Word: protagonist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...protagonist like Joel is a sitting duck about to have his world upended; think Jeff Daniels in Something Wild or another sexually frustrated Joel, the one played by Tom Cruise in Risky Business. From the first frames of the film, in which a kittenish con woman named Cindy (Mila Kunis) is introduced in the midst of a deft act of shoplifting, we know this Joel is headed for trouble - girl and, likely, financial. After Cindy reads about an industrial accident in which Step loses a component (and a half ) of his manhood and stands to gain an insurance and lawsuit...
...meet Zeitoun? At the end of 2003 I was in Sudan with Valentino Deng, the protagonist of What Is the What. We met a number of women who had been abducted and enslaved as young girls. Their stories had only been told in brief accounts on human-rights reports, and I thought they needed to have a voice of some kind. A few months later I met Lola Vollen, a physician who was working with wrongfully convicted men and women in the U.S., and she said that the books out there about exonerated prisoners hadn't told the whole story...
...that simply must have nefarious motives. Yet the movie isn't interested in suspense tricks or conspiracy theories so much as in investigating Sam's mind/body problem: he has a surplus of the latter and may be losing the former. Indeed, the picture could be called Lunacy, since its protagonist's mind drifts between moony and loony. Is Sam really facing his doppelganger - and later his tripleganger and possibly googolganger - or is it all just a lunar phase...
...influences on Pixar's new film Up, from Dumbo to The Wizard of Oz, Richard Corliss overlooks another, earlier source of inspiration [May 18]. This is animation pioneer Winsor McCay's 1921 short film, in his Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend series, called The Flying House, in which the protagonist dreams that her husband adds wings and a propeller to their home and flies away into the universe to escape foreclosure. M. Thomas Inge, ASHLAND...
...This is not my story. It’s the life of a boy named Jeffrey, the protagonist in one of the greatest stories ever told. An orphan with nothing, he’s best known as Maniac Magee, the title character from Jerry Spinelli’s timeless Scholastic classic...