Word: antiheroes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Layer Cake features, yes, an antihero with no name and no backstory. He's simply called XXXX in the credits, and he's played by a gelid Daniel Craig. He is a) a drug dealer and b) a man who, having made his pile, wishes to abandon his life of crime and start hanging about at posh country clubs. But prosperous as he is, he is still only middle management in the criminal pastry shop. He has obligations to his masters, chief of which is to help them recover a vast shipment of ecstasy pills that have gone missing somewhere...
...taste for opera (The Damnation of Faust naturally comes up in his conversations) and for rare books. We don't know that he reads them, but, by golly, he has them--housed in a burnished, glowingly lighted library. You can practically feel the sweat of desire forming on our antihero's lip when he penetrates this lair...
DIED. JOHN RAITT, 88, Broadway baritone; of complications from pneumonia; in Los Angeles. To a later generation, he was known as the father of pop-blues singer Bonnie Raitt, but he became an instant star back in 1945 as Billy Bigelow, the antihero of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (their showstopping 7-min.-long Soliloquy was written for him). Raitt also starred in Broadway's Carnival in Flanders and the 1954 hit The Pajama Game...
...would not be a stretch to say that for the past century or so, serious art has been at war with happiness. In 1824, Beethoven completed the "Ode to Joy." In 1962, novelist Anthony Burgess used it in A Clockwork Orange as the favorite piece of his ultraviolent antihero. If someone titles an art movie Happiness, it is a good bet that it will be--as the 1998 Todd Solondz film was--about deeply unhappy people, including a telephone pervert and a pedophile...
DIED. WILL EISNER, 87, comic-book pioneer; in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. The person after whom comics' most prestigious award is named, Eisner helped launch a company in 1937 that created Dollman and Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. Later he created the Spirit, a witty antihero with no superpowers who roamed back alleys in search of bad guys, and wrote one of the first graphic novels, about a Bronx, N.Y., slumlord, A Contract with God. "My interest is not the superhero," he said, "but the little man who struggles to survive in the city...