Magnificent Bastard/Film: Difference between revisions

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* [[Tim Curry|Dr. Frank N Furter]] from the ''[[Rocky Horror Picture Show]]'' is this at times. He's able to manipulate two people whom he's barely met (IE: [[Too Dumb to Live|Brad & Janet]]) into sleeping with him, tricks said people into eating the remains of someone he killed out of pure spite ([[Stealth Pun|Meatloaf, anyone?]]), and FINALLY brainwashes not only Brad and Janet, but also his groupie Columbia and his own creation Rocky into performing a floorshow with him. All the while, for the most part, maintaining a very charismatic appeal to him.
* [[Tim Curry|Dr. Frank N Furter]] from the ''[[Rocky Horror Picture Show]]'' is this at times. He's able to manipulate two people whom he's barely met (IE: [[Too Dumb to Live|Brad & Janet]]) into sleeping with him, tricks said people into eating the remains of someone he killed out of pure spite ([[Stealth Pun|Meatloaf, anyone?]]), and FINALLY brainwashes not only Brad and Janet, but also his groupie Columbia and his own creation Rocky into performing a floorshow with him. All the while, for the most part, maintaining a very charismatic appeal to him.
* Speaking of Tim Curry, in ''[[Clue]]'' he plays Mr. Body's butler, Wadsworth, {{spoiler|actually the ''real'' Mr. Boddy}}, who turns out to be a ruthless blackmailer who is blackmailing every guest in the house. Having lured them to the manor, he used a body double to fake his own death as a decoy before manipulating every guest to murder his former co-conspirators and destroy the extra evidence so he no longer has to worry about their treachery. After having every impediment to his schemes killed, he reveals he knows the guilt of every single guest and plots to continue blackmailing all of them. Despite his villainy, he conducts himself with total charm and a dapper congeniality, pleasant even after he's been shot.
* Speaking of Tim Curry, in ''[[Clue]]'' he plays Mr. Body's butler, Wadsworth, {{spoiler|actually the ''real'' Mr. Boddy}}, who turns out to be a ruthless blackmailer who is blackmailing every guest in the house. Having lured them to the manor, he used a body double to fake his own death as a decoy before manipulating every guest to murder his former co-conspirators and destroy the extra evidence so he no longer has to worry about their treachery. After having every impediment to his schemes killed, he reveals he knows the guilt of every single guest and plots to continue blackmailing all of them. Despite his villainy, he conducts himself with total charm and a dapper congeniality, pleasant even after he's been shot.
* In ''[[Heathers]]'', Jason "JD" Dean is a rebellious teenager who swoons the heroine Veronica with his bad boy image by scaring Ram and Kurt by firing blanks at them in the high school cafeteria. JD convinces Veronica to jointly prank Heather Chandler with a mystery drink, not informing Veronica that he switched her concoction with drain cleaner. When Heather dies, they cover it up by forging a suicide note. JD follows this up by having Veronica lure Kurt and Ram into the woods with the offer of a threeway, then fatally shooting them both and make it appear as a Suicide Pact between two secret homosexual lovers, tricking Veronica by telling her that he's using special "Ich Lüge" bullets. JD also facilitates Heather Duke's rise to prominence in order to have every student in the school sign a petition for a mass gathering. JD intends to blow up the whole school with a bomb stolen from his father's demolition company and frame the entire thing as a mass suicide, believing he's doing them all a favor by sending them to heaven with no social differences to fight over. After Veronica dismantles his bomb, JD follows her outside to compliment her spirit and blow himself up in front of her.
* [[Chicago|Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr Billy Flynn]].
* From ''Thick As Thieves'' we have [[Morgan Freeman|Keith Ripley]], a master thief who has been manipulating the steps of Miami thief Gabriel Martin ([[Antonio Banderas]]) from beginning to end, in order to pull off a heist for some Faberge Eggs from a high security vault, and he does this with so much ''class'' that you have to just love him.
* From ''Thick As Thieves'' we have [[Morgan Freeman|Keith Ripley]], a master thief who has been manipulating the steps of Miami thief Gabriel Martin ([[Antonio Banderas]]) from beginning to end, in order to pull off a heist for some Faberge Eggs from a high security vault, and he does this with so much ''class'' that you have to just love him.
* Lacenaire, the poet, playwright and murderer from the French movie classic ''Children of Paradise'' is an outstanding example of this trope. He's proudly evil ("I'll hold my head high, until it falls into the basket"), spends the second half of the movie manipulating events even when they don't go his own way and treating the other characters in the movie as if they are figures from his plays, is charming and foppish to the point of dandyism (in the original sense of the word, he lives during the era when the term was coined), he's witty and calm even when the lesser villain, the Count of Montray, has him bodily ejected from a theater and he gets even with the count with first a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] and then a [[Badass|Crowning Moment Of Badass]] that must be seen to be believed. His real life namesake and counterpart was pretty salty himself, holding all Paris spellbound during his murder trial and inspiring writers like Baudelaire and Dostoevsky, who used him as one of his models for Raskolnikov in ''Crime and Punishment.''
* Lacenaire, the poet, playwright and murderer from the French movie classic ''Children of Paradise'' is an outstanding example of this trope. He's proudly evil ("I'll hold my head high, until it falls into the basket"), spends the second half of the movie manipulating events even when they don't go his own way and treating the other characters in the movie as if they are figures from his plays, is charming and foppish to the point of dandyism (in the original sense of the word, he lives during the era when the term was coined), he's witty and calm even when the lesser villain, the Count of Montray, has him bodily ejected from a theater and he gets even with the count with first a [[Crowning Moment of Awesome]] and then a [[Badass|Crowning Moment Of Badass]] that must be seen to be believed. His real life namesake and counterpart was pretty salty himself, holding all Paris spellbound during his murder trial and inspiring writers like Baudelaire and Dostoevsky, who used him as one of his models for Raskolnikov in ''Crime and Punishment.''
* More like [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Magnificent Basterd]], Standartenfuhrer (Col.) Hans Landa, aka The Jew Hunter of ''[[Inglourious Basterds]]'' steals the show with his awesomeness and magnificence. Despite being a brutal, sadistic maniac tasked with searching all of France for Jews in hiding, his wit, intelligence, romanticism, and charisma make him the real star of the show, not Raine and his Nazi-hunting Basterds. By the end of the film {{spoiler|he's managed to take credit for killing the Nazi high command and ending the war in Europe, and got a nice seaside house in Nantucket on the side, all while allowing everyone else to do the work for him. The only hitch in the otherwise flawless execution of his plan is the swastika permanently carved into his forehead and Raine's shit on his chest.}} [[Quentin Tarantino]] has remarked that Hans Landa might be the greatest character he's ever written, and considering this is the guy who created [[Scary Black Man|''Jules '''Fuckin''' Winnfield'']], that's saying something.
* More like [[Incredibly Lame Pun|Magnificent Basterd]], Standartenfuhrer (Col.) Hans Landa, aka The Jew Hunter of ''[[Inglourious Basterds]]'' steals the show with his awesomeness and magnificence. Despite being a brutal, sadistic maniac tasked with searching all of France for Jews in hiding, his wit, intelligence, romanticism, and charisma make him the real star of the show, not Raines and his Nazi-hunting Basterds. By the end of the film {{spoiler|he's managed to take credit for killing the Nazi high command and ending the war in Europe, and got a nice seaside house in Nantucket on the side, all while allowing everyone else to do the work for him. The only hitch in the otherwise flawless execution of his plan is the swastika permanently carved into his forehead and Raines' shit on his chest.}} [[Quentin Tarantino]] has remarked that Hans Landa might be the greatest character he's ever written, and considering this is the guy who created [[Scary Black Man|''Jules '''Fuckin''' Winnfield'']], that's saying something.
** This character was so complex and such a [[Incredibly Lame Pun|magnificent basterd]] that we are all essentially rooting for a man called the fucking "Jew Hunter." He even says that he ''likes'' his nickname, because he feels he's done everything in his power to earn it. {{spoiler|Until later, when he reveals to Lt. Aldo Raine that he hates the nickname, and was likely just making the statement as a manipulation tactic.}}
** This character was so complex and such a [[Incredibly Lame Pun|magnificent basterd]] that we are all essentially rooting for a man called the fucking "Jew Hunter." He even says that he ''likes'' his nickname, because he feels he's done everything in his power to earn it. {{spoiler|Until later, when he reveals to Lt. Aldo Raines that he hates the nickname, and was likely just making the statement as a manipulation tactic.}}
** Aldo "The Apache" Raines is the head of the Basterds. A ruthless, charismatic soldier who intends on tearing down the Nazis, Aldo leads his men behind enemy lines, performing daring raids to kill German soldiers while spreading fear throughout the Nazi ranks, including Adolf Hitler himself. Aldo formulates Operation Kino to eliminate the entire Nazi high command, and when he bargains with Hans Landa to let the operation continue, Aldo promptly denies Landa the satisfaction of victory by carving a Swastika into his forehead, reasoning he's "been chewed out before" while retaining his sense of charm and composure to the end.
** Shoshanna Dreyfuss is a Jewish girl who loses her family to the Nazis. When approached on using her theater in Paris as the site of a premiere for Goebbels' major new film, Shoshanna and her lover Marcel opt to lock the Nazis inside the theater and burn it down. Shoshanna proceeds to enact her plan near flawlessly, recording a message to all the Nazi leaders to see on screen that their fates are her vengeance and the vengeance of the Jewish people, ending up with the complete elimination of the Nazi leaders assured even before the Basterds get involved.
* Nathan Muir of ''[[Spy Game]]'' may fit into this category. He demonstrates a certain amount of [[The Chessmaster|Chessmaster]] proclivities, risks his pension and his retirement to get his protege free, and manages to charm his way into the information he needs to get the job done.
* Nathan Muir of ''[[Spy Game]]'' may fit into this category. He demonstrates a certain amount of [[The Chessmaster|Chessmaster]] proclivities, risks his pension and his retirement to get his protege free, and manages to charm his way into the information he needs to get the job done.
** The scene at the end, where his coworkers discover that {{spoiler|he was never married, and he's been lying to all of them for years just for the hell of it}}, cements it.
** The scene at the end, where his coworkers discover that {{spoiler|he was never married, and he's been lying to all of them for years just for the hell of it}}, cements it.
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