-
TV Social
Login
Recent Comments
- Derek Hazelton: I think since we’re posting about our favorite memories: I remember the RHOA recaps from a few...
- PinkTop: I’m heartbroken.
- brebay: 1. rudimentary 2. WTF?????? None of your post makes any sense, is it meant to be...
- captain picard: So very sad! This site has been my go to sanctuary since 2007! Can’t believe it.
- blazergirl: @sororsalsa, the word is that Sabra had a falling out with either Nigel or the show (not...
- MargoRita: While we’re on the \Cora\ subject, can we PLEASE not forget to mention a...
- zbird: I have been around here for. ever. Since the B-side and J-unit days. Remember Honey Bunny? Yeah. I do. This...
- zbird: ^^^ Doesn’t do well with change. *whimper* Such a bummer.
- SororSalsa: Just watched the Top 20 show…I think they picked a good group. All of my faves are in!...
- pageantkidgrownup: It’s 10 something pm. My oldest two kids are playing Black Widow...
Hot Shows
-
Fresh Tweets!
Error: Twitter did not respond. Please wait a few minutes and refresh this page.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
1:00 pm
42 Comments
Tagged: bad writing, DVDgasm, hollywood sucks, logical fallacies, migraine inducing, Moviegasm, movies, OMG, plot holes, twists
Posted in:
Recaps
Someday I’m going to make a movie. My movie will be a dark murder mystery of the whodunit variety and it will have the most spectacular plot twist ever. First we’ll spend the whole movie establishing a realistic plot in a non fantastical world. No supernatural demonic vampire zombie shit here, folks. We’re going modern day Hitchcock. Then, just when we’ve killed off the person you were convinced was the killer and you’re freaking out because you have no idea who the killer could possibly be we will reveal that the killer is Jason from Friday the 13th. There will be no mention of Camp Crystal Lake or the Jason mythos at any point throughout the movie. He will just be the killer. Bam! Twist! In your face!!! Oh, but wait, we’re not done yet. THEN the guy that just got killed off will wake up. He’s not really dead and Jason Voorhees hasn’t been stalking his friends. That was all just a dream he had while hiding from the real killer. And it turns out the real killer is… Bob from accounting. No, Bob from accounting is not a real character. He’ll be mentioned once, early in the movie in a, “Here, take these ledgers down to Bob in accounting” way, but that’s it. No one will suspect him, because no one has thought about him once in the entire course of the movie. I am clearly a cinematic genius.
Since I lack most of the things necessary to get a movie made in Hollywood (see: money, power, influence, motivation, drive, connections, dreams, etc) let’s just mock the living hell out of some movies that did get the Hollywood treatment, despite suffering from some of the most poorly thought out plot twists (and sometimes the most poorly thought out plots) in the history of time. This post is full of spoilers, so consider yourselves warned. I would like to pose the argument that the true spoiler of all these films is the twist I’m about to give away to you anyway. Also, I refuse to re-watch any of these crap-tastic suckfests, and some of them I paid very little attention to the first time around, so feel free to call me out on glaring factual errors in my summaries.
10. Orphan
So let’s just start with the fact that the parents in this movie are named John and Kate. That pretty much destroys the movie before it even gets the chance to suck. John and Kate have two children and are getting over the loss of what would have been their third child, who was stillborn. Kate pops pills and has overcome her alcoholism in order to be fit to adopt a child to fill that gaping hole in their lives (actual living children be damned!). They adopt Ester, a homicidal little pervert who does bad bad things.
Twist: Ester is not a child at all! She’s a dwarf woman in her 30′s. And the orphanage they adopted her from was actually an insane asylum!!! Cause we all know how easy it is to wander into a nuthouse by mistake when you’re looking to adopt a child. Especially when you’re walking around in a booze and prescription drug induced haze. And it’s totally normal to walk into an orphanage and pick a child out like it was a hamster at PetCo and then bring it home that very same day. There’s no reason why anything would feel the least bit off to anyone.
9. A Perfect Getaway
The Plot: Milla Jovovich and Steve Zahn are on their honeymoon taking a hike on a remote island in Hawaii. They meet up with another couple and some assholes along the way, then find out a pair of killers are on the loose and it’s very likely that someone on the island is not who they claim to be.
Twist: Guys, it’s totally Milla and Steve the whole time. They just kill people and then live their lives for a while. It’s fun for them cause they’re psychos, but since Milla is really pretty you can count on her having a smidgen of humanity and turning on Steve in the end, who is unattractive and thus just a murdering dickweed with no soul. The problem with this twist is that it’s SO FUCKING OBVIOUS. The very beginning of the movie… We’re talking opening credits here… Is footage of their wedding taken with a handheld camcorder. Lots of footage. We see their friends and their family. We see their hands cutting the cake. We see the back of their heads even, but we never see their faces. It’s impossible not to notice. Now why, in a movie about killers pretending to be a couple they murdered, why would they take extravagent measures to make sure the face of the bride and groom were never shown in the wedding footage? I knew the twist before the movie actually started. That’s just sad.
8. Surrogates
Plot: This is your typical dystopian future dreck. In this version of the future, people have stopped doing fun things and going on adventures. Instead they live their lives through surrogates, which are like cyborg people shells. They can go out and have crazy sex and jump off of buildings and stuff and they’re not in real danger because if they kill their surrogate it just ends the simulation or something. I think. I was really drunk when I watched this movie. Anyway, Bruce Willis is some super important guy who created the surrogates and there’s some subtext about his wife or something but I never actually caught what that whole side-story was about. Someone has found a way to shoot surrogates with some magic electro-death ray weapon that can kill the person controlling the surrogate as well, and Bruce Willis is trying to figure out who it is.
Twist: The killer is Bruce Willis!! OMG. LOLZ. He’s anti-surrogates because people should be really living their lives. And the best way to get people to really live their lives is to kill them, obviously. And none of this twist made any sense whatsoever to me, but I was like two bottles of Riesling into the evening by the time it got revealed, so it may be far less confusing than I remember it. Drunk or not though, I am positive that the movie really sucked.
7. Flight Plan
Plot: Jodie Foster’s husband was a super important government dude who worked on super secret airplane propulsion engines until he jumped off a building and died. Now she’s on a flight with his dead body and her live six-year-old daughter, and they’re on the brand new plane that he designed. They sit down and Jodie Foster falls asleep, only to awaken and find that her child has vanished. She freaks out and has the crew search the plane, but the stewardess is like, “OMG, your kid’s not on the manifesto. She must be an other.” And then the air marshal is all like, “Calm down ma’am while I handcuff you for being a disturbance cause I just called to check and your daughter died along with your husband.” Jodie Foster escapes from him and punches in a secret code to open her husband’s coffin (cause important government dudes get combination locks on their coffins) but doesn’t find the body of her daughter there, so air marshal guy leads her away and tells her he’ll make sure they comb the entire plane after they land.
Twist: Then air marshal runs back to the coffin to get the bomb he had hidden in there but needed Jodie’s secret code to open the coffin to get it back out. Oh and the stewardess is in on it too and they tell the captain that Jodie is a terrorist and has a bomb planted and will blow everyone up unless they transfer a butt-load of money to an account. Oh and he killed her husband specifically so that he would have a casket to smuggle his bomb onto the plane with. Oh and he stole and drugged and hid her daughter so that everyone would think she was crazy, which is the most convoluted plot in the history of EVER. First and foremost, his entire evil scheme hinged around the hope that no one else on the plane would actually notice Jodie’s daughter. If the kid had said hi to someone or thrown a tantrum or spilled her juicebox then all that planning (and killing a dude) was for nothing. They based an entire hijacking scheme on, “Well, I’m sure no one will notice that she has a kid and I’m sure the stewardess will be able to abscond with her while her mother sleeps without anyone noticing that either.” What if the mom hadn’t fallen asleep? What if she hadn’t rushed to the coffin and punched in the code? What if a bomb sniffing dog had smelled those explosives through the coffin? What if this movie was so poorly thought out that I spent the entire 90 minutes yelling at my television????
6. Anger Management
Plot: Adam Sandler is a pussy who gets sentenced to anger management classes after Jack Nicholson gets him into a fight on a plane. Then the anger management teacher is actually Jack Nicholson, who spends the rest of the movie messing with Adam Sandler and being a total douche and eventually stealing his girlfriend, until Sandler snaps and stands up for himself.
Twist: It was all an elaborate plot to get Sandler to stop being such a pussy. His girlfriend asked Jack Nicholson to do it, and since people in movies have zero problem living double lives and involving all their friends (including the stewardess from the plane and the judge that sentenced Sandler and entire crowds of random others) in an attempt to teach a protaganist an important life lesson, Nicholson arranged the whole flight and sentencing and weeks upon weeks of torture as “therapy.” Poor Sandler. Everyone lied to him. Everyone played along. No one had anything better to do. WTF?
5. The Stepford Wives (the re-make, not the original)
Plot: So in the original Stepford Wives all the men in the town of Stepford had their wives killed and replaced with perfect robot wives. Watching the remake it is painfully obvious that a major rewrite was done on the ending after the entire movie was already filmed, and no one thought to go back and check for continuity.
Twist: Glen Close built microchips that she surgically implanted in the wives’ brains (using her robot husband to do her bidding) to control them and make them into June Cleavers. This led to happy-ending crap involving the wives having their chips removed and going on book tours to promote their memoirs about their time in Stepford. The problem here (aside from the fact that this pretty well rapes the source material) is that the first half of the movie clearly shows the wives as robots. One of them goes out of control on the dance floor and starts smoking and shooting sparks and another one gets used as an ATM by her husband. He puts his ATM card in her mouth, she swallows it, she spits up a stack of twenties, and then returns his card. Pretty sure that a mood altering brain-chip does not give you ATM abilities, yeah?
4. Saw
Plot: Two guys wake up in a dingy room. They’re each chained to stuff on opposite sides and in the middle of them is a fat guy in a puddle of blood who just shot himself in the face. Through a series of over-complicated instructions and flash-backs we learn that both men are sort of dicks and that’s why they’re being held hostage. At the same time two cops are trying to find the missing dudes and track down “Jigsaw,” the killer who sets unnecessarily elaborate traps to torture people who he thinks don’t appreciate their lives.
Twist: The cops say that Jigsaw likes to set himself up with a front-row seat to watch the action unfold, and it turns out he’s been lying in the middle of the room pretending to be dead and bleeding for however long this stupid movie took. Basing an elaborate torture plot on the hopes that you won’t sneeze or cough or have to pee or laugh have an itch you absolutely have to scratch is just dumb. This was one of those twists where no one saw it coming because it was so incredibly stupid.
3. The Village
Plot: It’s the 1800′s and some people live in a village and talk funny. They can’t leave the village because there are monsters in the forest, but that’s okay until this retarded guy stabs this blind girl’s boyfriend and she goes wandering off into the monster-infected woods in search of medicine.
Twist: OMG it’s not the 1800′s. Some history professors got sick of all the bad things in the world so they formed a commune which was like being Amish but with more lying, and then they just pretended it was the 1800′s and didn’t tell their decendants. Only a lot of the people who don’t know it’s all a ruse are too old to have been born on the commune, leading us to wonder if minds have been erased or something. Plus it probably would have been much easier to join an Amish community instead of LARPing to the point of insanity. And what if a plane had flown overhead or something? And why did they all have to talk and dress funny? And if the mentally challenged are stabbing people in jealous rages then is it time to admit that maybe the internet isn’t responsible for everything that’s wrong in your life?
2. The Passion of the Christ
Plot: God loves you and wants you to go to Heaven so he sends down his only begotten son to get his ass kicked by Romans for your sins.
Twist: So God is omnipotent, but he created mankind with the inability to live sin free lives, thus essentially damning everyone to an eternity in the firey pits of Hell. But then he gets this brilliant idea to send his son down (who is also himself) to die to sacrifice himself to himself so that he can forgive everyone for something that he was the one who decided they should go to hell for doing in the first place, even though he designed them specifically to do that thing that he was making this great sacrifice to forgive them for. Then He raised himself from the dead and told people to be nice to each other, and people took that as meaning using his name as an excuse to be dicks to each other, and somewhere along the line Mel Gibson called a cop, “Sugar-tits.”
1. The Number 23
Plot: Jim Carey is a dog-catcher. Sounds like it will lead to hilarity, no? Instead it leads to brain-hemmoraging levels of stupidity. See, his wife buys him this book about the number 23 and Jim starts relating to all these things in the book that totally mirror his own life and then he gets obsessed with how lots of numbers add up to 23 or 2 or 3 because math is magical and we shouldn’t look any further into it than that. The book is a memoir of a man who killed the no good cheatin’ hussy he was dating and then buried her body, and then stood on a balcony deciding if he should jump, but that’s where the book ends.
Twist: Jim Carey wrote the book. He killed his girlfriend and then tried to kill himself but instead he just gave himself amnesia because that’s usually what happens when you jump off a balcony. Then he went to a nut-house and this doctor reads his book and publishes it and then goes all crazy about the 23 thing too and slits his own throat or something. Then we see flashback of Jim Carey being pronounced cured and walking out of the nut-house with a box of his stuff, when he bumps into his wife and they meet for the first time. So aside from forgetting about killing his girlfriend and trying to kill himself, he apparently forgot everything after that too, since he has no memory of ever having been in a psych ward. And his wife either was too dumb to question why he was walking out of a crazy house with a box of personal belongings, or she knew why he was there and bought him the book anyway because she’s dangerous levels of mean/stupid/crazy. Also, there’s a dog that lives forever and that never really makes any sense, but since nothing in this movie makes sense that’s okay. Also, dog has three letters and two of them are constanents and two next to three makes 23. ***mind blown***
Honorable mentions:
The Life of David Gale:
I’m gonna sacrifice myself for the cause of fighting capital punishment, but then I’m gonna send a fucking video tape of proof to a journalist who would render my entire sacrifice useless should she go public with the tape. Which she just might do since she’s a fucking journalist.
I Know Who Killed Me:
Lindsay Lohan is a regular high school student. Lindsay Lohan is a stripper. One of these Lindsays is getting her limbs chopped off by her crazy piano teacher and the other Lindsay is spontaneously losing limbs as a result because science is hard and no one will look up how that sort of stuff works anyway. And they’re twins but didn’t know cause Lindsay’s mom’s baby died in the delivery room and the doctor offered the dad one of a set of crack babies that had just been born in the next room and the dad was like, “sure, crack baby. Awesome. Don’t tell my wife.” Cause there’s a secret policy in hospitals that if your baby dies you get to pick the next unwanted drug baby without any messy adoption paperwork.
Basic:
This should probably be on the actual list and it should probably be number two on that list, but it’s down in honorable mentions here because I still have no idea what the fuck happened in this movie. Sam Jackson and John Travolta do some stuff but then it didn’t really ever happen but then it did and then there’s a flashback but the flashback was a lie and then some people die but they’re not really dead but that was a lie too but it wasn’t a lie cause we were just lying about lying and there’s a drug sting in here somewhere I think and all the lying was to bust druglords but I don’t even know if the druglords are real because there’s so much lying going on that I just want everyone in the movie to get shot in the face.
Repo Men:
It was all a dream. It. Was. All. A. Fucking. Dream. Argh! This is the cinematic equivalent of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Lucy is Hollywood and Charlie Brown is all us movie goers and the football represents caring about the plot, characters, and happenings of a movie. And then they just rip the ball out from under our foot at the last second and laugh as we fall down because we never learn any better.
TV Social
-
42 Comments
This is gonna sound know-it-all-y (sorry in advance!) but Jesus isn’t God. They’re like two different people. And The Holy Ghost is another person. And I really liked Surrogates.
But LOL at everything else.
Well actually according to the Christian theology of the trinity they are all one and the same being.
I read that during filming of Stepford Wives the costume designer wanted to stay true to the period, so had the actresses wear girdles, hose, and those heavy-duty pointy bras; the women complained loudly about the discomfort. So we watched the movie one night and hated it, but my husband was entranced to the point of reminiscing about a favorite waitress at a local place who still wears those bras. He said that the owner told him that when other staff asked her secret, she said it was that torpedo bra. No one else was willing to suffer that much!
DO NOT question Catholicism. Mine is a religion based on shame, power, and vengeance. If you cross the Vatican, chaosbutterfly, the Holy See WILL see you destroyed, even if it has to sell off 50 churches and assorted pieces of property to finance its revenge.
Love this list! And I’m happy to see Moviegasm active again.
If I can add a few to the list:
Devil (Trap six sterotypical cliches into an elevator, watch them die one by one, and learn that the killer is the least stereotypical one to be a killer. Obviously, that’s I why I pegged them as the killer 10 minutes into the movie.)
Vanilla Sky – It was all a dream! Well, the good parts anyway. All the shitty stuff really happened.
Devil you could figure it out just from the trailer much like the Six Sense and every Shamadinglong movie ever. Sixth Sense was a full motion picture episode of the Twilight Zone. Hell Shamadinglong stole the plot for the Sixth Sense from an episode of a kids tv series and admits it.
Another film with a shitty plot twist, Dreamcatchers. I was silly enough to believe this movie was about Native Americans, or at least the spiritual significance of their knick knacks. People are getting killed left and right so there must be a logical explanation, right? Wrong. Aliens, I tell you. Aliens!
Aye, chaosbutterfly. According to the Catholics (who were the driving force behind The Passion) God and Jesus and The Holy Ghost are all the same entity. According to Mormons and J-Dubs they’re separate beings, but the Catholics think both those groups are going to hell anyway.
Devil was absolutely terrible, but I figured one M. Night movie was enough, and the Village was the worst of them all.
I figured Devil out from the DVD cover. Even the photos he picks are obvious. Watching the movie, once the character enters the frame, I was like “They did it!”
I was one of those who didn’t see the twist in the Sixth Sense coming at all. Or in Scream. Or in Saw. I think I watched the last 10 mintues of each film with my jaw on the ground. *blush*
Sarcastatire, The Forgotten was guilty of that exact same thing!!! Here’s a totally intriguing plot about something that looks like it will have tons of meaning… Wait for it…. Wait for it… ALIENS!!!! Yeah… Fucking second rate Dark City rip-off, and I actually dug Dark City.
Awesome list, except for 1 thing. THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE IS ONE OF (IF NOT THE) BEST MOVIES IV’E EVER SEEN!!! LOL. You’re crazy!!! It’s one of those movies that comes together 100% in the end, down to the last detail, including things you didn’t even realize meant anything throughout the movie. Yeah, the idea of it is a bit corney, the way you explained it, but I thought it was a brilliant film, and the acting was great. Phew. The only thing wrong with that movie was having to see Laura Linney naked……or, just see her in general. Ick! Also, I liked Perfect Getaway, but only because I missed the opening wedding video scene, so I didn’t suspect a thing. But sidenote reguarding that one: NOT GOOD for a former drug addict to watch. Seeing those two tweakin out with their crazy pupils and shit made me start twitchin’…TRIG.GER.
I’m so glad that you included “Saw”. It annoyed the shit out of me when that one came out and everyone was freaking out, sayin/thinkin that ending was amazing. Like, really? Just the fact that he’d lay there and play dead just to be present or whatever was just retarded (sorry retards and family/friends of retards-only word I felt I could use there). And the villian is not only named “Jigsaw”, but he’s a decreped (sp?) geezer who represents himself with a paper-mache doll that has circles on his cheeks drawn with red sharpie, and a gas station/liquor store wig on its head. Not one of those things is scary. “I wanna play a game”….ugh. Me too, Gramps. I wanna play “Fast forward through these redundant movies, only watching the scenes where people get murdered.” HATE.
Lastly, my only addition to this list would be “Mystic River”. The boyfriend and his brother? For real? *eyeroll*. I spent an hour and a half watching Tim Robbins get ass-raped (as a kid), crying and lusting for Sean Penn, and looking at Laura Linney without gagging, for what? A jealous, mute punk (I want to use “retard” again here, but i’d feel bad) who was just jealous of his brother’s puppy love stealing the attention away from him? I was so emotionally invested in that movie, only to feel ultimately betrayed. I had to watch “I Am Sam” three times just to not feel raped anymore.
Awesome list!!!
Hey I’ve got an idea, don’t use a column about movies to go on a religious soapbox, TheMiki. There’s a time and place for that, and this is not it. Also it seems your grasp on Christianity is pretty tenuous, so you probably shouldn’t be going on any such soapboxes.
Now I will continue reading the article.
Awwwwe SNAP!
Ok now that I’ve read the whole list, it’s quite good and funny. The only one of these that ive seen is The Village. That’s a movie whose actual plot is dumber than the twist. And I’ve gotta agree: why do they talk so funny?
Gotta include The Matrix in any list like this. It may have had some cool film sequences, but the plot was STUPID and filled with all sorts of holes.
Hey AntSuck, that was not a religious soapbox. That was me making fun of the plot of The Passion, because honestly the plot of Christianity is confusing and makes no sense. I was purposely making sound silly. I grew up in a Christian-offshoot cult and I can say with absolute certainty that I understand Christianity very very completely. I just choose to make light of it. Just like I make light of everything else in this movie round-up. Glad you liked the rest of it, and glad you caught the funny language in The Village thing too. It made no sense.
Has anyone seen “He Was a Quiet Man?” Was there a plot twist at the end? Was it all a dream? Was the end a dream or the entire movie a dream? Maybe it wasn’t a dream at all.(?)
I enjoyed it until it got to the plot twisty end which was the beginning scene but with a different ending. Confused? So was I.
TheMiki, I like the way you think. I hate it when an insignificant character (Bob from accounting) turns out to be the villain. It’s like they want us to fail! I try my damndest to solve the crime before the climax, only to learn that the villain never even factored into the storyline until the end?! Damn, damn, damn! A good writer (Agatha Christie) gives us all of the characters early on and several ‘red herrings’ and leaves it up to us to predict the killer. A horrible writer cannot do this without giving everything away so (s)he writes a great story and then at the last minute, tosses the killer into the plot with a ‘logical’ reason why he’s guilty.
Time wasted.
“Hancock” has “Bob from prison” plot twist. Lame.
Hancock had “Charlize Theron is an alien which we totally show in you in the preview and then try to pretend is a plot twist” plot twist too. Hancock just sucked, despite a promising first 35 minutes or so.
shamalamadingdong – LOL!!!!
Nice list and great to have this section restarted.
Argh, thank you for this! I have seen more of these movies than I care to admit, and they all BLEW. I was tricked into watching Saw by a review that described it as a stylish “Seven” type thriller – it wasn’t just the twist that sucked, the whole movie was a steaming poo sandwich! The only thing that saved it was the Princess Bride dude’s hammy, over-the-top acting at the end, which injected a dose of much-needed camp into an otherwise humorless crapfest.
I don’t know how you could pick just one ShyamaConMan monstrosity, the stupid plot twist is his trademark – like an idiotic Hitchcock silhouette. Starting with the Sixth Sense (dude has been a ghost for months and never noticed people couldn’t see him!), moving on to Signs (super-intelligent aliens can’t be bothered wearing space suits to a planet covered in toxic material!) and on to the freaking Village. Ten minutes into that masterpiece I thought, “So these random weirdos are role playing as colonial villagers – wonder what the stupid twist will be this time?” I had guessed the twist and didn’t even know it WAS the twist! I was done giving my hard-earned cash to ShyamaFlimFlam at that point but I hear he’s still up to his old tricks.
I also saw Repo Men, and I don’t think it was all a dream at the end. But you may be right – I barely remember anything except some gross scene where they’re slicing their bodies open to scan their organs? I also saw another crap movie called “The Box” the same night. It was just twist after twist until nothing made any sense at all – and yes, aliens were involved too! God bless drunken movie nights.
Yep, Shamalan is one crap ass plot twist after another, none of which make any sense. The closest he’s come to a decent film is Unbreakable, but that movie ended half-way through. Like, there should have been a part two or another thirty minutes of movie or something. Since The Village he’s made Lady in the Water, which was actually unwatchable without copious amounts of booze, then The Happening, which is about plants killing us. Then Devil, which we’ve mocked in previous comments on this thread. Then The Last Airbender, and I think we all know what a monstrosity that was.
Saw sucked. All of it. I got tricked into seeing it in the theater by similar previews and was PISSED. Horrible movie all around. And I heard a theory that the strain of pretending to have an American accent makes Cary Elwes forget how to act entirely.
Repo Men was a dream from the point where he’s in the hospital on. All the stuff about him needing a new heart and all of that was dreamt. Which is a damn shame because that movie was really cool in a cheesy futuristic sort of way and I was really enjoying it.
The Box — UGHHHHH!!!! This movie is based on a Richard Matheson story (He also wrote the novella I Am Legend, which was fucking brilliant and absolutely destroyed by Hollywood) called Button Button. It’s AWESOME. Then it was made into a Twilight Zone episode which was also awesome. It’s a short story though, and the TZ ep was 20 minutes long. There was never enough to stretch into a movie, and in doing so they destroyed everything cool about it.
okay, I’m going to say something unpopular; I enjoyed Orphan and Stepford Wives. I agree with everything you said regarding those movies, but I love me some Glenn Close and Bette Midler, so I enjoyed it for their performances. I also liked Orphan, mainly because I found the girl (“Esther”) unbelievably creepy. Just saying…..
Anyway, back to reading…
I was really scared by Orphan (when she takes out her teeth–ewwwieeee) but otherwise enjoyed your list immensely.
I must add that sometimes ambiguous endings can be worse than ridiculous plot twists–ever see the movie “Swimming Pool?” No clue what the end was about.
And even though it may not belong here, “the knowing” really had me feeling like I had been taken for a ride by writers who were too bored at that point to make a reasonable ending. It was like another movie started midway through.
I’m surprised nobody tried to clear up the mistake about Surrogates. Bruce Willis was not the guy who created the surrogates, and he was not the guy trying to kill everyone. Mega fail on that one.
I don’t care what you all say. I loved the Village!!! From the beginning I thought they were an Amish community and had no idea that I had unknowingly “guessed the twist.” I thought the real twist for me was that the monsters were fake. I could also be biased, but I love me some Joaquin Phoenix.
Good plot twist – the end of The Others!!
I appreciate the humor and fun behind this article, but damn, a couple of lazy mistakes:
1. ORPHAN — she was no adopted from an insane asylum. She escaped from one, after a life of abuse and having to whore her body out for money. Though orphanage was hardly duped — for long. And it’s not that she was a ‘dwarf’ or born with that genetic disposition. It was a rare condition that affected her growth and allowed her to pass.
2. THE VILLAGE — they made it very clear in the movie that William Hurt’s character was so rich, he set up this “foundation” or whatever you want to call it, to create this commune so that it was practically self-contained. One of the provisions he set up was that air traffic was forbidden over the compound.
2.
I argue not that there are numerous mistakes. They’re not LAZY mistakes though… They’re DRUNKEN mistakes. Well, drunken and just unable to bring myself to sit through any of this crap a second time to verify all the plot points. I vaguely remember them explaining that crap at the end of The Village, but I may have been bashing my head into my coffee table by the time the movie got that far, so it’s all a little fuzzy.
Also, there’s an extra ’2′ at the end of your comment about lazy mistakes. Just sayin…
Anger Management is my least favorite movie ever. Of course, they would make a show out of it with Charlie Sheen. Double suck!
I have not seen a single movie on this list. Not one. I’m an old geezer (born in good ol’ 1979) who thinks they just don’t make movies like they used to, so why bother? Used to = up to about 2004. I’ve only seen a handful of good movies in the past 7 years or so.
Not exactly a plot twist, more like a movie cliche, but here’s what I can’t stand about stupid romantic comedies:
1. You know from the first moment that the girl is not going after the guy she’s chasing, but for the quirky “reporter” / “best friend” type who she leans on for advice.
2. In the wedding scene at the end, all the kooky characters they met along the way are there, like the dog washer, the crazy neighbor, the homeless guy, the sassy waitress etc.
I know that has nothing to do with anything, so thank you if you even read through that babble.
Ha! I hate romantic comedies, so I feel that spewing hatred for them in any forum is perfectly appropriate. Maybe I’ll get to work on a post about stupid things romantic comedies do that don’t make any sense. Like how people who hate each other always fall in love (yeah, that happens all the time) or how everyone in romantic comedies seems to be a hardcore pathological liar who will make up all manner of stories to get the girl/guy, and then when their lies are revealed all is just forgiven due to an impassioned speech in the rain/airport/etc. Arg. Hollywood sucks.
Yay..I’m not the only one who hates romantic comedies! This shared hate is getting me all warm and gooey inside, making me want to race through an airport and profess my love to someone just as they are about to board an international flight. I’ll bypass security, never taking off my shoes, and I’ll even buy a ticket just to make sure I can board the plane (coincidentally, I’ll have my passport in my back pocket) and promise my eternal devotion while the guy behind me is struggling to stow his carry-on in the overhead compartment. The flight attendants will get all weepy eyed and clap and cheer as I kiss my love in the middle of a crowded aisle in coach. We’ll leave the airport hand in hand, with devil-may-care grins at having just wasted thousands on non-refundable tickets. But who cares, I’m with my love! And we both hate romantic comedies!
I would go through all that if it meant finding a girl that hated romantic comedies. Do you know how many Hugh Grant movies I’ve had to suffer through?
Speaking of romantic comedies, and I might go to romantic comedy hell for saying this, I caught Steve Martin’s “Father of the Bride” the other day. I remember liking it as a kid. Well, I must have been a stupid kid. I can’t even begin to describe everything wrong with that ridiculous movie.
“The Sixth Sense” plot twist was directly lifted from a movie called “Carnival of Souls”; it was released in the 60′s so I don’t know if it pre-dates “The Twilight Zone” episode (great, now I have to go look it up on IMDB). It’s unbelievably creepy… low budget black-and white, the main character is followed by a crazy looking man the whole movie, genuinely terrifying. Check it out- I think it’s on Hulu for free.
One other movie that had a hysterically funny bad plot twist at the end was “Knowing”, a stupid Nick Cage movie from a few years ago… another lazy plot twist at the end comparable to “it was all a dream!”- what I always describe as “… and then the aliens show up”. Yup, they exist, and of course they are far more advanced than us, so all the crazy going on during the movie was just them fucking around with humanity. Nothing more to see here, folks.
Ohmigod, I watched Knowing a few months ago and was awestruck by its stupidity. I watched it with a Rifftrak, which means it was awesome (free plug from themiki for rifftrax.com) but I couldn’t believe that shit-storm got made. And the worst and most unbelievable part for me was that Jessica Biel was boning Nick Cage. ***shudder***
Jessica Biel and Nic Cage?? Ew. And why do they always have the gorgeous, hot woman hooking up with some old gross guy? *shudder* Amanda Peet/Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt/Jack Nicholson, Catherine Zeta-Jones/Sean Connery. Those are just a few that popped into my head immediately, I mean, WTF?
Crap, meant to post that in the Rom-com section.
There’s a podcast called “How Did This Get Made?” – as the describe the program, it’s the podcast where “they try to make sense of the movies that make no sense.” So far they’ve discussed 3 Nic Cage movies- The Wicker Man, Drive Angry: Shot in 3D, and Season of the Witch. For anyone who finds him one of the craziest actors of our time, it’s a must listen. They also have teeshirts on the Earwolf website that say “Ridiculous Cage” and have a picture of Nic Cage screaming on them. He definitely seems to specialize in the movies that feature stupid plot twist endings. O ther episodes include discussions of Battlefield Earth (my personal favorite, never fails to crack me up), Green Lantern, I Know Who Killed Me, and The Smurfs. Check it out!!!