Word: protagonists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...return his affection. Like a dog, Brad certainly knows better, but he’s also this movie’s best friend. Such over-the-top hijinks are appropriate for well-placed minor characters like Brad and Dean, but they can’t make a central protagonist, and this is where the movie falls apart. Peter Gibbons—the programming anti-hero of “Office Space”—worked as a character because his depression and desperation perfectly highlighted the suffocating workplace tedium in which he lived. Joel, by contrast, simply comes...
...kindness of strangers--rose from the streets to Columbia University in two short years. It's a true story, and one that Kidder, the Pulitzer Prize--winning author of Mountains Beyond Mountains, crafts into a tale of unspeakable barbarism and unshakable strength. Once he crosses paths with his protagonist, Kidder's narrative loses steam, but he still manages to evoke Deo's sense of dislocation and--especially for a man with "some authority to speak about evil"--his extraordinary capacity for forgiveness...
...prolific Boom period of the 60s and 70s—wrote “Hopscotch” in 1963, after his move to France to escape dictator Juan Domingo Perón, and its Left Bank influences are clear. In stunningly tactile prose, the novel follows pseudo-autobiographical protagonist Horacio Oliveira, also an Argentinean expatriate, through his nights of jazz, cigarette smoke, and intellectual conversation in Paris with a group of friends dubbed the “Serpent Club...
Fusing the genres of introspective drama and explosive action calls for a delicate balance, but director Neill Blomkamp’s protagonist in “District 9”—who becomes a human-alien hybrid—reflects the success of such half-breeds. After being assigned to assist in relocating 2 million alien refugees from their city slum to a distant concentration camp, Wikus van de Merwe (the impressive Sharlto Copley) is forced to help the aliens escape the planet. With the same seemingly magnetic pull of District 9—the aforementioned slum...
...Munger, only a teenager when Tully encourages him to turn pro. The classic boxing arc would pit these two against one another in the final act—vitality supplanting experience, in expectedly American fashion—but as Munger emerges as the novel’s other main protagonist, the two barely meet one another again.What at first appears to be an unresolved narrative gives way to something far more beautiful and profoundly troubling. “Fat City” is a novel that changes itself as it moves. Tully struggles, torn between returning to the ring...