Word: three-act
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...interesting thing about life is that it does not come prepackaged in a three-act structure the way most movies do. It tends to lurch along like--oh, say, a disputed election in Florida. Take the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Since we are all still here to savor this accurate reconstruction of those anguished days, we know everything came out all right in the end. But seen through the eyes of presidential aide Kenny O'Donnell (Costner), it is still a suspenseful tale. Well acted too, especially by Costner, and Greenwood as John F. Kennedy. The players...
...interesting thing about life is that it does not come prepackaged in a three-act structure the way most movies do. It tends to lurch along like - oh, say, a disputed election in Florida. Take the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Since we are all still here to savor this accurate reconstruction of those anguished days, we know everything came out all right in the end. But seen through the eyes of presidential aide Kenny O'Donnell (Costner), it is still a suspenseful tale. Well acted too, especially by Costner and Greenwood as John F. Kennedy. The players...
...that Levinson packs his movie with more melodrama--including Little Melvin's kidnapping of Ben and Sylvia from an early rock concert--than you would think it could hold. What's important is the casual, even digressive, movement of the piece. It plays like a memoir, not a conventional three-act movie. There's room here for Ben to shock his family by dressing as Hitler for Halloween, for a faux-naive stripper to electrify Nate's theater, for the strange power of a new-model Cadillac to cloud the mind of a '50s male. In short, Liberty Heights seems...
...loony in different ways. John Goodman's false reasonableness, Ving Rhames' born-again religiosity, Tom Sizemore's addiction to violence--nothing about any of them can help Frank. The film is full of casual dark humor, but what's best about it is its resistance to the conventional three-act movie structure. Its string of incident is relentless, virtually undifferentiated, like life, and contains no promise of uplifting resolution. Bringing Out the Dead is like its title--blunt, truthful, uncompromising. It is hard on an audience, even harrowing. But that's exactly what Martin Scorsese was put on earth...
...Good-Times-Were-Not-Meant- to-Last genre relies on stars' generous willingness to drink, go bankrupt and have their houses burned down in order to create hypnotic TV. Behind the Music delivers on the credits' promise of "Fame...Passion... Heartbreak...Success...Glory" with an Aristotelian three-act structure--rise, fall and rehab--and florid narration: Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers "came out of the South--driven by jangling guitars and led by a rock-'n'-roll rebel!" E!'s True Hollywood Story is tart and eager to dish dirt. Compare an Intimate Portrait on Natalie Wood, filled with warm...