Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...arrangement, it would be a duet for a sax man and a girl singer, but with the soloists in a different key from the band. Smack in the midst of the gold-tinsel snowfalls and the studied unreality of the sound stages, Scorsese spins out a naturalistic, contemporary-feeling melodrama about a love affair that goes sour...
...battleweary German soldiers, the enemy is not so much Russia as the militaristic strain in their own national character, symbolized by Schell's aristocratic captain who dares not face his family until he has won the Iron Cross. The script labors the point with a barrage of melodrama and moralizing. "What will we do after we lose the war?" James Mason asks his cynical, brainy adjutant (David Warner). Replies the adjutant:"Prepare for the next...
...think that the primary aim of film is to satisfy an audience and then bring in politics. He states that "there is no objective reality" and, therefore, unlike most Marxist artists he cannot be interested in portraying any reality but instead claims he can invoke action through a melodrama wedded to an insistent pessimism. "The only reality," he insists, "is the relation of the work to its public. It's a collision between film and subconscious that creates a new realism." Films are political, yes, but they cannot be dogmatic. Fassbinder is interested in pointing out injustices, in making people...
...most unsettling facet of this death-of-love motif is the pervasiveness of its reality among the film's otherwise diverse characters. The malaise afflicts the professionally fulfilled executive (Harvey Keitel) as deeply as his hopelessly unfulfilled housewife (Geraldine Chaplin), who fancies herself a modernday Camille, running around spouting melodrama and sipping Carroll's Southern Comfort between lines. It fails to discriminate between John Considine's hail-fellow-well-met furniture dealer and Carradine's petulant artiste. With one noteworthy exception, each of the ten central figures goes in search of a human connection, and each comes up empty-handed...
Gilbert Roland's star billing is a mystery. Either it's for old times' sake, or his small role as a refugee-running boat captain is a remnant of the action-on-the-high-seas melodrama that this movie might have been. If the film makers did consciously reject such material in order to concentrate on the gentler, familial themes of Islands, they made a worthy choice. The pity is that they lacked the artistic energy to bring...