Word: melodrama
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...PSFU DO HITCHCOCK thriller, romantic melodrama, and Gethic tale combined into one. Robin Davis new movie I Married A Shadow defies definition. On one hand, the movie is a refreshing thriller that portrays characters as more than mere props to be clanged, banged, and shuffled through "the story." There are times, however when the different emotional undercurrents flooding the film work at cross-purposes...
...anger everyone with a special interest. It is to the credit of Hong Kong's Ann Hui, the 36-year-old director of Boat People, that she has chosen the latter course. Her film is not a meticulous precis of Vietnamese politics; it is a fast-paced, humanist melodrama centering on one family that, in the chaos of reconstruction that faced the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, finally determines to flee the country on an agonizingly slow boat through the China...
Artistically, First Affair isn't worth the time of day--the acting is horrid, the plot sappy, the filming glossy if not outright sleazy, Enough said. But beneath the veneer of Hollywood melodrama lies the perfect admissions office cover girl--Melissa Sue Anderson as Toby King. Putting aside for the moment the fact that King has an affair with her Expos teacher's husband, takes a bus home to Nebraska in the middle of the term, comes down with mono and skips numerous classes without having to drop out of school. King and her application to Harvard would have thrilled...
...almost a week, Radio Free Grenada had kept listeners across the Caribbean on edge with breathless accounts of coups and countercoups among the Marxist rulers of the tiny (133 sq. mi., pop. 110,000) island. Then last Wednesday, what had begun as political melodrama turned into a murderous power play...
...would they lie to you?). And yet, the film bends over backward to seem fair to its swarm of social and personal ambiguities. The result is a well-meaning muddle that refuses to come alive. The pace is languid when it ought to fall into the march step of melodrama. Hanna K. does boast what may be a film first: an infant's circumcision, in closeup. It is not the only moment in the movie when the viewer is provoked to sit up and wince...