Word: protagonist
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...innocence but from noncommittal hipness. James Woods, the movies' definitive Sidney Sleaze, plays a renegade war correspondent, a self-proclaimed weasel with an itchy social conscience. In El Salvador (and, climactically, back in the States), he learns firsthand of atrocity and duplicity in the name of law. Because the protagonist is knowing instead of naive, Salvador never slips into the haranguing righteousness of Platoon. If Salvador nonetheless seems a smaller film, this is because it is content to catalog the sins of power; they do not accumulate dramatically until the final twisting crisis. But it is a fine study...
...screaming, pillaging rape of a village takes the protagonist, Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), from a lush jungle to a stunningly depicted Mayan mecca and back again, as he tries to escape his death-happy captors. A prophecy foretells great and ominous things for him, but his most pressing thought is the rescue of his small son and very pregnant wife from the bottom of a well-cave combo where they were hiding during the sacking of their home. Luckily, nature, the fates, and his supernatural ability to rip arrows out of his torso conspire to help him thwart...
...mission.The galleries are floored with large, polished concrete slabs, the grid mirrored by the skylit paneled ceiling. During a tour of the galleries, one of the architects—Elizabeth Diller—said that she was trying to deal with “the architect as protagonist versus serving as background. We’ve tried to make the architecture a partner to the art.” The architecture isn’t meant to be ignored, and while it certainly complements some of the larger, more powerful pieces, it tends to overwhelm the more delicate works...
Opening the story proper, our historian sets the scene in Amsterdam, 1972. Sheltered, studious, and alienated from the “tough-talking, chain-smoking sophisticates” in the brat cohort of diplomats’ children, the protagonist spends long hours with the 19th century tomes in her father’s library during his frequent absences. She becomes captivated by a “much older volume” that breaks the collection’s uniformity: an enigmatic medieval text marked by a woodcut of a dragon and concealing a collection of yellowing letters...
Borat, the movie’s protagonist, hails from Kazakhstan, a nation which we are told has some of the cleanest prostitutes in central Asia. Cohen himself looks vaguely Muslim (Cohen is actually half-Israeli and half-Welsh) and his character Borat is incredibly out of sync with Western mores. Borat’s blend of misogyny, anti-Semitism, and general backwardness all carefully correspond with American stereotypes of Islam. Importantly, these are not always traits that Americans impute indiscriminately to all other cultures...