Word: melodrama
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...think that the primary aim of film is to satisfy an audience and then bring in politics. He states that "there is no objective reality" and, therefore, unlike most Marxist artists he cannot be interested in portraying any reality but instead claims he can invoke action through a melodrama wedded to an insistent pessimism. "The only reality," he insists, "is the relation of the work to its public. It's a collision between film and subconscious that creates a new realism." Films are political, yes, but they cannot be dogmatic. Fassbinder is interested in pointing out injustices, in making people...
...most unsettling facet of this death-of-love motif is the pervasiveness of its reality among the film's otherwise diverse characters. The malaise afflicts the professionally fulfilled executive (Harvey Keitel) as deeply as his hopelessly unfulfilled housewife (Geraldine Chaplin), who fancies herself a modernday Camille, running around spouting melodrama and sipping Carroll's Southern Comfort between lines. It fails to discriminate between John Considine's hail-fellow-well-met furniture dealer and Carradine's petulant artiste. With one noteworthy exception, each of the ten central figures goes in search of a human connection, and each comes up empty-handed...
Gilbert Roland's star billing is a mystery. Either it's for old times' sake, or his small role as a refugee-running boat captain is a remnant of the action-on-the-high-seas melodrama that this movie might have been. If the film makers did consciously reject such material in order to concentrate on the gentler, familial themes of Islands, they made a worthy choice. The pity is that they lacked the artistic energy to bring...
...distinction between cathartic melodrama and historical events needs attention, however, if only because professional historians themselves have so much trouble respecting it. Slavery, so obvious in its lurid immorality, is apt to become especially distorted in the hands of American historians. "What is it about the black experience," asks Author Michael Novak, "that produces in so many good minds, black and white, a positive lust for corruptions of elementary sense?" The answers are probably 1) guilt and 2) ideology...
There is undoubtedly a good movie to be made about the Alaska pipeline -the rigors of construction, the boomtown atmosphere, the struggle between the exploiters and the exploited. But Pipe Dreams is not it. The old Yukon hands would have had a word for this pallid melodrama: mush...