Word: melodrama
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...integration: art to convey a message. He places Annie Hall on the narrative content side (he considers the film cinematically inept), and Jaws on the side of good cinematic technique with trivial content. Neither bridges the gap the way Welles' Touch of Evil, superficially seen as a lurid melodrama, does, creating a broader cinematic metaphor. He gives Annie Hall a grade of B-, Jaws a D. So much for my favorite films...
...German immigrant community. Memories of grisly scenes such as a hanging, or even the dying of his injured dog provide a bleak background for the short stories. Without any annoying psychoanalysis Schorer portrays his raging father and his suicidal mother. Even though his history provides him plentiful opportunities for melodrama, the adult Schorer distances himself as much as possible from his boyhood emotions. He brusquely emphasizes the disadvantaged perspective of a child whose ignorance left the most important questions about causes and relationships unasked, while often leading him to unfair judgments. Schorer tells of his exit from a stuffy, rural...
...evening has the flavor of a tall tale recounted by an accomplished barroom raconteur. The story derives from a little civic melodrama that really took place in a small Texas town some years ago, and it is engagingly rich in regional nostalgia and spiced with delicate bawdry. Not surprisingly, the co-author of the libretto is a storyteller of no mean skill, Larry L. King, an accomplished journalist who wrote a compact account of the actual facts underlying Whorehouse after they occurred. To tell it as it is in the show, a rural community, Gilbert, has long tolerated, secretly relished...
...awkward lulls between songs and dialogue. Ruddigore further avoids monotony by alternately tingling and tickling the audience's spines. The overture and an early number that re-enacts the original curse freeze the viewer's blood, but as the plot progresses the mood shifts to a more comic melodrama, complete with Dracula-like capes and ominous laughter. The chills resume in force during Act Two's climactic portrait scene, in which the paintings of deceased Murgatroyds literally come alive--a moment that is as visually dazzling as it is technically brilliant...
...brief and pleasant mixture of drollness and terror. But the two don't mix well, and we inevitably lose come of the shock value of the play's blood if we're too bad everyone working on the show couldn't agree to squeeze out every last drop of melodrama...