Word: melodrama
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Despite its scale, the Black Tuna roundup lacked the melodrama of many narcotics crackdowns. The main action took place in hushed financial offices and on a silent computer terminal screen, as a task force of some 30 DEA and FBI agents, aided by two undercover informants, traced the enormous sums of money generated by the drug running. Dubbed Operation Banco, the investigation scrutinized thousands of financial transactions, hunting for suspicious deposits and investments and then following the funds as they were laundered and transferred to Florida banks...
...Director Bob Clark uses a powerful new weapon: incoherence. In this Victorian melodrama, the world's first consulting detective is pitted against Jack the Ripper, slayer of London harlots. An intriguing idea, but hardly unique. In A Study in Terror, Ellery Queen postulated that the fiend of 1888 was a deranged duke. Holmes' official biographer, William Baring-Gould, identified Jack as a Scotland Yard inspector. In the recent The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, Mystery. Writer Michael Dibdin put forth the heretical notion that the Ripper and the detective were aspects of the same character. Now Clark offers...
...instruments in Narratives assume personalities of their own, carrying on musical conversations among themselves. In the opening skit, for example, a violin, cello and piano exchange various harmonies, attempting to reach a common ground. In a later piece an altercation between between cello and alto-trombone ranges from melodrama to farce. Kim's parallels and parodies the actors' disjointed monologues. In one skit a piano accompanies actress Irene Worth, responding to the natural cadences of her voice as she relives a traumatic childhood experience. The culmination of this tension between the actor and instrument occurs in the last piece when...
...Innocent is a beautifully made melodrama, whose elaborate and operatic moral dilemmas turn on issues that are curiosities today. It is the last film of the late director Luchino Visconti (The Damned, Death in Venice). The Innocent is taken from an 1892 novel by the flamboyant poet and adventurer Gabriele D'Annunzio. Not surprisingly, it is the tortured sensibility of the hero, Tullio, a wealthy, thirtyish landowner, that gets most of the attention. Tullio, played with exactly the right touch of smoldering arrogance by Giancarlo Giannini, Lina Wertmuller's man of all movies, has long since transferred...
...enough against lush Welsh landscapes, but there are very few openings for his usual flourishes of wit and romance. James Costigan's mechanical teleplay often italicizes plot developments; a second-half plot stratagem, in which Morgan fathers an illegitimate baby, comes across as crude turn-of-the-century melodrama. One also wonders why Costigan has not bothered to open up the play's naturally constricted action. When Morgan travels up to Oxford to take his exams, the audience expects to go with him: the Welsh boy's first encounter with upper-crust British intellectuals could...