Word: melodrama
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...their artlessness, they were also clear mirrors of their time, perhaps of their audiences, certainly of their writers and directors. For in most race films, as in mainstream Hollywood product, it was white people taking the pictures. They imitated the Hollywood genres of comedy, melodrama, musicals and Westerns. Race movies were counterfeit white movies - faux-ofay. And though the producers surely didn't intend to offend their customers, black-cast pictures flaunted racial stereotypes: idle bucks spending the rent money on dice games and numbers policies, and the women who love them. In the 1939 "Moon Over Harlem," directed...
...cozy up to him for fear she was too light for him. The original film climaxed in a sequence advertised as "the annihilation of the Ku Klux Klan." Alas, those anti-"Birth of a Nation" scenes have not survived. But the film shows what Micheaux learned from Griffith: melodrama, at full throttle...
...ways in which writers Chap Taylor and Michael Tolkin escalate the conflict often bend plausibility, and director Roger Michell sometimes kicks the melodrama into fantasyland. But at heart this parable, well acted by a veteran cast, is one of those serious "gerund movies" (Pushing Tin, Falling Down) about the scars we leave on the folks we dash past in our rush to do our job. Their world disintegrates, and all we notice, for a second, is the puff of smoke behind...
Though Frailty is Paxton’s debut, he has experienced vicarious tutelage under the likes of director James Cameron and ventures on a polar opposite from his frequent employers. Where Cameron frequently descends into overblown melodrama and explicit sentimentality, Paxton exhibits an oddly compelling restraint. He pulls fewer emotional punches than might be expected in this, a tale of questionable morality, and leaves almost all the gore offscreen. Using sounds suggestive of the violence that the father inflicts on his demons, the camera pans to the reaction shots of his children, and in those moments, the images truly chill...
...Hills, 90210” was not a completely realistic show, clearly, but it certainly gave teenagers (and those preparing to be teenagers) a warning of what could happen during their high school years. Granted, the show took place in one of the richest neighborhoods in the country, and more melodrama occurred in one week than went on during my entire high school career, but aspects of the show were realistic, and it brought up issues for me that I might never have thought about until I faced them in real life...