Word: melodrama
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...Still, this is not Hollywood-humanist tract. It races and shocks like any good Mann melodrama, coiling its tension smartly, filling the screen with vivid tough guys (Howard Da Silva and Charles McGraw as a rancher and his enforcer) and gals (Lynn Whitney as McGraw's surly wife). The movie also has style to spare, especially in the pearly flashes of white amid the dark skies and darker hills. Somebody had seen Que Viva Mexico, Sergei Eisenstein's 1932 paean to peons. We'll tell you who that somebody was in a minute...
...That was the first third of this marital-arts melodrama. Gabrielle runs barely more than 80 mins., yet it superbly distills two lives, two attitudes, that should stir uneasy reflections in most adults. The feelings of being caged, compromised, desperate for the freedom of anything-but-this - or, for that matter, of being betrayed, and then having to play the reasonable party to someone whose love has withered or never existed - are not limited to Jean and his wife...
Forget the schmaltzy big-budget TV series French networks are again broadcasting to audiences looking for entertainment during languid summer vacation evenings. The big ticket this season is more reality TV than the usual melodrama: the mystery of what Italian defender Marco Materazzi said to provoke French soccer hero Zinedine Zidane's now notorious burst of violence during Italy's defeat of France in their World Cup final on Sunday. Almost 48 hours after Zidane's furious head-butting of Materazzi in the chest - an act provoking Zidane's ejection, an ignoble end to his otherwise stellar career - the mystery...
...many girls saw this 1948 English musical melodrama and, no matter what the heroine's fate, decided to put on ballet slippers? Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's fevered parable of ballet's uneasy kinship of music and dance turned an art-business into a battlefield of egos, lusts and near demonic possessiveness. It established Anton Walbrook as the Svengali of his day and made a star of Moira Shearer...
...elections here at home." There was, of course, no doubt that politics would trump substance. The Republicans dutifully repeated White House talking points, punctuated occasionally by perverse outbursts like Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe's assertion that "this isn't a civil war...the insurgents aren't Iraqis." The melodrama on the Democratic side was the continuing slow-motion self-immolation of Senator John Kerry, who posited, on the radio, "lie and die" as the Bush Administration's alternative to "cut and run." Sadly, there was no sign on either side of Clinton's hoped-for strategy to win in Iraq...