11. Olive (Bringing Up Bobby)
Bringing Up Bobby is a movie that's very rough and uneven around the edges, but you can tell that there is a great talent underneath it all being honed. One of the movie's good elements and one we need to see more of on the big screen in general is Olive, the protagonist. Olive goes through a very affecting conflict to determine what's best for the life of her son, Bobby, and the resolution doesn't involve tying herself to a man or kissing one along the way. Olive doesn't give any signs of thinking about a relationship in the least, unless it's describing the ones she's had in the past. She's just a person working through life. She does what she needs to do in her mind to get ahead. Her life is all about the necessity of happiness for her and her son. It's a very interesting point of view and just as engaging as a romantic story, and over the course of that journey Olive goes through many incarnations. And although her individual strategies also change by the end of the movie, her core, practical belief in working for her goals on her own never falters.