Word: antiheroes
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DIED. JOHN RAITT, 88, Broadway baritone; of complications from pneumonia; in Los Angeles. To a later generation, he was known as the father of pop-blues singer Bonnie Raitt, but he became an instant star back in 1945 as Billy Bigelow, the antihero of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (their showstopping 7-min.-long Soliloquy was written for him). Raitt also starred in Broadway's Carnival in Flanders and the 1954 hit The Pajama Game...
...would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed the "Ode to Joy." In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite piece of his ultraviolent antihero. If someone titles an art movie Happiness, it is a good bet that it will be--as the 1998 Todd Solondz film was--about deeply unhappy people, including a telephone pervert and a pedophile...
DIED. WILL EISNER, 87, comic-book pioneer; in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The person after whom comics' most prestigious award is named, Eisner helped launch a company in 1937 that created Dollman and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Later he created the Spirit, a witty antihero with no superpowers who roamed back alleys in search of bad guys, and wrote one of the first graphic novels, about a Bronx, N.Y., slumlord, A Contract with God. "My interest is not the superhero," he said, "but the little man who struggles to survive in the city...
Shunpei Kim, the antihero of director Yoichi Sai's new film Blood and Bones, is one of the least endearing characters ever to grace a movie screen. Compulsively cruel, breathtakingly petty, he stalks through life in Osaka's Korean ghetto with his face locked in a snarl. He puts maggoty meat on his family's dinner table while gambling away his earnings, beats and rapes his estranged wife, and hurls his stepdaughter down a staircase. When a worker at his fish-cake factory begs for back pay, Kim responds by applying a hot coal to the man's cheek. After...
With hours to kill in Chicago, you could do worse than Ferris Bueller, actor Matthew Broderick's amiably conniving teen antihero from the 1986 comedy who played hooky and turned the town upside down. But almost two decades later, you could also do much better. Over the years the Windy City has continually reinvented itself, adding world-class tastes to its legacy of blues, comedy and 1920s-era speakeasies...