Word: melodrama
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...film is full of attractive young performers. And there is a low-keyed conflict between them and a faculty that is trying to discipline their exuberance without stifling their spirits. If the film had concentrated on that instead of on hokey melodrama, it might have been far more engaging and truer to life...
...punk-gothic horror movie about a gang of vicious hot-rodders who terrorize the few survivors of an atomic apocalypse, and who are tracked down and slaughtered by a draconian police force. As a story, the film makes for overwrought, even repellent melodrama. The movie has little feeling for, or interest in, the human idiosyncrasies of its characters; they are glorified stunt men, stock figures in stock cars. But Mad Max is not a "people picture." It is an action movie whose subject is machines, and the sophisticated killing ma chine man could become. The hardware is the star here...
Assume for a moment that Director John Landis means to subvert the twin genres of musical comedy and action melodrama. He fails there, since periodically the film stops dead in its headlong rush toward satire and puts on an ingratiating face, mugging and mewling to win over its audience. Landis seems no surer of his visual style than he does of his movie's tone, so he tries everything: shots angled from a dog's-or a god's-eye view, eerily lighted special effects, more dancers, more extras, more noise, more cars and car crashes. Alas...
...story of such world-ranging pathos as Transit of Venus might be expected to lapse into the trite romantic-melodrama that fills airport book racks. But Hazzard errs infrequently. She makes sentimental slips in directing the plot; but they remain only minor errors, like those of other great writers, short detours from her delicate discipline...
...Eight pilots are based on movies. Among them: Breaking Away, Foul Play, The Goodbye Girl, Between the Lines and Freebie and the Bean. The flick series include Semi-Tough, The Main Event (also in the sport grouping) and Flamingo Road, which is taken from a steamy 1949 Joan Crawford melodrama...