Word: melodrama
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...Germany as a huge human slaughterhouse and Franz as "a big, good-natured sheep.' Mixing statistics of death and disease with the story of some petty, brutal people living in East Berlin, Döblin created a 600-page epic that was part newsreel, part nightmare-a documentary melodrama written in blood and neon. Through his art he exercised the control that Franz and his friends could never exert on their lives...
...prize at the Cannes Film Festival went to a Japanese film: Shohei Imamura's The Ballad of Narayama, an elemental and unsentimentahzed portrait of Japan's mountain people in the 1880s. The same festival also showcased Nagisa Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, a P.O.W. melodrama set in Java in 1942 starring David Bowie and two popular Japanese performers, Singer-Songwriter Ryuichi Sakamoto and the TV comic Takeshi. Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is scheduled to open this fall in New York as the spearhead of an Oshima retrospective...
...their feet. When Bresson, 81, appeared onstage closing night, he was bombarded with boos. L'Argent at least had its partisans among the critics. Beineix, whose 1981 film Diva had become a popular success in France, was not so lucky with The Moon in the Gutter, a moody melodrama about a dockworker obsessed with his sister's death...
...film seriously in the '60s, Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless was nothing less than breathtaking. Offhandedly it proposed that B movies, and almost everything else in the junk culture, actually influenced behavior more profoundly than the official culture did. Openly, instead of in the coded language of melodrama, the picture suggested that most of the violence in society was both meaningless and affectless. And this it did with a brash, jump-cut technique that seemed to be anti-technique. Dedicated to Monogram Pictures, the old Poverty Row movie mill, this was a Hollywood film as it might have...
Gypsies! Hot blood and fast fingers. Fortune-tellers and fortune hunters. Families feuding over a stolen sacred ring. It sounds like Late Show melodrama, with Maria Montez or Jane Russell parading about in pancake makeup, spitting out insults and endearments to a castanet heartbeat. Not quite: the performers in Angelo My Love are real gypsies, using their own names and, more or less, playing themselves. Six years ago, Actor Robert Duvall saw one of them, an eight-year-old charmer named Angelo Evans, arguing with a woman on a Manhattan street corner. For Duvall it was love at first sight...