Word: melodrama
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...second one-acter, Pasatieri's before Breakfast, is considerably more successful. Adapted by Director Frank Corsaro from a play by Eugene O'Neill , it is a melodrama similar in style, if not in score, to Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. The setting is a grim Depression flat. Soprano Marilyn Zschau is preparing breakfast for her husband before leaving for her own job as a waitress. While she flops around the room in her slip, she carries on a one-way conversation with the silent and unseen spouse as he gets up and goes into the bathroom...
Although it was filmed in Vancouver, someone at Hopper's flippant press conference had to ask where the film was supposed to take place. Was it a contemporary Western, an urban melodrama in cowboy drag, or just another Canadian tax shelter project...
...27th film by Akira Kurosawa, 70, Kagemusha sounds like tricky, plot-laden political melodrama. Indeed, there is a lot of story here. On the other hand, there is a lot of film here too, more than 2½ hours of it, even in a truncated "international version." The considerable pleasure of Kagemusha tends to be of the stately visual variety. The old master of Japanese cinema (Rashomon, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) may merely allude to material that in younger hands would be the stuff of a passionate play. But Kurosawa's mood now is autumnal and dispassionate. What really interests...
...life; she is always on guard for it in herself. She is sincere when she says she feels "like a hard-faced bitch," when she can't find much sympathy for the woman in a consciousness-raising course who's always trying to draw attention to her domestic melodrama. And in her brilliant indictment of Didion she goes out of her way to be fair, whole-heartedly praising some aspects of Didion's work and reminding herself not to overdo her criticism...
...film to provoke violence may have less to do with the quantity or treatment of violence than with the director's ability to placate the emotions that he/she has whipped up. Take the controversy over Walter Hill's The Warriors. This stupidly written but stirringly staged 1979 gang melodrama was blamed for several murders and numerous acts of violence. Once again, fingers wagged and the debate over violence in movies resumed. A writer in Film Comment, however, argued very persuasively that while the violence in The Warriors was unquestionably a turn-on, the movie's limp, unsatisfying ending was more...