Word: protagonists
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...Clockmaker is Tavernier's first film, and although it meanders too much for comfort, it does a very difficult thing very well: it draws us so completely into the protagonist's search that all the action seems to be filtered through Descombes's rather bleary eyes. Every scene is suffused with a soft yellowish light that illuminates without romanticizing. So also our view of the action is colored by the clockmaker's own perception of an ugly but finally acceptable truth...
...taken much more seriously. The Maysles followed a group of four door-to-door bible salesman in their journey through New England and Florida. In the breadth of the settings, there is a suggestion of something grand, perhaps a statement about loneliness in America. When Paul Brennan, the protagonist, tells his companions that the bible business must be good in Alaska, one is reminded of the scene in Five Easy Pieces where a hitchhiker proclaims the virtues of cleanliness in Alaska to Jack Nicholson...
...film also throws into high melodramatic relief certain recognizable human truths: the shock of sudden loss, the panic of the effort to recoup, the mourning and guilt that blind the protagonist to a multitude of suspicious signs as he seeks expiation and a chance to relive his life. In a sense, the movie offers viewers the opportunity to do the same thing-by going back to a more romantic era of the cinema and the simple, touching pleasures denied the audience by the current antiromantic spirit of the movies...
Voyage au Bout de la Nuit (translated as Journey to the End of Night) is as un-Proustian as a novel can be. Its scenes are the battlefields of World War I, hospital wards, lunatic asylums. The mysterious author's protagonist-narrator is a most reluctant soldier and postwar wanderer named Bardamu. Murderers, wife beaters and abortionists appear as ordinary characters in Journey. Its language-French jangled into street argot-is a kind of frenzied shorthand of pain, terror and hate...
...most disturbing thing about the book is its lack of compassion. The charm of Dune lies in showing how an emperor can remain human despite the demands his work places on him. In Children of Dune the protagonist, Paul Atreides' son, takes the road his father would not, and following the visions shown by the spice, forsakes his humanity completely. For some science fiction writers this device has worked admirably: the hero who loses everything to save the race, notably in Cordwainer Smith's "The Crime and Glory of Commander Suzdahl," but it falls singularly flat here. It seems that...