Word: melodrama
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What is this movie anyway? Only the first sci-fi western action adventure rock-'n'-roll melodrama farce. Only Star Wars, The Magnificent Seven, The War of the Worlds, The Right Stuff, Strange Invaders, Eddie and the Cruisers and Plan 9 from Outer Space mixed and mismatched as if by a mad scientist in his Late Show lab. And its Japanese-American hero? He is only the avatar of Han Solo, A. J. Foyt, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Christiaan Barnard, Bruce Lee and Bruce Springsteen. A state-of-the-art spaceship flying at the speed of light without narrative...
...prolonged crisis was narrowly averted when the unemployed judges were hired back as consultants to district court judges, which enabled them to give advice on legal matters as well as retain their $66,100-a-year salaries. The imbroglio was the latest episode in a two-year-long melodrama that had, in the words of one former judge, threatened to make the bankruptcy courts "the laughingstock of this nation." The confusion finally ended last week when Congress passed legislation that sets up a new federal bankruptcy system...
...distressing horse melodrama mysterious enough for Dick Francis, Kentucky Derby and Belmont Stakes Winner Swale collapsed suddenly last week. Just eight days after his emphatic four-length victory at Belmont-the 1½-mile test of three-year-old champions-Swale returned from an ordinary gallop, reared up, tumbled over and died...
...straight for the jugular, then along the way, find something more diverting to do with all that energy. Whenever the occasion permits, Dante loves to undercut the visceral impact of the horror genre with a clip from an old movie or a spitballing, pratfalling sight gag. His loopy werewolf melodrama, The Howling (1981), and his profligately imaginative episode of last year's Twilight Zone: The Movie are both energized by this sly schizophrenia. In Twilight Zone, the smile becomes a rictus as a child forces adults to live inside a cartoon world of jack-in-the-box monsters...
...seduction and betrayal of the innocent. But now that the deed is done, it is equally easy to see how this material can lead even the most conscientious and respectful writers and directors astray. The problem is that the true life of this novel, for all the bustling melodrama of its surface, is inward; its highest pleasures are to be found in the silence it maintains about its deepest thoughts. It tips these only in a descriptive fragment here, a line of laconic, often funny dialogue there. It is perfectly possible to read the novel and enjoy...