Word: melodrama
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...interesting. It bombards the audience with passion, adventure, crime and comedy--all in a comfortable domestic setting designed to lend an air of familiarity to the bizarre events. The central character is so colorful that he almost hurts your eyes, and the violent reactions he provokes could furnish enough melodrama for at least three full-length plays...
THURSDAY: Valley of the Dolls. 1967. A movie that makes the average soap opera look like "Last Year at Marienbad." Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, and Sharon (Manson victim) Tate flounder through the slings and arrows of this outrageous melodrama like wounded animals. Worst movie of the sixties award. CH. 7. 9 p.m. Color...
There is much more to Kieu than escapist melodrama. Written by a renowned Vietnamese classicist named Nguyen Du (1766-1820), the poem in Vietnamese has a wide range of wordplay. The meter is a flowing iambic called luk-bat, full of rhyming and nearly as easy to memorize as a song. Much of this is unavoidably lost in the otherwise excellent English translation by Huynh Sanh Thong, a Vietnamese scholar who has lived in the U.S. all his adult life. Jaded Western readers who may find Kieu's plight unconvincing can still enjoy the poem for its language, especially...
Much of this film is fiction, according to the credits; but much, too, is fact. Which is which never becomes clear. This state of affairs might matter less in an ordinary thriller than it does here, in a melodrama concerning the assassination of John Kennedy. The film makers state in a disclaimer that they do not maintain that a conspiracy to assassinate the President did actually exist. They want only to suggest how such a conspiracy "might have happened...
...reopen or revitalize the investigation of the assassination, there is nothing here to do it. The movie is so clumsy it may accomplish exactly the opposite: it may discredit all the theorists who have raised some pertinent and puzzling points and make them look like dabblers in unlikely melodrama. The movie trivializes national tragedy and leeches off still-painful wounds...