Word: villains
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...Ebert on Goodfellas: "[Henry Hill] loves it when the head waiters know his name, but he doesn't really have the stuff to be a great villain ... he wants the prizes, but he doesn't want to pay for the tickets. And it's there, on the crux of that paradox, that the movie becomes Scorsese's metaphor for so many modern lives. ... He simply uses organized crime as an arena for a story about a man who likes material things so much that he sells his own soul to buy them...
...American version? I noticed one comic where Batman was fighting a man who could change into a praying mantis, a drill bit, a pterodactyl...They took it back to the '40s, where there wasn't any deep psychological exploration, just a slam-bang fun thing. There's this one villain called Lord Death Man, and his ability is basically to die. But much more importantly, he comes back to life and starts to haunt Batman's dreams. All kinds of wonderful weird things happen that don't get explained...
...Mark Wahlberg) earned his wounds in the sort of battle familiar to action-movie fans: Coming home one night, he found his wife Michelle (Marianthi Evans) and their child murdered. Max caught up with two of the perps but caught only a fleeting glimpse of the fleeing chief villain. (The movie gets its suspense from tracking clues to the third man.) We know that this kind of film introduces wives and kids for the sole purpose of killing them off and turning a loving husband into a revenge machine. You got the same deal in this summer's Death Race...
...Abrams), sci-fi has come full circle back to Frankenstein: we have gained too much power over life and made the body into a mere machine. Plots turn on how bodies can be used as recording devices: corpses are psychically "interrogated"; people's memories are stolen by a villain jamming wires up their noses; a murder victim's optic nerve is hooked up to a TV screen to show the last thing she saw before she died. The humans involved have no more volition than a hard drive being reformatted in the shop...
...these scenarios involve an element largely missing from The X-Files: money. That show quaintly imagined a U.S. government big and competent enough to mastermind global plots. Now the feds are scrambling to keep up with them. In Fringe, the villain is unknown but appears to be connected to a shadowy supercorporation, Massive Dynamic. Working in a decades-old lab, Walter is a link to an era of government hubris, but in the 17 years since he was first locked up, conspiracy has been privatized. He's also a kind of devil's advocate, with the eccentric glee he takes...