Nice Guys of Filmland #1-2

I’ve done lists in the past that concentrate on people who do violence and murder: The 50 Biggest Movie Badasses (on dear departed Vox, possibly due for revival), Dangerous Bitches (on hiatus, possibly forever), TV Badasses (lying fallow for now), but here’s a different thing: The Nicest Guys in the Movies, by which I mean the characters, not the actors.  The list will go until it’s over, and, as I say every time but nobody ever listens, these are in no particular order.  Shall we begin?

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1. Fezzik (Andre the Giant)—The Princess Bride

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Sure, the first time you see him, he’s helping to kidnap a woman, and then later he tries to kill the hero.  But he never really seems into it, and it’s later revealed that he is in fact the stereotypical gentle giant, who fell into a life of thuggery because there are so few opportunities for a huge, slow-witted man.  But he has hidden facets: he loves to make rhymes, for instance, and he is warm-hearted and generous by nature when he doesn’t have a shrill little Sicilian man telling him what to do.  This is Andre the Giant’s only significant film role, but so much of the man’s simple charm shows through in his admittedly amateurish performance that you can’t help but fall in love with this lumbering teddy bear.

Nicest moments: Catching Buttercup when she leaps at the end: “Hello, lady,” challenging The Man in Black to a proper hand-to-hand duel because ambushing him didn’t seem “sportsmanlike”, rhyming with Inigo.

2.  Ned Plimpton (Owen Wilson)—The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

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Ned is a lost little boy, so desperate for a male role-model that he latches onto a sonofabitch like Steve Zissou, a down-at-his-heels once-famous oceanographer who had a relationship with Ned’s mother years ago.  When Steve offers him a spot on his crew, Ned takes a leave of absense from his pilot job and joins his maybe-father.  Zissou and Ned slowly form a bond over the course of the movie, even though neither one really believes they are related.  In fact, (SPOILERS) it is revealed that Zissou is infertile.  Ned screws up, he lets pirates board the ship because he’s busy romancing Cate Blanchett’s super-cute (and pregnant) reporter, and he clashes with Willem Dafoe’s Zissou-worshipping first mate, but he remains a likeable, simple, nice guy throughout.  When (SPOILERS) Ned dies, in the obligatory Wes Anderson moment of senseless tragedy, the movie feels his loss in a major way, and Steve Zissou himself is changed, for the good, possibly forever.  Owen Wilson himself plays against type as this easy-going southern gentleman with not a hint of irony about him, and in doing so creates one of the sweetest and plain nicest characters in the Anderson stable.

Nicest moments: Being read to by the reporter, helping design the new Zissou flag, convincing Zissou to keep going when he’s ready to give up, giving Jane a necklace made with dental floss.

Paragraphs without Context: "Slape"

Reg Slape spoke with an English accent, but not one of those hoity-toity ones.  It was an accent that spoke of years of chain-smoking and violence.  Whiskey, rage, and blood.  He wore simple black suits and white shirts.  Sometimes he put on a red tie, other times he just decorated his shirt-front with blood-spatter as it rained from his pummeling fists and carving stilleto.

He wasn’t a psychopath; he just didn’t give a fuck.

He owned the night.  When he went out on the town, people got hurt.  He feared nothing.  He owed nothing.  He took what he wanted, and if a fellow didn’t like it, a fellow was going to swallow his own teeth.

Reg Slape was everything that Ogden Stover wasn’t, and vice-versa.  Which one was the invention?  Slape couldn’t be bothered to give a shit; Stover pondered this question deep into the night, as he washed the results of the evening’s activites from his skin, tended to ripped knuckles, bleached gore-tainted shirts.

“It doesn’t matter,” Stover would say to himself in the mirror sometimes, as he suited up.  “You’re fucking right about that,” Slape would say back moments later, the transformation complete.  “Stop being a pussy.”

They met only during these brief moments, as one became the other.  Slape never asserted himself while the sun was out, and Stover never interfered while Slape was doing business.

Sometimes, Stover wondered what would happen if Slape ever became dissatisfied with this arrangement.  Sometimes Slape wondered too, but thinking about it only made his head hurt and wound up costing somebody a visit to the ER.

What would happen?

One day, both of them were going to find out.

This day, in fact.  The day Stover’s wife made a very bad decision, and the day Slape decided to do something about it.

therealcherilyn replied to your post: therealcherilyn replied to your post:…

well, it would serve you well to fucking remember this next time. now, where’s the dirty limerick? YOU OWE ME.

A woman named Cherilyn loved the cock.
She’d suck on it daily and ‘round the clock.
          In seed she was so covered,
          And so frequently smothered,
Her common attire was a painters’ smock.

You’re welcome.