Word: antiheroism
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...birth of the nation is not an altogether blessed event in this canonically loose novel about the Revolutionary War. Patriotism masks hypocrisy and greed. The Founding Fathers cloak private agendas and petty motives in lofty ideals. After decades of antihero worship and historical revision, are there still readers who can be jolted or amused by caricatures of national legends behaving like lesser mortals? Yet the author seems to have had a chortling good time burlesquing the past in a style that swings between Henry Fielding and Mel Brooks...
...movie execs as venal, corrupt sleazebags. Like most moralists, of course, the senator was too narrow-minded to look past the fact that the show contained a bunch of dirty words. But one standout episode also contained a blistering rejoinder to Lieberman's kind of moralizing. The show's antihero, movie producer Peter Dragon, defends his sex-and- blood-soaked movies to a sanctimonious senator at a congressional hearing...
...task facing Bret Easton Ellis at the end of the '80s. For Ellis, the death of feeling among hip young urbanites was a criminal act. And so, in his black-comic tour de force novel American Psycho, Ellis pushed past parody into nightmare farce. He created, in his antihero Patrick Bateman, a moneyman with a true killer instinct: mergers and acquisitions become murders and executions. "I have all the characteristics of a human being," Patrick (Christian Bale) says in Mary Harron's handsome, icily funny film version, "but not a single identifiable human emotion, except for greed and disgust...
Vladimir Putin's election as president has produced a new antihero in Russian politics. Gleb Pavlovsky, an owlish political consultant with a taste for casual clothes and an abiding reputation for dirty tricks, is being hailed as a genius by the winners and a cynical villain by the losers. The communists, who claim the March 26 polls were corrupted, say Pavlovsky fixed Putin's first-round win, just as a few months ago aides to Yevgeni Primakov accused Pavlovsky of a devastating smear campaign against their man and his main ally, Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov. His admirers are equally categorical...
Ghost Dog finds its behavioral rhythm in the commanding stillness and loping gait of Whitaker, the star of Bird and director of Waiting to Exhale, who perfectly embodies Jarmusch's anachronistic antihero. The director knew that Whitaker had nailed the part one day when they met to talk about a complex swordplay scene on Ghost Dog's roof. "So we're walking from my loft in the east Bowery to East River Park," Jarmusch recalls. "Forest has his sword in his knapsack. We get to the park, and he says, 'Let me just show you a few things...