Word: outcasts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...ground down by sinners; Diary of a Country Priest and The Trial of Joan of Arc depict a state of grace under pressure. But all his attractive heroes, whether explicitly religious or not, are trudging up their own private Calvary. In Mouchette, the beautifully pitiless story of a teenage outcast so maladroit that she must try three times before she succeeds in drowning herself, the girl's schoolmates sing one refrain as if it were a prayer: "Hope--for more hope." Bresson's films, handmade and precious, gave viewers hope for a more exact, more exalted form of moviemaking...
...Japan, where the Pokemon were born, Ash is called Satoshi; and Satoshi was made in the image of his creator, Satoshi Tajiri, a young outcast who, as a boy living just outside Tokyo, collected insects and other tiny creatures of field, pond and forest. In a nation of ultraconformists, he was a misfit who didn't even dream of college. His father tried to get him a job as an electrical-utility repairman. He refused. No one expected him to go very far, even when he came up with the game after six trying years. But it is Tajiri...
...home to the pastel-colored suburbia below. The boy, dubbed Edward Scissorhands, tries to fit in this retro-'50s environment and falls for a the Avon lady's daugher, a local cheerleader (Winona Ryder). Adhering to the fairy tale style, true happiness is not to be had by an outcast like Edward, and he is soon driven back to his castle by angry, frightened townspeople...
...Then where, among the frustrations and disappointments of American life, can one find some kind of happiness? Mendes offers an answer in the character of Ricky (excellently played by Wes Bentley), Burnham's teenage neighbor. A strange outcast, Ricky videotapes everything "because it is beautiful." Beauty, for him, lies in stripping away any layer from a thing until it is totally naked. He uses his video camera to get to the essence of a subject. That is, he struggles to see things as they are, while his parents and neighbors distract themselves with various illusions. Right before his death, Burnham...
Columbine High, where social-outcast status turned to murderous outrage, didn't create these series, but it lent them urgency, focusing as each does on that basic high school and Hollywood concern: popularity. Set in America's laboratories of tyranny, empathizing with misfits, the shows purvey the myth that much as there were suddenly no Nazis in Germany after V-E day, there are now apparently almost no former popular high school kids. "I very much identified myself as an outsider [in high school]," says Katims. "I was king of the geeks," says Manchester Prep creator Roger Kumble. "I totally...