Word: melodrama
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...film is framed by Toback’s exploration of this narrative within the context of Vera’s rampant sexuality and her search for self-discovery. Toback mixes hip-hop with Beethoven, steadicam control with voyeuristic video footage, and he strikes an unlikely balance between conventional melodrama and episodic airiness. Like many of his films, When Will I Be Loved features copious sex, nudity and dialogue that feels simultaneously spontaneous and weirdly controlled...
...Yukos political melodrama is hard to ignore. The Russian government is seeking to collect $6.8 billion in back taxes from Yukosan effort that has threatened to send the company into bankruptcy. That prospect is highly unlikely, but the mere possibility has spooked traders. That tiny share of the world's oil could loom large if it were disrupted even temporarily, which would surely push prices higher. Nor does the Kremlin appear to have any qualms about roiling the world's oil markets as the battle with Yukos drags on. "The people who are masterminding the assault on Yukos simply...
...joins the Indian army on a whim and winds up finding heroic purpose fighting Pakistani troops who crossed into Indian-controlled Kashmir in 1999. The tragic context of a conflict that has cost up to 70,000 lives offers ample opportunity for that staple of Bollywood film: copious melodrama. Akhtar isn't so radical as to depart from such essential ingredients of the genre: song and dance, boy meets girl, and plenty of tears are all there. But everything is deftly updated. In the first of three dance sequences, for example, Roshan puts on a display of body popping...
Jack Warner had two more roles for his budding star--a migrant worker who becomes a kind of Anglo Cesar Chavez in the vigorous melodrama Juke Girl, and an R.A.F. pilot in Desperate Journey, again supporting Flynn--before Uncle Sam cast him as a stateside warrior. A natural leader, if not a natural actor, Reagan was often cast as a government enforcer and even more often as a soldier. As Stephen Vaughn observes in Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics, "No 20th century President, with the exception of Dwight D. Eisenhower, had been seen in uniform by more people...
...their wattage, and again he had loser's luck. Bogart got the haunted-hero roles at Warner; Reagan got the scraps, like the part of a suicidal epileptic in the 1947 Night unto Night. After a decade, Warner still hadn't decided what genre best suited Reagan. Melodrama? Let him play a small-town D.A. in the 1951 anti--Ku Klux Klan Storm Warning, with another lynch-mob scene and heavy emoting from all the principals but Reagan. Comedy? Put him in The Girl from Jones Beach (1949), where he's an artist who has assembled the perfect pinup from...