Word: melodramas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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There's a reason Perry connects with his audience and exasperates almost everyone else. His plays and movies reside in that once essential, now demeaned genre of domestic melodrama in which family life is a bilious combustion of repressed emotions and grudges that explode into confrontation and recrimination and in which most characters are revealed to be cheating, abused or somebody's unknown daughter. That format, which fed decades of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford weepies, still raises its head occasionally--in the HBO series Big Love or Broadway's August: Osage County. And it's at the soapy, singing...
...Spitzer's rather poetic sentence seemed apt on March 12, as he resigned as governor of New York in a brief press conference, the culmination of a 48-hour melodrama sparked by revelations that he had been a client of a prostitution ring. Thus ended a public career that had once seemed promising enough that Spitzer was discussed as a potential 2012 Democratic presidential nominee. Spitzer apologized for his "private failings," but he said nothing to explain why he would have thrown it all away, why he risked so much. He had built a reputation as an ethical crusader...
...movies. The Other Boleyn Girl is based on the Philippa Gregory novel that wove the melodrama of Henry's rule into a bodice-ripping yarn. Not that the known facts aren't salacious enough: the King's impatience with his wife, Catherine of Aragon, in providing him with a male heir; his divorce of Catherine to marry Anne; his break with the Pope over the divorce and his establishment of the Anglican Communion as his own personal church. With all this as backdrop, Gregory foregrounded scenes of calumny and chicanery, of paternal pimping and near-incest, to create an international...
Deer season, rabbit season, duck season: these have their places on the hunters' calendar. But in movie melodrama, shooting-the-President season knows no limits. Death of a President, the British fakeumentary that imagined the assassination of George W. Bush and the succeeding imposition of martial law by the new President Cheney, was a sensation at the Toronto Film festival in September 2006, though it had little impact when it opened in the U.S. six weeks later. Last March, Shooter pinned the murder of an unidentified U.S. Commander in Chief on Mark Wahlberg, who was then obliged to uncover...
...this fourth or fifth rerun of the events, we have determined that Vantage Point has ambitions no higher than making the audience's collective pulse race as fast as the car Quaid will be maneuvering breathlessly through rush-hour traffic. The movie is best seen as straightforward, sometimes harrowing melodrama, packed with mistaken identities, beautiful villains, a kindly tourist who can outrace the bad guys, and a lost little girl whom the film brazenly sends onto a highway full of speeding cars. It's as if Dakota Fanning had wandered onto the streets of Ronin...