Word: melodrama
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...sheer longevity of the Kennedy melodrama is astonishing. Some Americans have grown weary of the spectacle, of course, the high American soap opera verging now and then upon Greek tragedy, and of the cruelly ingenious turns that the story takes. But there is something fascinating and emblematic about the family still. For a long time it dramatized the American possibilities of self-invention-old Joe Kennedy by sheer will contriving to raise up a President, to start a dynasty. But after Joe Jr., and John, and Robert, the darker, the converse American principle intruded upon the drama, the principle that...
...anything from his experience either. We long for anecdote, gasping with renewed interest when a crumb of plot is revealed. Wilson may have done this intentionally is make us feel how petty Giles Fox's life is. If so, the idea fails, because the result is overblown in its melodrama and moreover-tedious to read...
Director Patrick Bradford deserves much credit for not forcing the play into the shape of a comedy, melodrama, or sitcom, because Hansberry's plot resists constraints of form, narrowly understood. Avoiding the two temptations attendant on staging a classic. Bradford neither lets the play pull all the weight of the production, nor reinterprets the play in silly ways--making everyone wear parachute suits, for instance. Bradford's active good judgment, dramatic flair, and sense of timing preserve the thoroughness and unsentimental freshness of the original...
...terms of plot, the show is merely the stuff of any normal television soap opera: rape, plunder, anguish, despair. But the yearlong Japanese TV series Sanga Moyu is causing a real-life melodrama of its own. Based on a popular novel, Two Homelands by Toyoko Yamasaki, it is the story of the Japanese-American Amoh family, immigrants to the U.S. whose national loyalties are tested by World War II. The homeland they choose does not choose them, and the Amohs live through racist humiliation, imprisonment in a California relocation center and other indignities. The show has been so popular...
Civilization stinks. This is the message of virtually every nature-vj.-nurture parable to hit the screen lately, from Splash to Greystoke to this feral melodrama about the encounter between a group of Arctic scientists and a prehistoric man they find miraculously preserved in ice. Tenterhook anxiety builds in the film's first hour as the scientists (led by Timothy Hutton and Lindsay Crouse) discover and then thaw out the creature (played by the gifted actor-director-choreographer John Lone). But once Hutton and the creature establish contact, moviegoers must make a great leap of faith, or surrender...