Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...MOOR'S LAST SIGH (Pantheon). Salman Rushdie's first novel since The Satanic Verses exuberantly details the protagonist's absurd fall from the grace of a wealthy Indian childhood into the hands of a madman who plans to kill him once the story ends--an interesting motif for this particular author. But the hero survives, and Rushdie's bountiful comic narrative triumphs...
...scouting report on Jerry is that he's good at superficial friendships, not so hot at more intimate ones. The game plan of writer-director Cameron Crowe's intricate, insinuating comedy is to get his protagonist into the end zone of emotional maturity with no more than minor injuries. For a guy like Jerry, this is pretty much a Hail Mary play. For an actor like Cruise, it is a great broken-field...
...damning contradictions. But merely watching him up there, at last being called to account for his actions in his own words, provided its own sort of climax. It was as if, after several acts of a melodrama with a convoluted plot and a cast of thousands, the protagonist finally took center stage...
This is just the kind of entrepreneurial boldness that makes us such avid readers of the biographies and autobiographies of people who get rich quick, and one wonders why it has taken Hollywood so long to convert such types from shadowy antagonist--their usual role in thrillers--to shiny protagonist. One's next thought, of course, is the hope that Ransom does not signal the beginning of a trend...
...Owens, the protagonist of A Regular Guy, is an Oregon geneticist-tycoon vaguely modeled on Bill Gates or Steve Jobs (the author's brother). As a student he has had an affair with Mary, an earthbound girl, who becomes pregnant. In the book's signal exchange Tom tells her, "I can't have a baby now, Mare. I've just started something. I've got to give it time." Of course, Mary has just started something too, and that will be her destiny...