Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...originality as the writer/director of “Adventureland,” the sentimental tale of a virgin college graduate getting drunk, stoned, and (surprise) trying to get laid. “Adventureland” does boast some funny characters and a killer soundtrack, but the plight of the protagonist is taken too seriously, and “Superbad” fans might be disappointed to see the fun they love drained by unconvincingly tragic elements.James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is planning a summer Euro-trip with his affluent roommate before he packs his pencil for Columbia’s journalism...
...When one thinks about power between A and B there is a tendency to view the relationship as unidirectional,” Manley intones. “With influence, the relationship is more apt to be seen as a mutual process of stimulation.” For pages, the protagonist and his antics are never in sight. Where’s Wilbur...
...Adventureland's protagonist, James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), spending his first postcollegiate summer working at a shabby regional amusement park is, at least initially, an insult to his very being. It's the summer of 1987, and he's supposed to be having a proper European tour with his Beautiful People friends. Instead he's stuck in Pittsburgh, Pa., because his alcoholic father (Jack Gilpin) is having employment issues and, as his almost gleefully unsympathetic mother (Wendy Malick) explains it, they can no longer help fund his trip. Or graduate school. (See the top 10 movie performances...
...Spring” creates a world at once strange and familiar: a nameless town characterized by brutal, gratuitous violence and the prevalence of the bizarre, narrated through an unusual set of eyes—those of a teenage boy. Rodoreda’s narrator is a remarkably dispassionate protagonist, remarking in turns on the macabre and the surreal with unflinching ambivalence.Comparison is impossible to resist, as Rodoreda chooses to pitch her tent so deliberately close to that of other writers. The allegory of Rodoreda’s novel is glaringly reminiscent of its more renowned contemporary, J.M. Coetzee?...
...after the triumph of this film, which dwells crudely on the country's poverty. The outside world's supposed interest in seeing "the ugliness behind [India's] glittering façade" is akin to the sadistic and hypocritical concern of the game-show host for Jamal, our slum-residing protagonist, while rudely referring to him as a call-center chai wallah; the objective is to humiliate. Reality exists at many levels. Just look at your skin under a microscope if you want to see filth and ugliness. Neelam Sridhar, Secunderabad, India...