Word: melodrama
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...want to be. It was historic. It changed things. Alice Roosevelt Longworth once explained the scandal-plagued President Warren Harding to a friend: "Harding was not a bad man, he was just a slob." For six years, Bill Clinton's countrymen have thought that for all his messiness and melodrama, he was a basically good fellow, our Bubba, our flawed and favored good ole boy. But after this speech, with its sullen anger and trimming, a chord may have been broken, an estrangement begun. Something tells me "He's not a slob...
...Shumways--Philip, three sisters and their parents--track him separately into obsession. Philip's childhood is burned away, cauterized, by the loss, and the half-formed man whose personality coalesces is shadowed and deepened. The story has a dark, dreamlike quality, and author Reiken tells it with no melodrama nor any word out of place...
Decalogue is different; stuff happens. This series--with each 53- to 58-minute episode dramatizing one of the Ten Commandments through the lives of the residents of a Warsaw apartment house--revels in the convolutions of melodrama. There are two brutal killings, a few attempted suicides, even a car chase. A perfect child dies. Another child is told, Chinatown-style, that her sister is really her mother. At times Decalogue plays like a Polish Melrose Place...
They make a strange menagerie, the Hal Hartley clan. The people in his odd, alert comedies (Trust, Amateur, Flirt) inhabit some Long Island of the mind, where Amy Fisher-style melodrama rubs up against working-class angst. They are part strong, silent types, part East Coast neurotics. They revel in their own contradictions; one Hartley heroine, a nymphomaniac virgin, explains the anomaly by saying, "I'm choosy." His creatures will sit mute and mopey, then turn endlessly articulate once they get going. Self-conscious but not self-aware, skeptical yet wildly romantic, they have a horror of the personal commitment...
...Madness of King George and The Crucible. Whereas with those films, the attention centered on the passionate and dramatic acting, his sparse directing style makes this movie feel slightly sitcom-ish. The scenes don't particularly flow well (some parts scream for commercial breaks), and it jumps from melodrama to obvious comic relief without much attempt at subtlety. Hytner seems lost as to what genre the movie actually belongs in. Rare scenes echo with the light, schmaltzy appeal of a romantic comedy, some seem amateurish (reminiscent of high school plays), and others are bogged down in unnecessarily messy melodrama...