Word: melodrama
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...genre has a quicker sell-by date than self-important melodrama of the elevated sort. And despite the heist films and the ostentatiously life-hugging Never on Sunday, Dassin's main mood was serioso in his films with Mercouri. "Together," writes David Thomson in A Biographical Dictionary of Film, "they made some of the most entertaining bad films of the sixties and seventies: pictures that outstrip their own deficiencies and end up being riotously enjoyable as one waits to see how far pretentiousness will stretch. In good company, and a little drunk, He Who Must Die, Phaedra...
There's a reason Perry connects with his audience and exasperates almost everyone else. His plays and movies reside in that once essential, now demeaned genre of domestic melodrama in which family life is a bilious combustion of repressed emotions and grudges that explode into confrontation and recrimination and in which most characters are revealed to be cheating, abused or somebody's unknown daughter. That format, which fed decades of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford weepies, still raises its head occasionally--in the HBO series Big Love or Broadway's August: Osage County. And it's at the soapy, singing...
Usually, the supporting players carry the melodrama, and Perry's Madea shoulders the comedy. Black actors playing fat women is not exactly an innovation, as Martin Lawrence and Eddie Murphy can attest. But the 6-ft. 5-in. (1.96 m) Perry, who in civvies has the smooth good looks of a Will Smith, cuts an arresting figure. Outfitted in a purple print dress, giant glasses and sandbag bosom, carrying a purse with three handguns and punctuating every comment with the wave of a cigarette, the star stomps around the stage shouting out orders and ridiculing the supporting characters for being...
...dealing it to fellow blacks, and if enough of them didn't love it, he couldn't have afforded the lavish new house he built in suburban Atlanta. You could also ask if Perry is mocking the folks he hopes to uplift. But his form of comic melodrama depends on creating emotional extremes, acute cartoons of recognizable behavior, people who hurt and get hurt. Public humiliation is the penance his stage characters must endure before they are absolved in a final embrace and bring the curtain down with a full-throated gospel song...
...Spitzer's rather poetic sentence seemed apt on March 12, as he resigned as governor of New York in a brief press conference, the culmination of a 48-hour melodrama sparked by revelations that he had been a client of a prostitution ring. Thus ended a public career that had once seemed promising enough that Spitzer was discussed as a potential 2012 Democratic presidential nominee. Spitzer apologized for his "private failings," but he said nothing to explain why he would have thrown it all away, why he risked so much. He had built a reputation as an ethical crusader...