Word: soaping
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Oliver Parker's Othello is the more standard of the two, a solid reading that pulls out the stops on an easily played organ. This is, after all, a soap opera of the had-I-but-known variety. All the Moor has to do is ask his wife's servant, "Pray, did thee swipe fair Desdemona's hankie?" and the misunderstanding is resolved as smoothly as any episode of Home Improvement. But then there would be little allurement in the role for some of this century's most dominant actors...
...Rushdie, speaking through the Moor, is not writing an allegory or a political tract about recent Indian history, although elements of both are undeniably present. And when his narrator gets a bit preachy, he quickly cuts himself off: "Enough, enough: away with this soap-box! Unplug this loud-hailer, and be still, my wagging finger!" The true subject of The Moor's Last Sigh is language in all its uninhibited and unpredictable power to go reality one better and rescue humans from the fate of suffering in silence...
...These are tough, well-plotted legal thrillers, set in California, with a good mix of believable male and female characters. The new story takes one of the supporting actors from the earlier books, a judge named Caroline Masters, and puts her at the center of what is more a soap opera than a mystery. The absurdly intricate plot has Caroline, who is up for a federal judgeship, called back to her ancestral manse in New Hampshire, a place she left in deep and unexplained bitterness when she was 22, to defend a niece who seems to have stabbed her boyfriend...
Like most soap operas, this one wins hot tears from its audience by imagining the worst things that could happen to decent people. It ties its women to the railroad tracks of caprice and invites us to watch as a betraying beau comes chugging toward them. Waiting to Exhale doesn't have the idiot vigor to become a camp classic like the movie Valley of the Dolls. Forest Whitaker, a laid-back actor who directs this slow-fuse movie, lets his divas strut, smolder and tell off the skunks they once loved. This ain't art--it's more like...
...Like most soap operas, the film version of Terry McMillan's best seller wins hot tears from its audience by imagining the worst things that could happen to decent people. Starring Angela Bassett and Whitney Houston, this is the familiar story of a quartet of young females looking for love and identity. Director Forest Whitaker ties his film's women to the railroad tracks of caprice and invites us to watch as a betraying beau comes chugging toward them. But Waiting to Exhale doesn't have the idiot vigor to become a camp classic like the movie Valley...