I should have known better than to open this thread. You see, I borrowed a videotape of Gone With the Wind from the library yesterday because I haven’t seen it yet. Then I had to go and open eli_the_fanatic’s spoiler box. :rolleyes: 
Oh, and because I can’t resist:
. . . but not to each other.
CJ
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Did anybody see the one where the dog sacrifices its life to save its master from the zombie with the magic ring that can take our hero back in time to email the woman he is destined to fall in love with, but what he doesn’t know is that everyone’s been dead all along and only he can see them. And that’s why the Nazis stole the diamonds to focus their laser beams on the alien invasion from the planet Zygote but it turns out the aliens are merely being friendly and had only popped by to see if anyone needed anything, like a cure for AIDS, or a cup of sugar, or maybe we hadn’t invented perpetual ice-cubes yet?
Anyway, it turns out it was all a dream.
Wait, if you haven’t yet watched South Pacific and were really, really keen on the suspenseful storyline, why would you open that thread anyway? Shouldn’t there be a point after which a film works its way into public consumption that the onus is on you to not find out how it ends?
I guess I just don’t fully understand the concept of the spoiler anyway. If finding out how a movie ends ruins the whole damn thing, then how good a movie could it be anyway? I knew Rosebud was a sled but I still found even the mystery in Citizen Kane fascinating.
And this is just silly. It’s more akin to keeping Santa Claus a secret for children. I can see how it adds to their enjoyment of Christmas, but after a point, don’t they have to grow up?
There are no spoilers in real life. Anyone who finds out the unexpected ending from lack of spoilers on a message board is spending waaaaay too much time on the internet!
People talk about movies I’ve never seen all the time. I’ve read most of the book-of-the-movies anyway, so I know who did it. I don’t watch movies to be surprised by the story, I watch them for the acting, the action… everything that makes a movie a MOVIE and not anything else. It’s the same with books: if I’m reading it to find out what happens next, rather than to enjoy the writing, then I’m reading the wrong book.
I do find spoiler boxes incredibly seductive, though.
Please, please, please tell me this isn’t Ace Ventura…
No, it’s When Harry met Sally.
Gilgamesh fails to rescue Enkidu from the underworld, returns to Uruk, realizes that the city itself is his immortality, and dies in peace.
The Gods come, preventing the suitors’ relatives from avenging themselves.
The good guy kills the bad guy.
It’s full of stars.
Way to spoil the universe for me pal!
Spoilers are cool. I feel extra cool when I read one.
They’re good too because a particular thread (with a spoiler) might entice a person to see a movie they otherwise might not have. Ever think of that? huh? Well, did ya punk?
Of course that hasn’t happened to me yet but I’m ignorant.
Yeah, it’s all bein’ nice and stuff to put spoiler boxes up, I gotta agree, but…
…sheesh.
I had people complaining when I would talk about Lord of the Rings back before the first film came out. Fuck, the book has been out for fifty years, if you haven’t got around to reading it by now it’s your own fault.
Fish, are you aware that there are young people in the world who haven’t read Lord of the Rings?
What the hell kind of idiotic analogy is that? Are you saying that learning the Big Secret in Citizen Kane is some kind of “growing up” experience, and that people will figure it out on their own if no one tells them first?
People go to the movies to suspend disbelief for a couple hours. They want to see the film without prior knowledge of how it’s going to end, because watching the story unfold is so much more enjoyable when they don’t know what’s coming up next. Granted, they know that the film is prewritten and the ending is predetermined, but that’s the point of suspending disbelief: you allow yourself to pretend that it’s actually happening right now, and you allow yourself to be surprised by what happens.
If people want to know ahead of time how the movie ends, fine; they can go find out. But you don’t go walking around shouting plot spoilers to people who are standing in line about to see the movie–the technical term for people who do this is “assholes.”
I’ve seen variations on this thread come up many times on the SDMB; why do so many people have such a fucking problem with basic courtesy to others? If you’re going to give away a spoiler to a movie/book/whatever, just fucking say so ahead of time, so that people who don’t want to know won’t have to.
And by the way, the South Pacific link I mentioned earlier was the one in the OP, which doesn’t identify what it’s a link to.
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Neo
I had someone bitch me out on this very board for saying “Gandalf lives” before The Two Towers was released, even though (as I pointed out to him) Gandalf was shown prominently in the promotional materials for the film. Evidently, he felt that Ian McKellan has nothing better to do than to go on talk shows and discuss how he isn’t in an upcoming movie. How do you argue with a person like that?