Word: villain
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...great works are those which transcend those expectations. Runaway Bride, unfortunately, is a genre piece that does its transcending in all the wrong places. It begins, intriguingly enough, as a modern day fairy tale. In any good fairy tale, evil is summarized and allegorized by a single villain, but Runaway Bride splits evil in two and then sets its male and female halves at one another's throats. Julia Roberts as Maggie Carpenter is everything a man can fear in a woman: pretty and sweet but a heartbreaker of the first order. Richard Gere plays her male alter...
...than potential smooching and hand holding. Rowling has been dropping increasingly pointed promises that the four remaining Harry Potter books will turn darker than the first three. "There will be deaths," she says. "I am writing about someone, Voldemort, who is evil. And rather than make him a pantomime villain, the only way to show how evil it is to take a life is to kill someone the reader cares about." Can she possibly mean (oh!) Hermione, (no!) Ron or (gasp!) Harry himself? Rowling discloses nothing, but she does note that the children who contact her "are always most worried...
READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP Nazis are old. Russians are spent. We've picked on the Arabs enough. Hollywood is turning to a villain who can really inspire millennial fear: Satan. And studios are rolling out some big stars to work with...
...write and star in Sprockets, a feature film based on the forbiddingly avant-garde German talk-show host Dieter that he played on SNL. Of course, Myers will have some backup. Reportedly, one version of the script for Sprockets had a role for Baywatch mastermind David Hasselhoff as a villain who, on tour in Germany, kidnaps Dieter's monkey...
...good or bad that as viewers come out of a horror movie, they can't decide exactly what happens in the final shot (hint: recall what the witch made the kids do) and who the villain is (one guess: the missing filmmaker)? We'll say good, that ambiguity can coexist with atrocity. The film also plays upon the horror genre's attraction-repulsion for the filmgoer: what-happens-next? vs. why-am-I-watching-this? It makes canny use of dramatic longueurs. It's scary even when nothing happens, because something awful might, and, eek!, right now! Anticipation...