In the story, the Baroness and her friend Constance come across an escaped hyena while out foxhunting. The hyena, whom they christen Esmé, takes a liking to them and trails along after their horses. Unfortunately, it also takes a liking to a gypsy child, which it promptly devours.
Then comes the following piece of dialogue, which is pure Saki.
*Constance shuddered. ‘Do you think the poor little thing suffered much?’ came another of her futile questions.
"‘The indications were all that way,’ I said; ‘on the other hand, of course, it may have been crying from sheer temper. Children sometimes do.’
*All-American Murder * starring Christopher Walken and directed by Anson Williams. My wife and I were watching it on TV and after two characters had a conversation in a cafe I said, “Well we know how this turns out, let’s go to bed.”
She asked what I meant and I explained…this has to be the least necessary spoiler box of all time (no-one will see it), but I was once criticised for not using a spoiler box in discussing the WSOP 6 months after it was over:
The hero had made reference to his “date’s” watch. She explained that her dad had given it to her and read the engraving. I explained that the next body found would be wearing the watch and be burnt beyond recognition so that the watch was required for ID. This would mean that the female character wasn’t the dead victim and was therefore the killer. We should have gone to bed.
When I saw The Bone Collector I worked out the guilty party during the credits. As they ended I told my wife that I knew how the movie worked out and would give her a note when I spotted the criminal. I wasn’t trying to work it out but during the credits they let us know:Lincoln Rhyme is crippled and restricted to his bed. So obviously the climax must take place in his bedroom. Rhyme has previously caused another cop to be sacked and arrested due to his mishandling of evidence. Obviously this disgraced cop will need to prove his intellectual superiority. He must also have access to Rhyme (climax in bedroom!!) and equally obviously cannot now be employed in law enforcement. We don’t have to wait long for Richard Thompson to put in an appearance.
That’s not a plot twist, it’s a hole. You’re absolutely right: Hunter should have assumed from the start that the reaction shows were spliced in. It’s done that way 99% of the time in news broadcasting.
I guessed the killer in Murder at 1600 by a simple application of Ebert’s “Rule of Conservation of Characters.”
I should mention my favourite “got the twist via stupidity moment”. Just after Sixth Sense came out (but luckily after I had seen it) a bunch of teenagers were talking about it on the train. Someone mentioned not giving away the surprise twist and one of the teens said, “What surprise twist?”
Someone else said, “What you find out at the end.” And my hero said “You mean that Bruce Willis is dead? Everyone knows that you see that kid shoot him.” He appeared to be genuinely amazed that anyone could watch the rest of the movie believing that Willis’s character had recovered. The kids who hadn’t yet seen the movie resisted the urge to kill him.
When Chris Cooper’s character is constantly gay-bashing, even to the extent of bringing up his revulsion for gays when it’s totally out of context, I started thinking, “Hey, I took Psych 101; I learned about ‘reaction formation’; I betcha that guy turns out to be gay.”
I’d thought the revelation Jane had had was that the interview in question had been done with a single-camera set-up, necessitating the manufactured reaction shot. For some reason, she had assumed they had shot the original interview with two cameras, and that Tom’s reaction was real time. Having had no experience in news production, I never knew which is more common.
As to the topic, the first thing that came to mind for me was Frequency. Not a great movie anyway, but having read many science fiction time-travel stories already, I’d figured on the ending of that one way ahead of time - though I suppose even someone without an SF-reading background could have as well.
I was rather surprised by my mother’s reaction to the movie. She hates movies like this one (gore, people being ‘stalked’, and the like), but happened to be passing by as I was watching it on television a few years back. She saw one of the autopsy scenes, and remarked, “Must be making a dress out of skin.”
Y’see, mom used to be a professional seamstress, and guessed from the ‘darting’, I think it’s called, taken out of the victim’s back.
A lesser-known film, “The Bone Collector,” I actually caught the killer half-way through the film. Sadly, it wasn’t great detective work on my part, but formulaic scriptwriting. That week we’d had a talk in my screenwriting class about certain… Structural elements… In mysteries. The moment I saw them kicking in, I said to the person I was with, “Hey, I bet it’s gonna be (x)!” I was right.
I got The Bone Collector killer as soon as the character was first shown on-screen. I wasn’t even watching it, I walked past at that moment while mrs.gnu was watching. Not from my scriptwriting, though, but from storyboarding class:
…The camera lingers on him just a little too long.
Going to film school makes you watch movies differently. I look for general movie standard practices, especially the end-of-act-one timing based on the total movie running time.
Oddly, for me it was Isle of Doctor Moreau. Never saw it when it came out, wasn’t terribly interested. Maybe a year or so later some friends who did like it picked it up on a bargin bin. When they found out I hadn’t seen it, they were shocked.
I said, “but it was a book by H.G.Wells.”
They said, “oh, so you read it?”
“No, but I’ve read enough of his books to know how it goes.”
“How does it go,” they asked. I wish I could remember my answer, but I apparantly pegged all the major plot points in one go. Told them which character would be Herbert, that he’d be the only survivor, etc. and so forth.
A funny story about guessing movies’ “plot twists” early:
The film critic for our local daily paper is a friend of mine. He says that he was sitting in the theater, waiting for some movie to start, when the trailer for Taking Lives came on. Right then, during the trailer, he leaned over to his companion and said:
“Ethan Hawke is the killer.”
When the movie came out a month or two later, Bingo.
The Village made me mad. In a thread here someone posted about what some source “guessed” what the twist at the end was, but I didn’t think M. would really be so stupid as to rip off a then-recently republished kids’ book. I was wrong! And not surprised by the subsequent accusations leveled at him by the author of the book.
Years ago there was a trifling little romantic comedy called Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe? The first scene a supporting character appeared in, I not only knew she was the killer, I also knew her motive.
It made sitting through the rest of the movie completely pointless.
I can’t say whether I’d have guessed the “secret” of “The Crying Game.” Long before I saw it, I read a review by John Simon that pretty much gave the game away. So, I pretty much resolved not to see it.
But at the time, I was dating a single mom with a 5 year old son. She had just sent her son to spend a few weeks with his grandparents, and it had been ages since she’d seen a movie for grown-ups. And she wanted to see… naturally, “The Crying Game.” Swell, I couldn’t refuse without telling her why not, so I just gritted my teeth and went to the movie with her.
As it turned out, I enjoyed the first half hour immensely- it reminded me of one of my favorite Frank O’Connor short stories.
But the instant that Jaye Davidson appeared on screen, my date nudged me and said, “That’s a man, isn’t it?”
Watch The Spanish Prisoner, then. Mamet takes the movie-watching skills and expectations you’ve developed over a lifetime and uses them against you. Not only did I miss the final twist during the movie (he doesn’t actually reveal it but leaves it as an exercise for the viewer to figure out) but it was about 24 hours of mulling things over, trying to make apparently mismatched pieces fit, before it began to dawn on on my little mind that not all I’d seen was on the up-and-up. I did a googled the movie and found a site (unfortunately vanished) that confirmed my suspicions. But from casting to shots to dialogue, Mamet plays with you, making you think you see or hear things you haven’t, and ignore clues he leaves in plain sight.
I did much better, a long time ago with Soylent Green. The trailer had the repeated question, “What is the secret of soylent green?” Well, lessee, it’s obviously set in a dystopia, there’s a new food source, what could it possibly be made from?
Single-camera, 99% of the time (why waste a cameraman who can be working on another story?). No one in the business would assume it was a two-camera setup.
