Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...film opens promisingly enough, as we are introduced to Robert (McGregor), a recently laid-off janitor with a really bad haircut. After having been replaced by a cheap robot and dumped by his gum-chewing girlfriend within the space of a few hours, our shaggy protagonist is at the end of his rope. During a trippy-freak-out-on-the-bed scene (which bears a strong resemblance to the trippy-freak-out-on-the-bed scene in Trainspotting), Robert comes up with a solution: kidnap his ex-boss' daughter Celine (a painfully typecast Diaz), drive away and improvise from there...
Also less than endearing is the protagonist's penchant for philosophizing about sex. Updike can manage heroes with enough testosterone for entire football teams, even fatalistic ones wearing Depends. But when the hero decides that not only does he like sex, but that sex is the natural and proper center of life, he loses a certain amount of reliability. Even die-hard Updike fans may have difficulty stomaching reflections like the following: "When my erection... had attained full stretch, with my left hand cupped nurturingly about my balls, I admired it--the inverted lavender heart-shape of the glans...
...problem. His workers will not dig a foundation, because they don't want to kill any worms. Why? As Pitt's character is informed: "In a past life, this humble worm could have been your mother." Meanwhile, in Martin Scorsese's Kundun, scheduled to open on Christmas Day, the protagonist muses, "My enemies will be nothing. My friends will be nothing. All will be nothing." This is spoken not morbidly but philosophically--a most peculiar sentiment in a Hollywood film, even one made for a mere $30 million...
...playwright's other works (the fourth act, when done with enough punch, is one of the most brutally painful scenes Shaw ever wrote). As a mentor figure, Henry Higgins is less like the savvy, kindly Caesars and Captain Bluntschlis and more akin to another recurring type of Shavian male protagonist: the loquacious, self-enamored big baby who needs to learn, not teach. However, unlike Jack Tanner and Reverend Morell, Higgins learns nothing, ultimately rejecting the woman's efforts to lead him out of his narcissistic universe into the real world of male-female relations. And therein lies the tragedy: Higgins...
...hummed to a close, I had eaten only one raspberry-kiwi frozen fruit bar. I had had enough time only to decide that I like the peach variety better, as I adore the "real fruit chunks." I had read only one chapter of Bastard Out of Carolina, and the protagonist hadn't even finished sketching out her family history. The impending return of my cousins from work buzzed around my head like an increasingly angered insect, steadily rising in decibel. But the pleasures alone-ness had brought to me over that short afternoon, ephemeral as they may have been...