Word: melodrama
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...Working with co-director Vincent Paronnaud (the celebrated comix artist known as Winshluss), Satrapi finds a simple, supple, almost monochrome visual style that allows the heroine's distinct voice and raucous wit. Even when the story turns from Iranian political melodrama into more familiar coming-of-age territory, Persepolis never loses its momentum, its sustaining sense of fun or its rapturous hold on the viewer...
...MAGIC OF MELODRAMA...
...Mexico was like Hollywood, or like India today: a national industry heavily invested in the romantic and domestic weepie, with fearless emoting, hairpin turns of fate, mega-doses of religious and family piety, all set to the popular songs of the day. (Melodrama literally means music drama.) Noble mothers are forever sacrificing themselves -silently, stoically, suicidally -for their kids. Fully three of the 10 Infante features end with some spiteful young person driving some dear old person to death, only to be flattened with a shocking revelation: "She's / he's your mother / father!" Cue tears that would flood...
...Rodriguez's feature jumbles the zombie, cop, political thriller and rural-trash-melodrama genres. Like The Night of the Living Dead, it's about a random bunch of people trapped in a shack and beset by flesh-dripping, flesh-eating zombies. In the spirit of that 1968 classic, Planet Terror celebrates the community of the still-living, except that Rodriguez's humans do a lot less grousing than George Romero's did. It's also got deadly gases, go-go dancers, pretty disgusting shots of men with extreme gonadal anomalies, and Bruce Willis as the man who killed bin Laden...
...camera shots with picturesque and still images, which lends “Live Free or Die” the look of a beautiful, low-budget affair, which is doubtlessly what earned the film’s critical acclaim. Sadly, the poor direction and too-minimal editing create an unfocused melodrama out of what could have been either a riotous comedy or a love letter to small-town New Hampshire. Unlike much of the plot of “Live Free or Die,” Kavet and Robin have a history of comedy that actually makes people laugh. They...