Word: melodrama
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...much about Argentine politics as about the English obsession with class. Eva, the illegitimate daughter of an estate manager whose funeral her servant mother was forbidden to attend, gets back at the middle class with her upwardly nubile conquest of the military aristocracy. Our guide in this revenge melodrama is a sardonic, Rice-like narrator (Antonio Banderas), offering keys to the allure of Santa Evita, first lady, holy whore...
...bombshell--no weeping O.J. confessing, no furious O.J. tripped up by damning contradictions. But merely watching him up there, at last being called to account for his actions in his own words, provided its own sort of climax. It was as if, after several acts of a melodrama with a convoluted plot and a cast of thousands, the protagonist finally took center stage...
...until he is blue in the face. If he has made a sacrifice, it is so small in comparison with his blessed three times over. While Reich speaks nobly of the loss of leaving important work for the more private pleasures of family life, it is insulting to find melodrama here in the place of thankfulness...
Most films, as they ravel their stories, narrow their focus to two or three central characters. The English Patient, though, expands its field of vision to embrace the impromptu communities around Almasy--notably Hana and her Sikh lover Kip (Naveen Andrews). They re-enact, with less melodrama, the arc of Almasy and Katharine's desperate affair. Almasy wants his love to flee in a plane; Kip sends Hana soaring on pulleys into the clerestory of the monastery chapel. Up there with the heavenly murals: Kip knows that's where this pensive angel belongs...
...solemnity, EZ Streets somehow manages to avoid melodrama. Indeed, Haggis brings a mordant wit to his new show. He has conceived head gangster Jimmy Murtha (Joe Pantoliano) as the kind of guy who mercilessly blows people up, then goes to confession and can't quite deliver the goods. "I know what you do. God knows what you do," the priest chastises. "You're trying to tell me that the only sin you have to confess is that you took the Lord's name in vain?" Murtha's response: "I'm giving you what I can." Then he negotiates his penance...