal form is to keep one's balance. Reach too far in one direction, and all you do is bring on the empty horses. Restrain the impulse, and you may only bring forth empty images, beautiful and static. It is on the ground that lies between melodrama and abstraction that the most haunting figures in film history--Griffith, Eisenstein and Abel Gance among them--have both lost themselves and found themselves. It is this terrain Kurosawa confidently bestrides...
...GOOD NEWS IS: the genre melodrama in all its variety is making a comeback in American film. Yes, cop pictures, films-noir, and private eye sagas are back following the failure of a slew of teen comedies, westerns, and serious "Oscar-bait" dramas, all presumed more commercial by an industry that generally felt melodrama had become the province of TV. "Blood Simple," "Witness," "Prizzi's Honor," and "Jagged Edge" have all contributed to a feeling in Hollywood that audiences want better and more adult stories in their theatrical diet...
...complicated narrative interweaves events in Bombay with a subsequent movie about those events. But rather than push toward deeper understanding, Hare lampoons his argument in dopey scenes from the putative movie and shifts toward melodrama in more elegant but equally sentimental scenes for the "actual" characters. In the most implausible sequence, an American actress offers herself as the prize to the "winner" of the debate between the novelist and the journalist. Even after this conscious retreat from political complexity, Map remains lively and provocative. Yet it leaves a viewer with the sad sense that its author shrank from the dangers...
...queen to affectionate husband, from Velvet Underground frontman to the man on the Honda scooter who won't settle for just walking. And he's had to watch his various lives fold and unfold in the public eye to varying degrees of interest. But worse than that, pardon the melodrama, probably hardly a day goes by for Lou Reed that he doesn't have to live with being a survivor. A survivor in the rock and roll sense of the word...