Word: melodrama
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...ageless melodrama in all its florid glory. This scene, from Louis Feuillade's 10-part serial Les Vampires, was shot in 1915, the year of The Birth of a Nation. D.W. Griffith's epic, a masterpiece of film form, creaks today. But Les Vampires, with thrill upon stunt upon criminal chicanery, is as modern as Rush Hour or The X Files. In Waterbearer Films' ravishing 6-hr. 40-min. video edition, restored by David Shepard with its color tinting and long-lost intertitles, Les Vampires is revealed as the prototype and apotheosis of every hurtling action film and devious crime...
...will find Beloved more admirable than involving. The focus on stern Sethe and her closed fist of a heart may put audiences at a distance; and 174 minutes is a lot of time to spend with four troubled souls moseying toward inevitability. But the popularity of pizazzy Hollywood melodrama should not mean that the only movie pace is four-on-the-floor frantic. Beloved has a pulse that beats slower because the hearts of its characters are heavier; but that pulse is evidence of complex people sifting through the ashes of a national tragedy, trying to find meaning...
Abrams and Reeves succeed in making their show lightly cinematic, creating a plusher experience for the viewer than is usual on TV. What really makes Felicity enjoyable, though, is that despite its requisite melodrama, it is emotionally plausible and endearing. In this it is very different from its demographic stablemates Dawson's Creek and Fox's Ally McBeal, which are dishonest to their core and as a result impossibly irritating to watch. Felicity, instead, manages to be pretty good, gooey, yearning, adolescent fun. Not bad for a first...
...driveling anxiety to his shrink, the first moments of Antz suggest a film destined to become another prototypical Woody Allen movie. Or so it seems until Woody (now an ant named "Z") gets off the psychoanalyst's couch and walks into "The Colony." Hardly the accustomed venue for paranoid melodrama, the computer generated image of a million humanoid ants carrying around gargantuan dirt clods seems to belong more to a Charleton Heston flick than to a movie whose hero is characterized by unrelenting nervousness...
Part hardboiled thriller, part sensitive melodrama, with tears for the ladies and gunplay for the guys, the novel borrows a potent narrative trick from Kenneth Fearing's noir classic, The Big Clock: Schwartz tells the story from complementary viewpoints that must sooner or later collide and clash. In their grief and remorse, the three lead characters start out locked in separate universes. Ethan, insulated in his study, ceaselessly revisits happier days while simultaneously dreaming of revenge, despite a father who drilled him in nonviolence. Grace drifts in an existential darkness amid her bright perennials, her spirit crisping and withering leaf...