Melodrama Films are a sub-type of drama films, characterized by a plot to appeal to the heightened emotions of the audience. Melodrama, a combination of drama and melos (music), literally means "play with music." The themes of dramas, the oldest literary and stage art form, were exaggerated within melodramas, and the liberal use of music often enhanced their emotional plots. Often, film studies criticism used the term 'melodrama' pejoratively to connote an unrealistic, pathos-filled, campy tale of romance or domestic situations with stereotypical characters (often including a central female character) that would directly appeal to feminine audiences.

There are many names for melodramatic films - 'women's pictures', 'weepies', tearjerkers, soap operas (or soapers), and more recently, 'chick flicks'. O Magazine compiled their 50 Greatest Chick Flicks in their July 2004 issue.). See Filmsite's own Memorable and Great "Chick Flicks." Pure melodramas reached their pinnacle in the films of the 50s by Douglas Sirk. See also this site's extensive, illustrated compilation: Greatest Tearjerker Films, Moments and Scenes. (Entertainment Weekly's November 28, 2003 issue listed their choices for the Top 50 Greatest Tearjerkers: each one "involves a terminally ill loved one, or an impossible love, or a giant robot that dies for our sins.") However, not all melodramas are tearjerkers, but more like heightened dramas.

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Soon-to-be-famous actors and prominent real-life heroes were also featured in serials. Bela Lugosi starred as the supernatural-powered mystic/magician Chandu in the 12-chapter The Return of Chandu (1934) and Chandu on the Magic Island (1934) (the feature version of The Return of Chandu, based on chapters 5-12 of the serial). And Lugosi appeared as evil Dr. Zorka in the 12-episode serial The Phantom Creeps (1939).

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The Marx Brothers' greatest and funniest masterpiece - the classic comedy Duck Soup (1933) is a short, but brilliant satire and lampooning of blundering dictatorial leaders, Fascism and authoritarian government. The film, produced by Herman Mankiewicz, was prepared during the crisis period of the Depression. Some of its clever gags and routines were taken from Groucho's and Chico's early 1930s radio show Flywheel, Shyster & Flywheel. Working titles for the film included Oo La La, Firecrackers, Grasshoppers, and Cracked Ice.

It was the Marx Brothers' fifth film in a five-picture contract with Paramount Studios, before they went on to MGM. It was their last and best film with the studio. The film was directed by first-class veteran director Leo McCarey (who would go on to direct The Awful Truth (1937), Love Affair (1939), Going My Way (1944), and An Affair to Remember (1957) - a remake of his 1939 film), and its screenplay was written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby (with additional dialogue by Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin). Originally, it was to have been directed by Ernst Lubitsch. The film was devoid of any Academy Award nominations.

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It Happened One Night (1934) is one of the greatest romantic comedies in film history, and a film that has endured in popularity. It is considered one of the pioneering "screwball" romantic comedies of its time, setting the pattern for many years afterwards along with another contemporary film, The Thin Man (1934).

The escapist theme of the film, appropriate during the Depression Era, is the story of the unlikely romantic pairing of a mis-matched couple - a gruff and indifferent, recently-fired newspaper man (Gable) and a snobbish, superior-acting heiress (Colbert) - a runaway on the lam. It is a reversal of the Cinderella story (the heroine rejects her wealthy lifestyle), a modern tale with light-hearted sex appeal in which courtship and love triumph over class conflicts, socio-economic differences, and verbal battles of wit.

The madcap film from Columbia Studios (one of the lesser studios) was an unexpected runaway box office sleeper hit (especially after it began to play in small-town theaters), and it garnered the top five Academy Awards (unrivaled until 1975, forty-one years later by One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) - and then again by The Silence of the Lambs (1991).) It won all five of its nominated categories: Best Picture, Best Actor (Clark Gable), Best Actress (Claudette Colbert), Best Director (Frank Capra), and Best Adaptation (Robert Riskin).

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In other later roles, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyck, and Olivia de Havilland represented powerful, liberated females on screen, and helped to create long-lasting examples of this genre. Crawford starred in the trashy, high-strung, musical melodrama Humoresque (1946) as an older, wealthy society patroness who sought revenge after being scorned by a struggling, talented violinist. She also played an emotionally unstable nurse in Possessed (1947), a playwright/heiress wise to a plot against her by her scheming husband in Sudden Fear (1952), and a middle-aged typist grasping for love with a younger man in the psychological soaper Autumn Leaves (1956). Melodramatic elements were found in the socially-conscious drama regarding mental illness and institutionalization The Snake Pit (1948) with Olivia de Havilland's showcase performance as a woman descending into madness in a brutal mental institution. De Havilland also played a courted, plain-jane spinster in the moody and somber melodrama The Heiress (1949).

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The primary moods of classic film noir were melancholy, alienation, bleakness, disillusionment, disenchantment, pessimism, ambiguity, moral corruption, evil, guilt, desperation and paranoia.

Heroes (or anti-heroes), corrupt characters and villains included down-and-out, conflicted hard-boiled detectives or private eyes, cops, gangsters, government agents, a lone wolf, socio-paths or killers, crooks, war veterans, politicians, petty criminals, murderers, or just plain Joes. These protagonists were often morally-ambiguous low-lifes from the dark and gloomy underworld of violent crime and corruption. Distinctively, they were cynical, tarnished, obsessive (sexual or otherwise), brooding, menacing, sinister, sardonic, disillusioned, frightened and insecure loners (usually men), struggling to survive - and in the end, ultimately losing.

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Cast:

Robert De Niro, Ray Liotta, Joe Pesci, Lorraine Bracco, Paul Sorvino, Frank Sivero, Tony Darrow, Mike Starr, Frank Vincent

Review:
Almost every filmmaker in the history of cinema would be thrilled by the knowledge that a feature of his (or hers) is considered an undisputed classic - a benchmark by which other, similarly themed movies are judged. Director Martin Scorsese, considered by many to be the finest American film craftsman working today, can claim a unique distinction - he has been responsible for a classic during each of the last three decades of the 20th century. In the '70s, it was Taxi Driver. In the '80s, it was Raging Bull. And in the '90s, it was Goodfellas (the most lauded, at least in terms of official awards and nominations, of the director's features). No one else, not even greats like Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, and Eric Rohmer, can make a similar claim. With patience, care, and strict attention to detail, Scorsese has staked out an impregnable position in the history of motion pictures.

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Stars: Natalie Gal, Alicja Bachleda and Cameron Goodman

Review:

This second film by the German commercial director Markus Goller will inevitably remind most viewers of its more accomplished predecessor, "Goodbye, Lenin!," in the genre of "man, was life ever stupid in the former East Germany!" Luckily, "Friendship!" shifts focus to the other end of the spectrum, to concentrate on the comic and apparently true-life travails of two young Ossies who decide to head toward San Francisco in 1990 in search of freedom and real junk food.

This shift helps a lot, but the film ends up being crippled by the cliches of the fish-out-of-water, road-movie composite genre. Yet director Goller is nothing if not energetic, and he has an ability to keep things moving in the best Hollywood fashion.

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Starring Ulrich Tukur
Daniel Brühl
Steve Buscemi
Anne Consigny
Jingchu Zhang

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G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra writers David Elliot and Paul Lovett sold their pitch of an action fantasy about stone gargoyles on buildings coming to life to Disney.

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