Word: melodramas
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...results were viscerally thrilling. This show is an embarrassment of riches. It’s just that some of those gems need serious polishing.Above all, it’s the two brilliantly realized central roles (partners in crime Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett) that make this musical melodrama go. Arlo D. Hill ’09 is fully at home in the title role. Handsome, brooding, and gaunt, his Sweeney strikes a perfect balance between seething rage and frighteningly easy charm. The audience is enchanted and seduced right up until the moment when Sweeney slits the first of many throats...
...There is, to begin with, the film?s score by Hollywood composer Danny Elfman, which would pass virtually without notice in a fictional melodrama, but which here rings and thunders with portent. These are accompanied by sound effects of dubious provenance. Then there are the inserts, like the famous deck of playing cards, carrying pictures of Saddam Hussein and his leading henchmen, which was distributed to American troops in Iraq, Images of some of these cards, very handsomely photographed against black, fly artfully, abstractly across the screen in a manner that is distinctly at odds with the essential grubbiness...
...heads or leashed like dogs--is harrowing and haunting. It's also spooky how poised and telegenic the perps are; two, Javal Davis and Sabrina Harman, could easily fit into the cast of The O.C. But the ultimate anomaly of Morris' movie is how closely the story mirrors Hollywood melodrama...
...certain English reserve, Meyer's books are full of gusting emotions. Bella never stops gasping and swooning and passing out and waking up screaming from nightmares. Her heart is always either pounding or stopping. (Bella's histrionics don't feel at all unrealistic. When you're writing about adolescents, melodrama and realism are the same thing.) Rowling labors over her intricate plots, but Meyer's stories never bend or twist or branch. They have one gear, and she guns it straight ahead till the last page. The way she manages the reader's curiosity, maintaining tension and controlling the flow...
...doesn't look like the usual Mexican telenovela, packed with scantily clad girls, dashing macho men and unceasing melodrama. And there's a lot more about Capadocia, HBO's first attempt to crack the Mexican market, that sets it apart from any other Latin American TV production. Shot on 400,000 feet of film, with three movie directors and 300 actors, it is probably the most expensive TV series ever made south of the Rio Grande. HBO executives wouldn't release the exact cost, but said that one episode of Capadocia costs about the same as 250 episodes...