Word: protagonist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...prolific Boom period of the 60s and 70s—wrote “Hopscotch” in 1963, after his move to France to escape dictator Juan Domingo Perón, and its Left Bank influences are clear. In stunningly tactile prose, the novel follows pseudo-autobiographical protagonist Horacio Oliveira, also an Argentinean expatriate, through his nights of jazz, cigarette smoke, and intellectual conversation in Paris with a group of friends dubbed the “Serpent Club...
Fusing the genres of introspective drama and explosive action calls for a delicate balance, but director Neill Blomkamp’s protagonist in “District 9”—who becomes a human-alien hybrid—reflects the success of such half-breeds. After being assigned to assist in relocating 2 million alien refugees from their city slum to a distant concentration camp, Wikus van de Merwe (the impressive Sharlto Copley) is forced to help the aliens escape the planet. With the same seemingly magnetic pull of District 9—the aforementioned slum...
...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...