Word: melodrama
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...variety of musical idioms, from a seductive rooftop serenade to a dry Stravinskian neoclassicism that accompanies the cat's pompous posturings. The delightful storybook production by Charles Ludlam, founder of New York's Ridiculous Theatrical Company, turns the opera into a tragicomedy in the vein of a 19th century melodrama, but one with a pointed moral. In a season that also includes Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld and Strauss's neglected Die Liebe der Danae, Santa Fe has proved once again that it is the most adventurous, if not to say eclectic, opera...
Sadly, however, these moments are fleeting and the bulk of the film is written in mind-bogglingly hackneyed clichés, starting with Duchovny’s entirely misplaced film noir-esque voice-over narration and extending all the way to the disastrous melodrama that leads him to become an American artist in Paris, quite possibly the biggest and most painful cliché of them...
Some movie genres will just not lie still under Lawrence Kasdan's knife. As screenwriter (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and writer-director (Body Heat), he has performed deft surgery on the Saturday-matinee serial and the film noir melodrama. But the western will not yield. Silverado sprays the buckshot of its four or five story lines across the screen with the abandon of a drunken galoot aiming at a barn door. Though the film interrupts its chases and shootouts to let some fine actors stare meaningfully or spit out a little sagebrush wisdom, it rarely allows them to build...
...retaining inviolate is his fantasy life. Of the two men pent up in a South American cell, Luis (William Hurt), a homosexual, has the easier time doing so. His secret life revolves around the fool's-gold romanticism of old movies. To be precise, one World War II melodrama in which, as he remembers and recounts it, the Gestapo were the heroes and the French Resistance the villains. Luis, a decent, motherly sort of chap, doesn't care about all that. He just loves the Huns' glamorous nightlife and stylish livery...
...social commentary is not the draw of Gilbert and Sullivan—light farce and playful ditties are. At least in the latter, the work succeeds—the music is reminiscent of a fifties melodrama and suits the story well. However, the lyrics fall flat in places, and they were sometimes difficult to hear with the orchestral accompaniment (or perhaps simply poor acoustics in the Agassiz Theatre). Nonetheless, the singing itself evidenced the actors’ skills...