Word: melodrama
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...that become bothersome. There can be no question that Writer-Director Oliansky truly loves his subject and wants everybody to know everything he has found out about it. There are enough subsidiary characters with strong, if not subtly shaded personalities to stock a couple of movies, and enough extraneous melodrama to plot a Competition II. Granted, a piano contest in which six high-strung finalists must each play a concerto within a single 24-hour period is likely to be an emotionally taxing occasion, but enough is enough...
...term robot comes from the Czech word for forced labor and was invented by Karel Capek and popularized in his "fantastic melodrama" of 1921, R.U.R., which stood for Rossum's Universal Robots. These robots look and behave like people and work twice as hard, but since "God hasn't the least notion of modern engineering," as Rossum's general manager puts it, the robots have been built without such impractical attributes as feeling or a soul. First they do all the world's work, then they wage all the world's wars, then they rebel...
...leather jackets, and Juliet (Judy Buxton) playing her balcony scene atop what looked like an abstract painting. Also at Stratford, R.S.C. Veteran Alan Howard, directed by Terry Hands, was essaying both of Shakespeare's Richards, II and III. In the latter, a sort of cooked-up Jacobean melodrama, Howard hobbled about a raked stage somewhat more fleetly than he actually managed some of the lines...
Scorsese and De Niro have been here before: in the good brother-bad brother melodrama of Mean Streets, in the story of a troubled Taxi Driver searching for his blond goddess, in the musical tragedy of two big-band musicians playing king of the hill in New York, New York. And they have faced the same narrative challenge - how to build their vignettes of domestic brutality to a satisfying climax - without ever quite solving it. From the moment Raging Bull introduces its three main characters, the moviegoer knows all there will be to know about them. Jake is the loner...
...tends to get a little too homey. After all, it takes place in Kansas, and there's no place like Kansas. The string-heavy score and schmaltzy touches--like the abandoned dog who becomes Edna's loyal companion--plus some drawn-out healing sequences, fall into the category of melodrama...