Villain

A villain (also known in film and literature as the "antagonist," "baddie", "bad guy", "heavy" or "black hat") is an "evil" character in a story, whether a historical narrative or, especially, a work of fiction. The villain usually is the antagonist (though can be the protagonist), the character who tends to have a negative effect on other characters. A female villain is occasionally called a villainess (often to differentiate her from a male villain). Random House Unabridged Dictionary defines villain as "a cruelly malicious person who is involved in or devoted to wickedness or crime; scoundrel; or a character in a play, novel, or the like, who constitutes an important evil agency in the plot".

Etymology

Villain comes from the Anglo-French and Old French vilain, which itself descends from the Late Latin word villanus, meaning "farmhand", in the sense of someone who is bound to the soil of a villa, which is to say, worked on the equivalent of a plantation in Late Antiquity, in Italy or Gaul. The same etymology produced villein. It referred to a person of less than knightly status and so came to mean a person who was not chivalrous. As a result of many unchivalrous acts, such as treachery or rape, being considered villainous in the modern sense of the word, it became used as a term of abuse and eventually took on its modern meaning. The Germanic word "churl", originally meaning "a non-servile peasant" and denoting the lowest rank of freemen in Saxon society, had gone through a similar degradation, as did the word "boor" which originally meant "farmer".

Villain (2010 film)

Villain (悪人, Akunin) is a 2010 Japanese film directed by Lee Sang-il, based on Shuichi Yoshida's crime noir novel of the same name. It was nominated for numerous awards at the 2011 Japan Academy Prize, including Best Film and Best Director (which was director Lee's second nomination, after his 2006 win for Hula Girls), and won five, which included all four acting awards and for the score by Joe Hisaishi.

Plot

Abandoned by his mother at an early age, Yuichi Shimizu (Satoshi Tsumabuki) is a young man who lives with and takes care of his grandparents in a decaying fishing village near Nagasaki. He works as a blue-collar day-labourer and leads a lonely life: his only real interest is his car.

Looking for companionship through online dating sites, Yuichi meets Yoshino Ishibashi (Hikari Mitsushima) a young insurance saleswoman from Fukuoka. But it is clear that Yoshino has no respect for Yuichi.. she looks down on him, and even demands money for their encounters, which—as she candidly tells her friends—are just about sex. It becomes apparent that Yoshino keenly feels her own lack of social status (as the daughter of a barber), and has her real sights set on a spoiled rich university student by the name of Keigo Masuo (Masaki Okada), whom she met in a bar and subsequently pesters with emails.

Raavanan

Raavanan (English: Ravana) is a 2010 Indian Tamil thriller film co written, co produced, and directed by Mani Ratnam. The film features Vikram, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and Prithviraj in the lead roles, with a supporting cast led by Karthik, Prabhu and Priyamani. The film was also made simultaneously in Hindi as Raavan, with a slightly different cast. Furthermore, the film was dubbed and released in Telugu as Villain, with all three versions releasing simultaneously on 18 June 2010.

The film follows the crux of the epic Ramayana, with a ruthless police officer on the chase to find a tribal leader and lawbreaker, who has kidnapped his wife. Veeraiya, the kidnapper and his motive for the kidnap has been led on by the death of his sister, as a result of police custodial torture and brutal rape. The film explores the search by the officer, whilst exploring the changing emotions that the three protagonists experience with each other, leading to a riveting climax, situated in the jungle.