Word: protagonist
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...song “Quelqu’un m’a dit” accompanying a scene in the recently released “(500) Days of Summer.” The movie, a fluffy Joseph Gordon-Levitt vehicle, takes off from an interesting premise: A pretty female protagonist rejects the labels of a straightforward relationship. For all its pretenses at innovation in the form of jump-cuts and non-linear narrative, though, the final product makes no attempt at exploring the motivations behind that stance at all. The inner struggles through which the main character, or women like...
...they've always enjoyed anatomizing humanity's weak points and turning them into a kind of comedy. The lynch party, composed of Jews and gentiles, that assembles around Larry is full of these caricatures. And Larry was made to be intimidated, ignored, abused. He is a passive protagonist whose plight earns him as much pity as sympathy. So A Serious Man, which has its world premiere tonight at the Toronto Film Festival before opening in theaters Oct. 2, is a rare event in movies, where action is character. It's certainly rare for the Coens, in that this...
...return his affection. Like a dog, Brad certainly knows better, but he’s also this movie’s best friend. Such over-the-top hijinks are appropriate for well-placed minor characters like Brad and Dean, but they can’t make a central protagonist, and this is where the movie falls apart. Peter Gibbons—the programming anti-hero of “Office Space”—worked as a character because his depression and desperation perfectly highlighted the suffocating workplace tedium in which he lived. Joel, by contrast, simply comes...
...kindness of strangers--rose from the streets to Columbia University in two short years. It's a true story, and one that Kidder, the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, crafts into a tale of unspeakable barbarism and unshakable strength. Once he crosses paths with his protagonist, Kidder's narrative loses steam, but he still manages to evoke Deo's sense of dislocation and--especially for a man with "some authority to speak about evil"--his extraordinary capacity for forgiveness...
...Munger, only a teenager when Tully encourages him to turn pro. The classic boxing arc would pit these two against one another in the final act—vitality supplanting experience, in expectedly American fashion—but as Munger emerges as the novel’s other main protagonist, the two barely meet one another again.What at first appears to be an unresolved narrative gives way to something far more beautiful and profoundly troubling. “Fat City” is a novel that changes itself as it moves. Tully struggles, torn between returning to the ring...