Word: melodrama
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Physical comedy was the order of the day in Loot, and particularly rib-tickling was Fay's confession to the murder of Mrs. McLeavy, with melodrama and cheesy music in full gear, and the sorrowful admission that "Euthanasia was against my religion. So I murdered her." Of course, Orton himself objected to the use of any camp in the original productions of his plays, but in modern times, when Orton's once unprecedented criticisms of societal values are no longer so, well, unprecedented, the actors need the energy of camp to let them rip into his lines. So while...
...result, lurching haphazardly between melodrama and MTM-lite comedy, is not just inferior but unsettlingly wrong, like a beloved relative reanimated as a zombie. Moore and Harper click instantly--Rhoda might well have been cryogenically preserved since 1978, and shows charming touches of her mother Ida when hectoring her own daughter--but they're burdened with sentimentality and limp one-liners. The Mary we see here shows glimpses of her self-effacing but strong self, yet at other times, incongruously, seems to have become a helpless uptown lady-who-lunches and slips into self-help-speak like...
...turning compliance with New York's residency requirements into a Lifetime movie, the Clintons have given new meaning to keeping up appearances. Why force us to watch their melodrama? We're being asked to believe that "they" are staying married, that "they" are moving to New York, when by many people's definitions, "they" are doing neither. The headline in one New York paper was HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW, as the President returned to Shepherdstown, W.Va., for the Israeli-Syrian talks. Among their possessions, you could see a couple of rugs, a kitchen table and a large bed. Don Imus...
...Death," Errol Morris' new film, is subtitled "The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.," a formidable label that seems to imply a sort of melodrama that, while dramatic and intensely emotional, the work never really approaches. Instead, it is the disturbing, offbeat, and darkly comic story of Leuchter, a self-taught expert in execution equipment who travels to Auschwitz in order to prove that the holocaust never really occurred...
...almost as if the producers of popular culture sensed, and tried instinctively to compensate for, this defect. For the content of movies, popular music, latterly television, has remained stubbornly locked to the 19th century traditions of melodrama and romance. We may admire the multiple narrators of Citizen Kane, not to mention its sheer panache; we may adore Bart Simpson, not least because he's such a self-conscious little transgressor, so aware of both his self-destructive impulses and his generally thwarted impulse to be better. But we have to admit that these remain rather lonely modernist gestures in mass...