Word: protagonist
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...Shrek”)—immediately calls to mind an idealized 1950s America. White picket fences and pink-lipsticked Stepford alien wives make up the charming atmosphere of their small-town utopia. The film acquires all the makings of a sci-fi romantic comedy when Lem, the teenage protagonist voiced by Justin Long (of Mac commercial and “He’s Just Not That Into You” fame), reveals his crush on Neera (Jessica Biel). But their budding romance is complicated when American astronaut Chuck Baker (voiced by Dwayne “The Rock?...
Rosero’s choice of name for his protagonist puts us in mind of another famous first-person narrator and survivor of catastrophe: Herman Melville’s Ishmael, who lives to tell the tale in “Moby Dick.” Melville’s epilogue is taken from the book of Job: “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” Like Job, Rosero’s Ismael has no part in the processes governing the destruction of his life but is forced to take up the challenge...
Michael “Big Mike” Oher—the protagonist of “The Blind Side”—has a GPA of 0.6 when he first shows up at Wingate Christian High School in Tennessee. His mother is a crack addict he hasn’t seen for years and his father is nonexistent. He carries one extra shirt around with him in a plastic bag. Some nights he sleeps on a stoop, some nights in the school gym, some nights on his friend Steven’s couch...
...Some bloggers have wondered if it isn't simply in the French blood to root for an underdog taking on authority figures. Generations of French children have been enamored with traditional Guignol puppet shows, in which the protagonist, Guignol, fights with a rotten, bumbling policeman. The nation is also obsessed with the comic-book hero Asterix, a puny but cunning Gaul warrior who always gets the best of Julius Caesar's Roman armies despite being overmatched and outnumbered. (Read "Asterix at 50: A French Comic Hero Conquers the World...
...Judge me, you bitch!” yells Test Subject #20 at the female protagonist of “Brief Interviews with Hideous Men.” Played earnestly by John Krasinski—who also directs the movie—Test Subject #20 (real name: Ryan) is just one of many confused and impetuous males to find themselves uncomfortably put on the spot by Ivy League graduate student named Sara. Krasinski’s eponymous adaptation of a 1999 short story collection by the late David Foster Wallace takes the blunt emotional starkness of the written interviews and puts...