Word: three-act
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...religious belief. From writing political plays that verge on the lecture, that is, Hare has decided simply to lecture in an actorly manner. "I find the strategies of fiction more and more tiresome," he explains. "I cannot watch Hollywood films, which I know have been written to a three-act structure that's been taught in class at UCLA." Though he has made forays into Hollywood in the past--including the film version of his play Plenty (which is being revived next month in London starring Cate Blanchett)--he is now resolved to experiment only within his chosen genre...
What makes this movie work is the kind of cool that made Get Shorty go so nicely: an understanding that life's little adventures rarely come in neat three-act packages, the way most movies now do, and the unruffled presentation of outrageously twisted dialogue, characters and situations as if they were the most natural things in the world...
Another slightly offbeat characteristic of the ballet was the music. Prokofiev's three-act score of "Cinderella" fits some of the moods on-stage quite well, from lilting with the dancers' feet to thundering with the characters' emotions. But again, the music during the ballroom scene leaned more towards cruel sophistication than lighthearted dancing. Also, as Cinderella and the Prince embrace after finally reuniting, the horns and violins wail a mournful melody rather than a romantic one. This is not to say that Prokofiev's music is poor-far from that. But for a fairy tale with a happy ending...
David Mamet's Oleanna is about many things, but above all else, it's about interpretation. Language, at least in this play, always has more than one meaning. Nothing like a "pure statement" ever exists. Oleanna is a linguistic battleground, a three-act power struggle between two characters whose points of view, sensitivities to nuance and emphases of thought are constantly...
There are pain and honor in this performance, and they constantly rise up to redeem a film that is less probing, less thoughtful than its director's claims and aspirations for it. The problems with Michael Collins begin with its conventional three-act movie structure--ABC, QED. This is fine for fiction, but history, as everyone who has lived some of it knows, works more waywardly and coincidentally than that. Especially when it's in the throes of revolution...