Word: melodrama
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Bergman took up the challenge here, too. He has cooked up a few plot devices in an effort to give the tale some grit and human motivation, and comes dangerously close to melodrama. About halfway through the film we learn that Sarastro, High Priest of the Temple, was once the Queen of the Night's consort, is actually Pamina's father, and has snatched her from her mother's clutches out of paternal concern for her own good. According to the original text this is all wrong. The High Priest is traditionally a somewhat remote cult figure; here...
...melodrama all this is acceptable, though extended for two and a half hours somewhat tiresome. As a film with a message, this is pernicious bullshit. Nurse Ratched's vicious attack on Billy is completely out of character. Nothing in the film up to this point has suggested that her chief purpose is to keep patients under her domination and not to help them. Or are we supposed to take her preference for order over chaos, for cleanliness over filth, as the real prelude to such a cruel act? Her chief role has been to protect the weaker members...
...case," protested Director Alfred Hitchcock, 76. Even so, the pudgy film maker and his wife Alma ventured to the snowy slopes of St. Moritz, where he wanted to rest before finishing his latest film, Family Plot. The movie, he said cryptically, is "sort of a comedy-melodrama about a fake woman medium, an out-of-work actor and a chase after a missing heir who is also a kidnaper." Had he bothered even to sample the Swiss snow? "We spend most of our time sitting comfortably in the Palace Hotel, watching it all from behind the window...
...like losing a character in fiction they become more "relevant" and, sometimes, realistic. Today it is common to see such queasy subjects as abortion, incest, drug addiction and venereal disease meshing with the old, familiar workings of unhappy families. This produces the kind of intense melodrama rarely seen in the evening. Currently, The Young and the Restless is helping a woman through a mastectomy with almost excessive realism. All My Children recently took six months to describe a child-abuse case; How to Survive a Marriage (now defunct) introduced a precedent-setting seduction scene that ended up with the participants...
...appears that the facts of ordinary life must be abandoned when watching the soaps. There are more doctors than there are patients to treat. Amnesia is a plague. Neighbors are not friendly; they are sharks. Despite the melodrama, the surface proprieties are strictly observed; no one, for example, ever swears...