Word: melodrama
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...know your name is an adverb?" a woman he is trying to woo snaps at the title character. The wit in this spoof of the old-fashioned gangster melodrama never rises above that mildly agreeable level and is often below it. But perhaps because the writers outnumber Director Amy Heckerling 4 to 1, Johnny Dangerously offers more verbal felicity than it does visual flair. Heckerling has no feeling, affectionate or malevolent, for the genre she is trying to parody and no sense of comic rhythm either. The result is a thin and clumsy thing, in which talented Michael Keaton leads...
...bogged down in its own complexities. In the middle episodes, when the action closes in on Layton and four other mem-sahibs, the show could be mistaken for a provincial soap opera, and a brackish one at that. Sometimes too it parades a kind of sincerity that teeters on melodrama. Symbols are spelled out, symmetries underlined, characters displayed with embarrassing nakedness. Merrick never tires of proclaiming his lower-class origins, and Kumar commits such lines as "I hate ... most of all myself, for being black and being English." Nevertheless, the rippling succession of slow, soft moments gathers such cumulative resonance...
...Hilarion sings well, and hams up his lines, but suffers by comparison to both Meridith and his Princess. Margery Hellmold, in the title role, possesses the stage from the moment of her entrance--but overplays her lament after her women have betrayed her, suggesting some sort of pseudo. Wagnerian melodrama. Douglas Freeman, as Hilarion's father, and Melody Scheiner, as Ida's lieutenant, both display the necessary gravity and force of will. Lisa Zeidenberg and Debra Staniunas, in the parts of female undergraduates, add a charming note of whimsy to their surrender to the unfair...
...farm troubles often turn bankers into unwilling villains, a role they play in a recent crop of mortgage-melodrama movies, including Country and Places in the Heart. One case of real-life tragedy occurred in September 1983 in southwestern Minnesota, where a farmer and his 18-year-old son decided to get even with a small-town bank that had foreclosed on their land. The father and son lured two bankers to the farm and then shot them to death. One farmer in Nebraska was killed last month in a shootout with police who were serving him papers...
Unlike a spaghetti western, The Sicilian has no one-on-one shootout under a hot sun. Instead, Don Croce and Guiliano are locked in an elaborate melodrama of betrayals within betrayals. Puzo too demonstrates sly moves. His florid descriptions and graphic action scenes guarantee bug-eyed attention while he plants a sardonic fatalism in the heart of his book. One of the rarest commodities in his Sicily is truth ("A source of power, a lever of control, why should anyone give it away?"), while revenge is one of the highest virtues ("On this Catholic island, statues of a weeping Jesus...