They are paranoid, they are melodramatic, they are absurd and they almost always get it wrong.
At times, they are melodramatic – a woman accusing her friend of sleeping with her boyfriend – or wilfully pretentious – young people debating irony versus sincerity.
As the analysis proceeds, Devereux elicits stories from Picard's life, and they are melodramatic ones, involving his difficult home life, his early sexual experiences, his separation from the mother of his young daughter, his divorce.
The fault must be with the reader if he is not impelled to read them, for although they are melodramatic and are naturally redolent of their times, they are none the worse for that".
My friend Abdelkader, a Moroccan writer who grew up in the Netherlands, told me why Moroccans watch Hindi movies: "We like that, in the end, everyone bows down and touches the mother's feet". The standard Western complaint about Bollywood movies is that they're melodramatic, but for those who love them, melodrama in the defense of entertainment is no vice.
Which is funny, because their songs are really the opposite -- they are melodramatic anthems of love and growing up and making it, and then, being unsure of it all.
They favored a more basic beat than the crafty, jumpy rhythms of great early-1970's funk, and they appreciated singers who were melodramatic to the point of campiness; they also liked instrumental passages and interludes of pure rhythm that they could stretch out (using two copies on two turntables) to keep people moving.
When violated women in Victorian novels say their lives are ruined, they aren't being melodramatic.
They had to make the most of what they can get", and such characteristics as they have managed to build up are pretty self-effacing: they pride themselves on not being melodramatic, and their tendency to pretend things are going to turn out fine even leads them to deny their own mortality.
Although the books are melodramatic and escapist, they also depict "the sinister menace of an all-too-real adult world".
For Lady Antebellum, country is melodramatic pop full of sweet harmonies and guitars so plangent they practically melt.
