Word: melodrama
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...shows--the prostitutes and lowlifes, shocking violence and moral compromises faced by cops who patrol the urban jungle. But Huff's vivid, intricately layered script--a mix of straight narration, interlaced commentary and re-created scenes--lifts it far above the usual clichés, both detaching us from the melodrama and imbuing it with the force of tragedy...
...shall I consider myself bound to you similarly." In the movie, she writes with the groom snoozing behind her, then reads it out loud. Languishing against the pillows, hand over eyes, Putnam mutters that such brutal words are tolerable only coming from her. Gere struggles to sell the melodrama, and we struggle to buy the logic. Why did she say yes again? (Read an interview with Hilary Swank...
...rest of Philadelphia with murders of a scheming, Saw-like sadism. Saddled with a scathing 16% score from the "top critics" monitored on Rotten Tomatoes (Wild Things nabbed a gentleman's 68%), Citizen won audiences on star quality and the movie marketplace's lack of other adult-themed melodrama - read: crap for grownups. Younger viewers in search of shivers had already lined up for Paranormal Activity, which now stands a fair chance of breaking out from cult toy to the year's must-see Halloween...
...horrific, but hardly implausible, series of events that push their friendship to the breaking point, the two cops narrate much of the action; occasionally comment indirectly on each other's recollections; sometimes re-create actual scenes together. Cumulatively, the effect is to drain the sometimes shocking events of any melodrama, to force us to see them with the same resigned, matter-of-fact detachment these characters do. The taut, 90-minute script builds with a tragic inevitability, yet with a coda of redemption that seems neither forced nor fake...
...What's an iguana doing on my coffee table?" wonders Nicolas Cage as Lt. Terence McDonagh in this dark, daft, vagrantly intoxicating melodrama. It's a sequel of sorts to Abel Ferrara's 1992 Bad Lieutenant, which starred Harvey Keitel as a nameless, coke-addled sadist who has visions of Jesus. Director Werner Herzog - who made great movies in the '70s, and whose oneiric documentaries landed him on this year's TIME 100 list - says he never saw the Ferrara film, and simply worked from a script by William Finkelstein, who's written more than 100 episodes of cop shows...