Word: melodrama
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...capable of getting off the plane in New York and staying drunk for the entire tour," says one of his friends. A talk with Townshend at the best of times is a hopscotch game in a minefield. This is part of what he means when he says, with some melodrama and a strong measure of truth, "Rock is going to kill me somehow. Mentally or physically or something, it's going to get me in the end. It gets everybody...
What is not likely to change is that the games that succeed will work because they use their memory chips and lighted readouts to create melodrama. The best example now in production is a brilliant quarter-arcade game called Space Invaders. It is a reaction-time contest: shoot down the massed, marching aliens shown on the big TV screen before they shoot you. The refinements are satanic. The player has four blockhouses behind which to hide his man, but as the blockhouses catch fire under attack, they crumble. As the sound effects become more ominous, the aliens begin to shoot...
...Clover's meeting, he notes, is not to be found in historical documents but rather in the histrionic imagination of a scriptwriter. Friedrich is uncompromising in his refusal to create drama where there is no supporting evidence. When the situation warrants it, however, he is not above melodrama. At noon on Dec. 6, 1885, Henry Adams entered Clover's bedroom to announce a caller...
...highly fictionalized biography of a Janis Joplin-like rock icon, Midler can hardly be contained by a wide screen and six-track Dolby Stereo. She not only blasts out her many numbers with blistering fury, but she also attempts to strike every emotional chord known to junky movie melodrama. Even when she comes up flat, it is hard to look away. Midler does not make the mistake of begging for attention, like her cabaret colleague Liza Minnelli; she retains a sense of humor about herself. By mixing outrageous show-biz posturing with low-key self-effacement, she is a mastermind...
...Kennedy School, had good reason to be angry last Monday night. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown's soporific advertisement for SALT II--beamed live and in color to the largest crowd in the K-School Forum's history--had suddenly gone haywire. An elaborate farce had turned into melodrama. While 20 of their comrades picketed outside, two protesters from the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) had managed to smuggle themselves into the building, and one began screaming at Brown ten minutes into his speech. All those plans, all those arrangement... screwed up by two jerks from Dorchester...