Word: gooder
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...scenarios for Yes Man, the Carrey comedy, and Seven Pounds, the Smith drama, could have emerged from the same screenwriting class. Premise: An ordinary man who's lost his wife has become remote from his family and friends. To resolve his ennui, he determines to become a do-gooder - Carrey's Carl Allen by answering in the affirmative to every vagrant request, Smith's Ben Thomas by choosing seven strangers whose lives he can drastically improve - and in the process he finds a new woman to give him hope or assuage his guilt...
...GOODER BACKLASH...
...laughs and even more subversive ones). Roberts gets to parade her luster in evening gowns and bikinis; she amps up the cunning warmth, and we note only in passing that in early middle-age she's starting to frost over into Glenn Close. Hanks, liberated from playing anguished do-gooders, unlocks a lot of raffish energy and gets that famous whine out of his voice. He makes Charlie a larger-than-life, conniving, lascivious ... all right, do-gooder, but one you wouldn't mind sharing a drink or a hot tub with...
...tiny bit is that he managed to be sexy. How can you be playing this weird, overweight guy in galoshes who's socially inept and somehow be a movie star as you're doing it?" It takes an actor who excels at contradiction--a Jewish anti-Semite, a do-gooder drug addict--to pull off the hunky-freak trick. It also helps if he is, in real life, a bit of an oddball...
...sake is not how I personally want to live my life,” Sarkar told me in a recent conversation. “I think an education is meant to be a catalyst for working toward concrete improvements in society.” Sounds like pretty standard do-gooder stuff, right? Well, any amount of time with Sarkar will introduce you to a thoughtful person who is unafraid to challenge certain paradigmatic assumptions. “Social scientists and policymakers sometimes use data as an indestructible science on which to base policy,” Sarkar says...