Word: overblown
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...often, as Critic Mikal Gilmore points out, graphic novels still tend to be "overblown bad comics, using fancy paper to do bad stories." But a work like Watchmen -- by common assent the best of breed -- is a superlative feat of imagination, combining sci-fi, political satire, knowing evocations of comics past and bold reworkings of current graphic formats into a dysutopian mystery story. It is as engagingly knotty and self-referential as The Name of the Rose, but instead of monks doubting their faith, here are superheroes weighed down by their creed, caught in a world they never made...
...iconoclastic Superstar shattered Broadway tradition with raucous electric guitars, grinding dissonances and a subject that was, to say the least, unorthodox, it has been fashionable to dismiss Lloyd Webber as a panderer to the basest melodic cravings of the mass audience, hammering home a few repetitive themes amid overblown orchestral climaxes and distracting technological gimmickry. His scores have been derided as derivative and too dependent on pastiche -- meretricious parrotings of his Broadway betters (Rodgers) and his operatic antecedents (Puccini...
...next show, Starlight, which opened in London in 1984, was also directed by Nunn and designed by Napier, but this time the cooperative effort was less happy. What was conceived as a small collection of genre songs (pop, rock, mock-soul) for children, like Joseph, emerged instead as an overblown extravaganza that the composer, despite his initial enthusiasm for the production, later disowned. "It was a mistake to have put it anywhere near where it could be considered a Broadway musical," Lloyd Webber says, though he still defends it as a vehicle that brings to the theater people...
...course, what consumer-oriented American benefit LP would be complete without an overblown, melodramatic ballad. The idea of Whitney Houston singing "Do You Hear What I Hear" is initially promising, a pure pop voice made to sing simple ballads. This production is more like "We Are the World: The Sequel," with choir-like backup vocals and a very similar melody. There's the same slow beginning and spare verses building to an overpowering climax of Whitney, backup singers, and treacly violins all at once...
...Desire's excesses--of emotion, of irony, of guts--are entertaining but ultimately messy. The end of the movie is a strange brew--part cop show, part overblown tragedy and part comedy...