"12 Years a Slave," on the other hand, "takes advantage of the fact that this is a biography and, therefore, is able to be a little more minimalist in the storytelling, a little more repetitious," McKee said, adding a bit of jargon: "In genre it's sometimes called a pathetic plot or a plot of suffering, and what's at stake is the character's willpower.
Perhaps my pathetic vegetable plot convinced him to seek sustenance elsewhere.
"Sarkozy has been very nationalistic and protectionist in his policy decisions since he became finance minister," says Richard Portes of the London Business School.Frits Bolkestein, the fiercely liberal European commissioner for the internal market, is furious about the "pathetic" Franco-German plot to nurture industrial champions.
At first glance, it would seem that an aging predator, both exploitative and pathetic, drives the plot of all four of the narratives in "The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro," and yet the only effective protagonist in the collection, in terms of an active force that moves drama toward denouement, is a talking snake as old as Genesis.
Gene Siskel's review of Labyrinth for the Chicago Tribune was highly negative, and he referred to it as an "awful" film with a "pathetic story," "much too complicated plot" and a "visually ugly style".
Wonderful fictional character X turns out to be pathetic real-life character Y; incredible plot twist turns out to be personal tragedy.
But Mavis has also been criticised: Jack Kibble-White, writing for MSN, called Mavis and Derek a "pathetic couple", suggesting that their gnome plot was one of the serial's most bizarre.
Featuring William Macy, a co-founder of Atlantic Theatre, and Philip Baker Hall, who both recently starred in Paul Thomas Anderson's "Magnolia", "Buffalo" revolves around a pathetic, half-hearted heist and the sorry figures who plot it.
The plot kicks in when a police raid scatters the truly pathetic and creepy inhabitants of this ramshackle community, and brings in the Professor — a genius sociologist and mystery man of astonishing physical bulk and gluttony.
But she accuses Arendt of ignoring anti-Semitism -- and of discounting all the evidence about Eichmann's centrality in plotting the genocide so that she could portray him as a pathetic bureaucrat.
The major departure from the original plot is once again the reawakening of Juliette just in time for a pathetic duet with Romeo before both die, begging God's forgiveness for their unchristian suicide.
