Word: melodramas
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...racism has had upon them. Humiliated in the larger world, these people fiercely guard their dignity close to home. Defeated by enemies too distant to see, they lash out at their own kind -- a colleague in Ma Rainey, a son in Fences. These confrontations can seem like old-fashioned melodrama in comparison with the plotless minimalism now in vogue. But Wilson has the weight of history on his side. If Troy Maxson turns tyrant, betraying his wife with a younger woman and blasting his son's chances for an athletic scholarship to college, his demand for autocratic power is understandable...
From the bitter opening invocation "Look down, look down," intoned by prisoners in a dungeon, to the anthemic rallying cry "When tomorrow comes," sung at the finale by the spectral dead of revolutionary 19th century Paris, the musical version of Victor Hugo's epic novel Les Miserables is a melodrama inflamed with outrage. Its politics always matter more than its love stories. Many of its principals die in violence or grief, but the most unprincipled of them endure and thrive. Like Nicholas Nickleby, staged largely by the same team, Les Miserables denies itself the indulgence of even a muted happy...
...then work like thumb-tied demons to return the booty. But even the surface of a Coen brothers picture looks unlike any other. These two young guys from Minneapolis -- Joel, 32, who directs and writes, and Ethan, 29, who writes and produces -- proved with their debut film, the gory melodrama Blood Simple, that they are shrewd filmmakers who can give a skewed spin to a hoary genre. Compared with their new effort, though, Blood Simple was just a five-finger exercise with a knife spiked through the hand. To their old fascination with Sunbelt pathology, to their side-winding Steadicam...
...When the melodrama came to its inevitable conclusion at week's end, Regan's ouster was yet another reminder that Nancy exerts extraordinary influence on her husband. The President considers her a trusted adviser, especially when it comes to hiring -- and firing. While Reagan avoids unpleasant confrontations, his wife is more hardheaded about staff failures and more willing to deal with them. "It's the eternal optimist in him," Nancy said of her husband a few years ago, "that if you let something go, it will eventually work itself out. Well, it isn't always...
...across the immense African landscape, from the distant escarpment, a gray-purple rainstorm blows. It encroaches upon the sunlight, moving through the air like a dark idea. East Africa has a genius for such moments. Wildlife and landscape here have about them a force of melodrama and annunciation. They are the Book of Genesis enacted as an afternoon dream...