Word: stagey
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...gets away with it because it's adapted from a true story; because Charles S. Dutton directs it with grace; because T.K. Carter and Khandi Alexander are revelations as a middle-class couple brought low by, and struggling to rise above, their drug habit. The dialogue is at times stagey, and the characters are defined almost entirely through their addictions. But for this last, reality has to share the blame...
...fight, even more exciting than the battle of the blades in All the Pretty Horses, fully realizes McCarthy's attachment to formal manly rituals. Aficionados of the bullring should appreciate the choreography of the action. Fans of bloodless sports may find the whole thing too stagey. Yet there is no denying the drama and inevitability of McCarthy's climactic mano a mano. What seems less fated is that white whale of an epilogue...
Many of these traits, of course, could be viewed as a direct result of the movie's origin as a stage play. But what works on stage doesn't always work on film, and Bent's stagey conventions make it drag along...
...tour: 30 or 40 Mormon teens sat on the floor of a second-story room and listened to a husky, white-haired elder narrate the tragedy of Smith's last hours. The elder, using a walking stick to imitate the rifles of the mob, enacted the death scene with stagey gusto, but when the bloody climax came--Smith's disastrous fall from the building--he grew somber. "I personally think that when Joseph fell out that window, the Savior was right there to catch him." There were tears in his eyes now and more tears on the cheeks...
...which the duke's toadies block Rigoletto's entrance to their lord's chambers, kicking the poor hunchback until his angry recriminations collapse into a pitiful plea for the return of his daughter. It's a moment that can move one to tears; yet here it looked so stagey that it failed to resonate...