Word: melodrama
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...eventually does to innocents like Sam and Pilar when they are not let in on the secrets it shrouds. Above all, he wants us to understand that when we deny history we grant it a more disruptive power. Sayles is a meditative storyteller, with a tendency to mute melodrama rather than letting it wail. But he is also one of the few filmmakers still ferreting out the strangeness and anxiety hidden beneath our poses of ordinariness...
That's the good part. What is exasperating about Isaacs' novel is that every even-numbered chapter breaks off from this engaging legal drama to spin out a whiny and exceedingly slow-moving melodrama of Lily White's fretful childhood and early adult years. Her younger sister, we learn at great length, was pretty and petulant and absorbed all their parents' attention; her father was a Jewish businessman who tried unsuccessfully to be a Wasp; the husband Lily eventually married was handsome but shallow...
They could keep making zippy comedies, Xeroxing successes like Aladdin for a predictable billion-dollar gross in the theatrical and video markets. But the artists at Disney's animation unit--it should be called the ambition unit--have bigger eyes. They figure that where they go, into melodrama or political sagas, the audience will follow. With The Hunchback of Notre Dame, directors Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise (who made Beauty and the Beast) have splashed the broody emotions of Victor Hugo's epic novel with a bold, dazzling palette. Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz (Pocahontas) have written the largest, most...
...steeped in the magic and mystery and doom of the blues. Ella's art had a sunnier side, a more adaptive quality that let her be, if not an absolute original, a peerless interpreter, a superb vocal actress who could snuggle into Porter's playfulness or Arlen's melodrama or Ellington's chromatic gymnastics with equal agility. Billie Holiday's music was a lifeline. She lived out all the suffering of her songs. For Ella Fitzgerald, music seemed more like a safe harbor, a home from which she rarely ventured...
ROSIE O'DONNELL Sans dirt and melodrama, her debut talk-variety show scores with critics, soars in ratings...