Word: melodrama
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...Zito turns the twisted, self-centered Serebriakov into a buoyant, strapping cartoon villain. When Vanya charges him with ruining his life in their third-act confrontation, Zito rushes across the platforms to the other side of the house, breathing heavily and staring over the audience like a character in melodrama who can't face the awful truth. But the horror of Serebriakov is that he is too full of himself to begin to understand what Vanya is talking about. Instead of playing Serebriakov's intentions, Zito plays him from the outside, as an Asshole. As his wife, Elena, Bonnie Zimmering...
Like its characters, Resurrection is a sympathetic but irreconcilable olio of extremes. The film swerves between irony and sentimentality, human drama and melodrama, powerful acting and shameless hammery-sometimes in the same sequence or shot. Screenwriter Carlino and Director Petrie have previously worked in the genres of sci-fi schizophrenia (Seconds and Sybil) and domestic conflict (The Great Santini and Eleanor and Franklin). Here, they have tried to blend the two forms, but the film does not always gel. The problem may stem from a lack of faith in its "small," challenging story. When in doubt, Carlino inserts a violent...
Exactly 100 years ago, Sarah Bernhardt, legendary mistress of melodrama, arrived in America demanding to see the Indians. "She was very disappointed, but she fell in love with the country," says Actress Lilli Palmer, who is preparing to return to Broadway this winter, for the first time in a quarter-century, in the title role of Ruth Wolf's Sarah in America. "I hadn't opened a script for 26 years," says Palmer, now a successful novelist (The Red Raven), living in Switzerland. "I wanted a clean break after my divorce [from Actor Rex Harrison], and I thought...
...classic 1930's horror films: the shadowy black-and-white photography; the slow fade-outs and dissolves; the eerie music; the mad scientist; the sensitive, hideous monster, misunderstood and abused by society, tortured by the humanity within him. Director David Lynch artfully manipulates these components--evading scariness and melodrama, while adding historical perspective and social commentary--to tell the true story of a tormented soul searching for dignity and compassion. Lynch's film is what Frankenstein should have been, what The Hunchback of Notre Dame merely hinted at, what Phantom of the Opera aspired to: a compelling tragedy...
...script by Lynch, Christopher Devore, and Eric Bergen is earnest and intelligent, though it suffers frequently from the unavoidable heavy-handedness that accompanies the theme of man's inhumanity to man. The scenes with Merrick and various excessively slimy and sinister persecutors flirt with melodrama. Rather than concentrating their fire on these caricatured villains, the writers might have more thoroughly examined the subtler exploitation that Merrick suffers under Treves' care. The doctor worries that the hospital has replaced the carnival as Merrick's freak show, that the Victorian socialites come to have tea with the Elephant Man only to stare...