Yes, exactly that. Even if there was a street for it to have come from, it would have been obvious to the character that there was a bus barreling down on her. (Final Destination movies are cheesy, but kind of fun in their cheesiness)
Curious, I did a little googling. It seems I’m not alone. Paul Schrader himself says he wrote Travis as an antihero.
Also, numerous cites consider him the quintessential antihero:
Hmm. OK, well, I stand corrected.
<team-america-trainingmontage.mpg>
Amazing! He shoots better, kungfus better, even shaves better.
Well done, golf clap.
aka the spring-loaded cat.
This may or may not fit my stated thread topic, but it is my thread, so…
I’ve noticed that basically every show made in the late 60s/early 70s had a computer dating episode, including I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, Andy Griffith, and Green Acres. But it no longer merits a special episode because “computer dating” is now just a normal lart of everyday life.
I once made someone pass a chili bean out their nose. Does that count?
Who would be your go-to example of an antivillain?
Maybe Marv in Sin City?
Similarly, cop shows from that era often made a big deal about having the detectives use a computer to figure out who their suspect is (or at least narrowing it down to a short list) by searching their database of everyone’s rap sheets based on what they know about the prep. Of course today we see cops using computers and searching databases of known criminals, but it’s just portrayed as an everyday part of their job, not something we’re supposed to be impressed by.
I think today maybe the “Zoom in! Enhance!” trope might be the modern day version of the “Let’s go to the crime computer!” trope of old.
It’s not dead, maybe not near dead, perhaps not even sick:
Person or people are in a darkened room, tiptoeing around, afraid of being noticed by bad guys or monsters, and a cat jumps out from some hiding place scaring the people out of their wits.
The enhance thing is a hoot. A washed out B&W image of a person where their head occupies about 4x4 pixels in the image can be enhanced until their face is shown in high resolution.
Then there’s also the supertech who presses a key and a bunch of C source code flies by on the screen, or maybe just a hex dump, and they immediately understand how this code works, everything it does and they take about 3 seconds to change it and gain access to every computer on earth.
That swirling harp plays the whole-tone scale. Because all the notes are equidistant, it has no tonal center, and this gives a disorienting effect.
I loathe this…drives me up the wall. I remember an episode of House, in which he kept seeking a bigger and bigger screen on which to watch a laproscopic video, and by the time he had it projected on a huge screen, it somehow got much sharper and clearer. I was almost yelling at the screen “That’s not how that works! It’ll be more pixillated!”
Speaking of computers, I haven’t watched any of the American Law & Orders in a long time (though the Toronto one is finding its footing lately, I think), do they still make up names of social media sites? “I took at look at the victim’s Facespace page…”
One of the newer older shows I’ve been rewatching is Early Edition. One episode not only involves enhancing an old photo but it takes several hours for the computer to do it for dramatic plot reasons.
So I guess by that definition an anti-villain is a character who does villainous things, but is not a stereotypical mustache twirling Hollywood villain who’s motivation is just “I’m evil”.
My go to example would probably be Little Bill in Unforgiven, played by Gene Hackman. He clearly doesn’t think of himself as the villain, he thinks he’s the hero protecting his town from hired killers, but he clearly is the villain (in as much there is a villain, one of the many things that movie does really well is portraying absolute complete moral ambiguity. Whether or not Little Bill is the villain there are clearly no heroes)
I checked on Wikipedia and it has a list of shows that featured speed dating. All except for one was between 2000 and 2010. The exception is The Angry Birds Movie 2.
I was thinking of what he did in the movie Hannibal, where he chose to sever his own arm rather than Clarice’s.
I did one in 1985, when my late mother (a lifelong smoker who fell completely for the tobacco lobby’s claims that smoking was harmless) read in the paper that Pittsburgh Pirates announcer Bob Prince (also a lifelong smoker) had died of throat cancer, declared: “That was from all that yelling!”