Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Blind Ambition has good intentions; this mini-series is even more ambitious than its protagonist. By tracing the career of White House Counsel Dean (Martin Sheen), the show can touch on virtually every Watergate headline: the Huston plan, the Saturday Night Massacre, the plumbers' dirty tricks, the Nixon pardon. Unfortunately, Writer Stanley R. Greenberg (Pueblo) retells the story without regard for the niceties of strong character development or well-paced storytelling. In the entire series his only theatrical flourish is the use of a flashback format in the first half. Besides being a TV cliché (especially in nonfiction...
...CAST IS uniformly superb and convincingly British. Redford looks like he arrived straight from a rugby match at Wembley Stadium, while Hunt, his face set in an eternal mischievous grin, could be in Eton taunting the protagonist of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Stout and full-faced, Clemenson is the show's most consistently hysterics-inducing actor...
...does, but we're still scared to death). You gotta credit Alan J. Pakula though, who here, as in All the President's Men and the Parallax View, conveys the someone-is-always-watching-you motif with incomparable creepiness. Donald Sutherland is an intelligent, if pallid detective, but the protagonist is Jane all the way, the frustrated hooker trapped by the emotional and physical perils of her profession. Her best performance to date...
Fuentes, as in his others works, does not develop his characters any better than he explains why they exist or what exactly they are doing. Maldonado is the only three-dimensional protagonist--a confused middle-aged stud who resembles a Velasco painting. Maldonado's triad of women--the seductive Mary, loyal Rebecca and unattainable Sarah--fill the traditional female novelistic roles of whore, mother and virgin. Maldonado's purposeless orders come from two spies, the nationless Timon and the clove-smelling Lebanese Ayub, and a Mexican economics professor Bernstein and the bullying Director General. The only thing which binds...
Bloom's troubles begin with his characters. The protagonist is a human being named Perscors, whom we follow from earth to the planet Lucifer. Unfortunately, the hero has no personality to begin with, and picks up none along the way--Bloom just seems to forget to give him one. He rampages across Lucifer, a sword in each hand, splattering limbs and skulls across the countryside, but earns less sympathy from the reader than even such legendary softies as Conan the Barbarian...