Word: melodrama
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...course not! Hollywood expects us to resist the urge to express sincere feeling for or exchange passionate vows with a loved one; instead, we are supposed to immerse ourselves in the sappy melodrama of Playing by Heart, a film that explores the superficial relationships of photogenic Los Angelinos looking for love in all the wrong place. Playing by Heart does not just serve up a single silly, teary-eyed plot that is drawn out over an hour and half. Rather, you get six sappy stories of seemingly unrelated couples that are murderously extended for two full hours, a great deal...
...That's the curse of the artsy indie, I guess. The film does have its moments, however, where the jumps in time and costumes serve a unique purpose I don't want to spoil. But they are quite amusing and provide the sorely needed comic relief in this maudlin melodrama...
Luckily, Wright doesn't take anything too seriously until later in the movie when she's forced to play this silly melodrama straight. As a research lackey for a Chicago Tribune columnist, she finally does something fun as she tracks down the origin of the letter. Her selfish motivation is oddly reminiscent of Meg Ryan's valiant quest in Sleepless in Seattle. But whereas the latter is whimsical and heart-warming, the Penn-Costner combination is a bust from the start. In fact, Wright has more chemistry with the man she initially mistakes for G than with Costner, her dream...
...posh party to honor a Danish patriarch on his 60th birthday, the favored son rises to make a toast. His father, he says, sexually ravaged him and his twin sister, a recent suicide, when they were kids. This acerbic farce-melodrama, laureled at Cannes and by critics' groups, is directed in a fake-verite style that distracts a bit from the entertaining spectacle of the rich airing their bloody silk underwear in public. But it's still creepy fun to watch the upper class pretend a family isn't in tatters. When propriety meets outrage in a chateau, guess which...
...choice. I'm Asian for Chrissakes. Sometimes, I feel like I've been strapped to a conveyor belt my whole life and I'm slowly headed toward some dark, yawning abyss in the distance often referred to as the Real World. Its definitely not the processed, edited-for-melodrama hi-jinks of the MTV version, but something far more sinister. It is a place where kids somehow lose their souls on the way to being bonafide adults, those people who connive, deceive and ass-kiss, among other things, to claw their way to the top, wherever THAT...