Word: melodrama
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...manipulates her dark, piercing eyes, which are emphasized throughout the film, does the trick. And although I refuse to buy that Diana and her imposing boyfriend would be boxing in the same weight class, Diana's fight scenes with him and others thankfully skip the gratuitous melodrama plaguing many of the battles in typical action films...
Well, you have to expect a little melodrama--though Bull provides more than a little, saddling its well-heeled heroes mawkishly with personal burdens to up their sympathy quotient. More unsettling is the subtext of Ditto's crusade. Bull has internalized the trendy, bogus messages of Ameritrade ads, "new-economy" magazines like Fast Company and career gurus like Tom Peters: that entrepreneurship is heroism, that job insecurity is emancipation, that work is art and love and rock 'n' roll. Ditto mocks "the suits...who want to stay [at the firm] for the rest of their lives nice and safe...
...mini-series, written by David W. Rintels and directed by Yves Simoneau, instruction and entertainment make a pretty good match. Baldwin nicely tamps down his natural charisma to get at a good man's frustration in abiding by the stern moral rules that he set for the tribunal. In melodrama, of course, the villains always win; they're the ones who get to strut. Thus Brian Cox, as Goering, has his drollest mass-murderer role since he played Hannibal Lecter in the 1986 Manhunter; and Herbert Knaup (of Run, Lola, Run) is a handsomely conflicted Albert Speer...
...Sinatra was to popular music, so John Gielgud was to theater: The Voice. It could draw a word out into a long cello note or quaver like the lead fiddle in the pit of a Victorian melodrama. It made Shakespeare's verse immediately comprehensible and ethereal: perfectly analyzed, beautifully felt. Declaiming the final scene from King Lear in his solo Shakespeare show The Ages of Man, Sir John sounded like a noble basset. "Howl, howl, howl, howl!" The tone was mournful, then (an octave higher) deranged, then weirdly ecstatic and finally strangulated, stilled...
...acted production at the Ivy Substation in Culver City, Calif., the play opened on Broadway in 1944 and closed after four nights. At the time, Miller thought it was victimized by the cult of the well-made play, and he may be right. For Luck is a sometimes comic melodrama that flirts a little messily with tragedy--particularly in that Miller specialty, father-son relationships...