And then some...

Yeah, I know. Someone said my list of fav characters is way too short. Well, maybe I just can’t recall all of them. I’m always reading a book. Sometimes I read just because I know that in the end, the knowledge I’m putting inside my head is going to influence me in some way later on. Sometimes, its just because I can’t sit still in a place without reading a book.

I have discovered that the stories I read are far more important to me than the characters that carry them. Probably, this is born out of the knowledge that they are a creation of the author’s mind and he couldn’t care less if the character is called Marlene or Angel. So I think that’s why I don’t store up lotsa names from the fiction I’ve read.

But I love characters. I love the baddies too. Sometimes, I love the bad guys more than I do the saints coz they get to say all the cool lines and all. I sometimes think Harry Callahan in Dirty Harry was given all the lines that the bad guys should have been saying but again, that film was done in 1971. Backs then, the bad guys were written as dumb. The hero would come around and work hard at looking cool, as though looking cool was the most important thing. Clint Eastwood’s “Come on, make my day” was supposed to be some evil genius’ line. Well. The horse has already bolted…

Some of my best bad guys ever are Denzel Washington’s Detective Alonzo Harris in Training Day, Spacey’s Roger “Verbal” Kint in The Usual Suspects, Robert Patrick’s T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (God, I went around school with my books marked T-1000) and Linda Blair as Satan in The Exorcist. This was the first movie to really scare the living out of me. I had seen Thriller as a kid and thought it was scary. When I was in P6, I sneaked in and watched part of The Exorcist; it put me off horrors forever. But I could not forget the way that chick did her thing.

I liked Nuclear Man in Superman IV: Quest for Peace for his strength and for making it clear to me that the man of steel could get his backside whipped. Incidentally, it was Gene Hackman who did his voice. That voice full of disdain for everything that was not as perfect like him. Jim Carrey in The Mask is really a freak. That dude needs help. Yesterday. No wonder he is always smiling like a fool. No one smiles like that and claims he’s fine up there.