[spoilers request] Who is "Keyser Soze"?

[barsoomcore]

Are YOU of this hypothetical opinion that "Identity is a failure because it's so easy to figure out the ending and once you do the film is boring as all heck"?

No, I am not

Just to address the "so why did you say that then" question -- I do consider the hypothetical opinion to be a perfectly valid reason for disliking a film. And in fact, there are probably lots of films that fit into that for me -- that is, there are plenty of films whose plots offer little or no surprises, AND whose other qualities are insufficient to provide any entertainment, and so I dislike them. Most Friday the 13th-type movies fall into this category. If their plots offered surprising twists I might overlook the other flaws -- likewise if they featured, say, over-the-top action set pieces I might overlook the dull story. Or whatever.

So not those films in particular, but sure, plenty of films in general.

 

[reapersaurus]

a) Being sympathetic does NOT mean I am being condescending.
That's like saying that because I have sympathy for someone who can't walk means I am being condescending to them.
I truly feel sorry for you that your not-common approach to watching movies gets in the way of your enjoyment of them.

Take that for what you will, but it's not meant as condescending.
Hell, I wish I liked all kinds of food - I don't. I'm somewhat picky (not many vegetables, etc). I don't take offense when someone is enjoying some tasty vegetable and says "You don't know what you're missing."

b) I believe I can prove that your approach to watching movies is problematic at best, flawed and unrealistic at worst:
If the enjoyment of the movie is dependant upon not guessing the ending, than you had better not listen to ANYONE talk about the movie before you've seen it, nor should you ever see trailers, or anything.
Since I have already pointed out how knowing that a movie has A TWIST ENDING!! will change the way you watch the movie (i.e. your antenae will be up for every storytelling and directorial trick, like the afore-mentioned "Never Trust the Narrator" and "watch for the idiosyncratic way he holds the cigarette", etc), than it behooves you to be a complete tabula rasa (blank slate) about every movie you want to see.
This creates problems in today's life. It's difficult to avoid info, and IMO, it enriches a life to be able to talk about films one hasn't happened to see yet (not to mention you can't completely avoid trailers on TV or at movies).

This is a simple equation/proof, something like:
If any knowledge of movie = worsening of movie, then your approach makes it harder to enjoy a movie.

c) If you'd like, we could discuss (as objectively as possible) how you are incorrect in saying that it is EASY to figure out the ending of Identity....
because unless you go in KNOWING that there's a twist, than you would be watching it as a Whodone-it, and based on the film, I would strongly argue that there is almost no way that any normal person would come to the conclusion that

Spoiler

the whole movie is in the head of another person.

could someone find the old thread about Identity on these boards? TIA

 

[barsoomcore]

a) Being sympathetic does NOT mean I am being condescending.

I believe that you do not mean to be, but I assure you I feel condescended towards by somebody who tells me that my way of appreciating art is not as good as theirs.

I truly feel sorry for you that your not-common approach to watching movies gets in the way of your enjoyment of them.

Where do you get this notion that my "not-common approach" to gets in the way of my enjoyment? Are you saying that it is not common to watch movies with some semblance of critical judgement? Are you saying that most people never apply rational thought to stories told to them?

I believe I can prove that your approach to watching movies is problematic at best, flawed and unrealistic at worst:
If the enjoyment of the movie is dependant upon not guessing the ending, than you had better not listen to ANYONE talk about the movie before you've seen it, nor should you ever see trailers, or anything.

Did you read my post on The Sixth Sense vs Fight Club? I meant to be pretty clear that my enjoyment of the latter was in no way spoiled by the fact that I had a notion what the twist was going to be.

In both cases I saw the twist coming, so that's obviously not a key determiner to my enjoyment of the films.

My enjoyment of a movie is NOT dependent on not guessing the ending. Your argument is based on false premises. Indeed, I agree with you, that if your enjoyment of any story is based on not being able to predict the ending, you're cutting yourself out of a lot of very rewarding artistic experience.

based on the film (Identity), I would strongly argue that there is almost no way that any normal person would come to the conclusion

I'm happy to take on the mantle of abnormal if you insist. But look,

Spoiler

two-thirds of the way into the film we STILL haven't encountered the supposed killer anywhere. He's just not there. So either we're watching a stupid film that's never going to make any sense, or something more than what's obvious is going on. I don't see it as a big leap.

But you're NEVER going to convince me that it's not easy to figure out because it WAS easy to figure out. It took very little effort on my part, and it DIDN'T WRECK THE FILM. Okay? That's not the problem with Identity.

Now if you have problems with my stated ideas about the relative value of the different ways of appreciating art (unthinking acceptance vs simultaneous disbelief and critical awareness), I'd be happy to address those. But your post proves nothing about the ideas I put forth.

 

[reapersaurus]

Now if you have problems with my stated ideas about the relative value of the different ways of appreciating art (unthinking acceptance vs simultaneous disbelief and critical awareness), I'd be happy to address those. But your post proves nothing about the ideas I put forth.

And similarly, your painting my stance as "unthinking acceptance" does not adequately convey my stated intent.

 

[barsoomcore]

And similarly, your painting my stance as "unthinking acceptance" does not adequately convey my stated intent.

Does that mean you now understand and agree with my stance?

Let me know how I've mischaracterised your intent. Your words on the subject that got me thinking what I did:

Most everyone else does NOT watch those movies with all their antennae up to try and glean every scrap of information they can

Most people simply watch the film and enjoy it unfolding at the creator's intended pace.

most people don't go into movies with all their senses on alert for story tricks, or Meta-Story elements like "Never trust the Narrator."

an average filmgoer should NOT be attempting to short-cut around the plot using guesses based on Writing Rules.

The consistent message I see here is: "Do not question the story as it is told." Concurrently with that I see no suggestion that using one's logical powers to assess the story as it is told is a good thing.

If you think that SOME kinds of story-questioning are good and others are bad, please be clear. It seems to me from what you have said so far that you think all forms of audience challenge to the story as it is told are bad and lead to reduced enjoyment. I have stated why I think this way of thinking is incorrect.

You provided a rebuttal to a different statement -- one I never made -- and so have not yet provided any sort of counter-argument to my actual position, best represented in these statements:

Great stories don't ask us to kid ourselves, and settling uncomplaining for mediocre stories only makes it harder for us to truly appreciate the good stuff.

unthinking acceptance of mediocre art does NOT give us the greatest value from any artistic experience. Greatest value comes from the simultaneous engagement of disbelief and objectivity. Great stories allow both to operate at full capacity. Mediocre stories require us to "slow down" one or the other.

I realise that I may have made statements contradictory to these and subsequently forgotten them (once already!), so please be patient with me and instead of dragging out my embarrassing lapses, address this position, if you would.

If you still think I'm wrong, I welcome your efforts to show how.

 

[Elric]

Wow, another war of attrition on the messageboards...

I thought The Usual Suspects was great. I didn't guess the surprise, but seeing more Kevin Spacey movies would have helped. Plus, you get the fun of watching the movie again and figuring out everything that you missed the first time.

Still, there are some times where you don't even have to watch the movie to guess what's going on. Some actors are just always bad guys, so if you see them in a movie as a good guy, you can guess that they are just bad guys in disguise.

 

[SynapsisSynopsis]

A film that fails to entertain me is a failure, and it is on that basis that I say the writer of a film that fails to entertain me, FOR ANY REASON, has failed. Now, you're using "failure" to mean, "Disliked by the majority of people," which means you're talking about popular acceptance, not artistic success. The one can be measured by a polling of audiences, the other cannot.

If you're going to qualify the protasis you should qualify the apodosis as well: If a film fails to entertain me, it is a failure to entertain me, i.e. tautologically. If it fails to entertain you, then yes, it fails to entertain you, but to jump from its failing to entertain you to its failing wholesale is to make the unspoken assertion that it only exists inasmuch as it entertains you. A film fails if it is a failure, and a film fails to entertain me if it is a failure to entertain me, but you'll have to do a lot more arguing to establish a connection between failing and failing to entertain.

I think you're more guilty of the disjunction between popular and artistic success than LightPhoenix. Art does not exist for your or my mere entertainment. It has to be heavier and thicker than that. Entertainment is popular success; artistic success lies elsewhere. I'm assuming, for example, that you aren't entertained by Finnegans Wake (I certainly am not), and hope that you can see how shaky that would be as grounds for calling it a failure. I think I am more disturbed than entertained by great art. It doesn't give me the giggles or the urge to say 'cool' or make me cry--every angel is terrifying.

Actually, this goes beyond film (and indeed, beyond writing) so let's just say the teller of a story that fails to entertain me has failed. "Teller" and "Story" being nice general terms that might apply to all sorts of situations.

That's a bit troublesome now isn't it? I mean, with film and its second-rate critical appartus emphasizing things like auteur theory and Lacan, perhaps that's fine, but, at least where books and poems are concerned, the idea of the "teller" has been under intense scrutiny since the mid to late 18th century. I do not subscribe to your 'entertaining me = success' theorem--it's a bit egocentric for my taste--but supposing someone did, you could just as well attribute artistic failure to the culture that produces artists as to the artists themselves. It has been some time since anyone has had a clear idea just what an 'author' is.

Now, they may or may not care. Britney Spears almost certainly does not care about my opinion of her music. But I can still make statements like "Britney Spears is a failure and here's why," and be justified in doing so, no matter how popular she may be.

Arguments like, "Well, she's really popular so she can't be a failure," do not address the reasoning of the statement and so don't demonstrate it's incorrectness.

Here's where I won't make any friends. I can't stand LotR. Movies--have seen them--, books--have read them--, none of it. In fact I have a general distaste for stock fantasy and stock sci-fi from Forgotten Realms to Dragonlance to Farscape to, well, let's just say a lot of the things that are sacred cows to most of the people on these boards. Yet there is that thread toward the top of the forum about Tolkien's failings, of which assuredly there are many, (not that he is without his charms), where reapersaurus is continually beaten with 'most read books other than the Bible' and similarly goofy statistics. I bet if you counted up every person that has ever read Homer in the last 2800 odd years, it would exceed LotR, but that is not my point.

So am I free to proclaim with absolute legitimacy that because LotR fails to entertain me, it's a complete, utter, devastating failure? I am guessing a big no is on the way. I have more than once heard someone say LotR are the greatest books ever written, and more than once have burst out laughing; I cringe when people call them great movies. That's just taste. I concede that we live in an era of relativism, where people are happy to give up arguments of quality in favor of the 'everything is subjective' line, but that doesn't mean it's true. I recall a thread in general some months ago where one poster antagonistically tossed off something like "Oh lord, save us from the moral relativists." Well, I'd like to be saved from the literary relativists as well. There are reasons Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe are so widely read, which have nothing whatever to do with their entertainment value (plenty of people find them boring), at least not in any gut-response sort of way.

I disagree with extreme prejudice. Writing a twist that nobody can guess is a method of entertaining people. One of many. Story-telling well and entertaining your audience are synonyms. A well-told story is one that entertains. At the least -- it may do many things besides, but if it doesn't entertain, it's not well-told.

Writing well, writing a twist that nobody can guess, and entertaining your audience have nothing necessarily to do with each other. I could write a twist that would be impossible for you to guess; that impossibility could as easily be a function of how badly it is written as how well, and anything in-between. If you insist on a well-told story being an entertaining story you may, but it is not at all clear that what constitutes artistic success has anything to do with telling stories at all, let alone telling them well.

Now we come to the question of audience frame of reference. Let's take Sophocles. That Sophocles has entertained many people is clear -- the plays have survived because of their ability to entertain audiences through the ages. That reading Sophocles may not entertain casual readers of today is likewise clear -- there is a frame of reference that Sophocles takes for granted that is very different from what most people carry around with them nowadays.

They've also survived through luck. Euripides is a more interesting example, since he hardly ever won and was the most lampooned of the great 3. I understand your point about frame of reference--in hermeneutics the popular term is horizons or horizons of expectation--but to say that the only reason the great works of the past are less popular today than they once were is because they can no longer be properly understood is a bit of a stretch. Shakespeare is read, seen and appreciated more now than he ever was in his lifetime or probably any period after, and that is not an uncommon scenario by any means.

We have to learn to appreciate Sophocles. We have to acquire a frame of reference in which the plays become entertaining.

That is one approach, but not the only one. Some critics would advocate the opposite. I would think, given your emphasis on subjectivity, that you would incline more toward the 'it is significant only in how it relates to us now' camp.

So sometimes when a story fails to entertain us, we need to consider frame of reference. Often the first time we're exposed to material from an unfamiliar f.o.r., we dislike it or reject it. Only after time do we acquire the background we need to understand the material.

Yet ultimately, such horizons are unavailable. We all know what happens when you go chasing after a horizon: you come to the spot where it had been, only to find that it has since moved on.

Additionally, there are more layers than a simple 'frame of reference' suggests. It is more like a reel of frames of reference, and really (bad pun?) those frames are the film, and there's no going back from them. Their meaning is contained entirely in what they are, and the discursive unity, if you believe in such a thing, that made that articulation, reel, frame possible is never again available. It's something like a language: nothing you can pin down. Of course one of the first things we often forget when starting down these roads of thought is that there's really no such thing.

But once we do, we can then once again offer our opinions as to the success or failure of individual works of art -- in our subjective way. And of course sometimes when we think a work has failed, what's really happened is that our frame of reference is sufficiently misaligned with that of the storyteller that we cannot appreciate the work.

And it's entirely possible for this to be the case when viewing or listening to a work produced in our own time. Perhaps you are simply misaligned and so cannot appreciate Spears or NSync.

If you want to play the subjectivity card, you should at least accept the consequences, which are, at the least, that you are forbidden from making categorical judgments about anything and so that, essentially, good and bad cease to exist and relations between things take over.

It is the mark of truly great storytellers that their material tends to transcend frames of reference and resonate even for people who haven't learnt to appreciate it. Shakespeare springs to mind, here. People who cannot read Shakespeare for pleasure will still flock to movies made from his plays.

Movies that generally suck . A lot of Shakespeare's stories were already stolen; it isn't the stories, in themselves, that make the writing great.

As a storyteller, I can't afford to have that attitude. If my audience loses interest for ANY reason, it behooves me to find out why and figure out if I can improve my story somehow so as not to lose my audience's attention.

If you want to make a living writing, I can certainly sympathize with you having the views you do and taking the approach you do. But from a critical standpoint I think it is the wrong approach--at the same time, if you are a great writer, it will make no difference. You will simply write good books that happen to be popular books, too. There's certainly nothing wrong with being popular, only with using popularity to justify critical judgments.

But let's take two other famous "twist" films -- The Sixth Sense and Fight Club. I disliked the former and loved the latter.

We get along capitally on that one. I also agree with your assessment of the weak way the twist in The Sixth Sense was wrought, which goes to my previous statement that a twist that cannot be predicted and good writing have nothing necessarily to do with one another. I've entertained similar thoughts about Fight Club as well.

 

[barsoomcore]

*contemplates SynapsisSynopsis' post*

Whoah. If nothing else, I feel a lot better about my tendency to obsessively go through other people's posts and find every single point I could possibly disagree with. I do worry about the possibility of us ever being in the same room together, though.



That said, it's clear from your post that we're using different meanings for the word "entertain." Let me be more clear (since, frankly, I think I'm the one with the nonstandard usage):

By "entertain" I mean "delight, inspire, thrill and/or provide new and valuable insight into life, the universe and everything." There should be no question of "mere" entertainment.

Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe are indeed tremendously entertaining. I consider Finnegan's Wake one of the great con-jobs of literary history, so let's leave that aside, shall we?

I'm going to continue to use the word "entertain" on the understanding that I'm using it to mean the above. If you'd prefer I use another term, I'm open to possibilities. Let us avoid tedious arguments about terminology. In favour of tedious arguments about critical theory.

So now for my turn to behave in a frighteningly obsessive/compulsive manner:

If (a film) fails to entertain you, then yes, it fails to entertain you, but to jump from its failing to entertain you to its failing wholesale is to make the unspoken assertion that it only exists inasmuch as it entertains you.

On the one hand, we have the new definition of entertain, which possibly addresses this point for you. On the other, I'm not very happy about the term "failing wholesale". What does that mean?

I'll happily agree that a story may fail me and succeed for others -- there being no end to reasons why that may be (not least of which might be that I'm wrong), but I will not agree that a story must succeed regardless of my opinion, if most other people think it succeeds.

Sometimes everybody else IS wrong. If you're not capable of believing that, you're not capable of original thought.

It has been some time since anyone has had a clear idea just what an 'author' is.

Well, not anyone in the publishing industry, I am compelled to point out.

You seem to be confusing narratorial identity with actual authorship. I'm not aware of any reason to doubt, for example, that Lord Byron wrote Don Juan. The question of who's speaking in that work and what that may mean in the arena of interpretation is certainly a complex one, but the question of who John Murray mailed the cheques to is not. When I say the teller of the story has failed, I mean the guy who cashed the cheque. He got paid, so he's on the hook.

You could just as well attribute artistic failure to the culture that produces artists as to the artists themselves.

You'd have to provide some pretty spectacular evidence to convince me on that one. You'd have to demonstrate, for example, that said culture was unable to produce successful artistic works at all -- and I'm not aware of any such culture on this planet.

Well, possibly Edmonton.

Seriously though, are we going to pretend that, say, the United States is to blame for Jackie Collins? That she emerges from the cultural context in which she writes is obvious, but that doesn't mean that the work was spontaneously generated out of American culture.

Or at any rate, if you want to say that it did, knock yourself out, but in explaining why her books are so much different from, say, Steven Brust's, you're going to need to discuss the elements of their genesis that are distinct -- and the primary one of those is going to have to be Ms. Collins herself.

So am I free to proclaim with absolute legitimacy that because LotR fails to entertain me, it's a complete, utter, devastating failure? I am guessing a big no is on the way.

Not from me. You're free to say whatever you like. And if you can back it up, I might even be convinced. It's happened before. At any rate, I'll certainly listen to your arguments.

I concede that we live in an era of relativism, where people are happy to give up arguments of quality in favor of the 'everything is subjective' line, but that doesn't mean it's true.

Of course it isn't true. It never has been and it never will be.

Relativism is a refuge for people who can't formulate opinions but need to view themselves as opinionated.

Writing well, writing a twist that nobody can guess, and entertaining your audience have nothing necessarily to do with each other.

I feel like my meaning got turned inside out in all this -- and I concede that it's probably my fault. Let me try again:

When somebody attempts to create a plot twist, and the audience sees it coming, and the story's impact is lessened thereby, somebody has failed to write as well as they could have. And the audience is less entertained than they otherwise would have been. Had the plot twist been more difficult to see coming, all other things being equal, the success of the work would have been greater.

It's perfectly simple to create a plot twist that nobody can guess -- I can announce at the end of my story that all the characters are in fact sentient cheese wedges and surprise the audience completely. THAT I agree has nothing to do with writing well, or entertaining.

I hope it's clear that under my expanded definition of "entertaining", there is indeed a necessary connection to writing well. A well-told story is an entertaining story -- the terms are synonymous.

If you insist on a well-told story being an entertaining story you may, but it is not at all clear that what constitutes artistic success has anything to do with telling stories at all, let alone telling them well.

I find this a curious statement. There are indeed many forms artistic success can take that have nothing to do with telling stories.

The success of an oil painting, for example, need have nothing to do with telling a good story. Likewise a symphony, or a pop song. Sculpture. Poetry.

But I'm not talking about these things. I'm talking about story-telling. Are you trying to say that the artistic success of a story has nothing to do with telling stories, let alone telling them well? I sort of doubt it, but I'm genuinely confused by this statement of yours.

To say that the only reason the great works of the past are less popular today than they once were is because they can no longer be properly understood is a bit of a stretch. Shakespeare is read, seen and appreciated more now than he ever was in his lifetime or probably any period after, and that is not an uncommon scenario by any means.

I don't think I said (or once again, didn't intend to say) that great works of the past can no longer be properly understood. I meant to say simply that one reason we are sometimes not entertained by a given work is because its virtues fall outside of our current frame of reference. This may or may not have anything to do with our distance from the work in time. I chose time-related examples only because they were the first to come to mind, but I don't mean to make a statement on the way tastes change over the years.

That Shakespeare is more popular than ever means only that our society's common frame of reference makes it easy for us to appreciate the virtues of his work.

We have to acquire a frame of reference in which the plays become entertaining.

That is one approach, but not the only one. Some critics would advocate the opposite.

The opposite? Some critics would advocate we have to acquire a frame of reference in which the plays become less entertaining?

Let me be more clear. If we wish to enjoy a story that falls outside of our current frame of reference, we must acquire a frame of reference that allows us to appreciate that story's virtues. Acquiring that frame of reference is largely the same process as "learning to appreciate" the story in question.

I would think, given your emphasis on subjectivity, that you would incline more toward the 'it is significant only in how it relates to us now' camp.

I think you're confusing the fact that I think I know better than all the critics in the world with the notion that I'm a subjectivist.

I may be confident, but I'm not a subjectivist. I'm serious. I think my opinions are the correct ones -- I do not attempt to pretend that "since they're purely subjective nobody can tell me they're wrong." Or rather, I don't think the fact that they're subjective (as all opinions are) relieves me of the need to defend them or means they can't therefore be wrong.

A friend of mine has a statement about beliefs that I think is applicable, belief and subjective opinion sharing certain qualities:

We believe things for one of two reasons: either because we think they're true, or because it makes us happy to do so.

I hold the beliefs I hold about storytelling because I think they're true. Given that, I consider it essential that I constantly challenge and assess them, and improve them when I find them lacking. I am appreciating your assistance in this effort.

Yet ultimately, such horizons are unavailable. We all know what happens when you go chasing after a horizon: you come to the spot where it had been, only to find that it has since moved on.

Additionally, there are more layers than a simple 'frame of reference' suggests. It is more like a reel of frames of reference, and really (bad pun?) those frames are the film, and there's no going back from them. Their meaning is contained entirely in what they are, and the discursive unity, if you believe in such a thing, that made that articulation, reel, frame possible is never again available. It's something like a language: nothing you can pin down. Of course one of the first things we often forget when starting down these roads of thought is that there's really no such thing.

Poetic. But rather beside the point. We aren't chasing after horizons and we aren't trying to recapture some lost understanding. That we can't "go back" is immaterial.

All that matters is can we learn to appreciate stories that operate according to notions of story-telling outside our frame of reference? And the answer to that is of course we can. People do it all the time. It may be a complex process, there may be dozens of layers if you like, but if you're going to say it's impossible to learn how to like stories that fall outside our current frame of reference, well, you're going to need to provide some heavy evidence.

If you want to play the subjectivity card, you should at least accept the consequences, which are, at the least, that you are forbidden from making categorical judgments about anything and so that, essentially, good and bad cease to exist and relations between things take over.

Now that's just downright unfriendly.

Are you saying there are objective standards of artistic success? Please show me them, I'd be very interested. Of course there are not, and there never have been (outside of France, anyway). The appreciation and discussion of art is dependent on the subjective reactions of indivduals to the work.

But that doesn't mean we cannot make categorical judgements. That doesn't mean that good and bad cease to exist. You're getting a trifle melodramatic here, don't you think?

The fact that our opinions about art are subjective does not mean we cannot have meaningful discussion about them. It does not mean that we are barred from making categorical statements about art. It only means that we must keep in mind that all our categorical statements are subject to change, should new ideas and approaches arise.

Rather than trying to force me to accept one position or another, offer me your own. If you think that the discussion of storytelling success can be run on purely objective terms, I'll be surprised, but more than willing to listen. If you think some degree of subjectivity must be allowed, then why are you badgering me about it?

The notion that thought must be completely objective or completely subjective is rather naive. Surely as more or less rational beings it falls upon us to be constantly assessing our conversations, picking out the subjective opinions that are only expressions of our taste and trying to analyze the objective truths we manage to hit upon. It's never all one or the other.

Looking over this whole debate, it seems to me like we're disagreeing on a couple of key points: the meaning of the word "entertainment" (for which I apologize but I hope my new definition helps you to understand what I'm getting at -- and possibly brings us to agreement on the nature of the "responsibility" for artistic success or failure) and the subjectivity of artistic opinions (on which subject I'm not at all sure as to what position you're putting forth, and so remain uncertain as to whether or not we agree). My central point remains: when a story fails to entertain me, I am correct to say that the storyteller has failed. This does not absolve me from any responsibility to examine my own appreciation of the story and make sure that my lack of enjoyment does not result from a missing or inadequate frame of reference, but the job of the storyteller is to entertain me, and should she fail at that, she has failed.

 

[Mog Elffoe]

It's not like anyone sets out to make bad movies..."I know, let's make a bad movie".

Tom Green did with Freddy Got Fingered. I'm sure of it. That guy's got a good punchin' coming to him if I ever meet him..

 

[Wulf Ratbane]

Sixth Sense-- Got me.

The Usual Suspects-- Got me.

No Way Out-- Got me.

Fight Club-- Got me.

The Crying Game-- Got me.

and recently, The Ring-- Got me. (Not exactly a "whodunnit" twist, but certainly a WHOA! ending)

I recently also watched Miller's Crossing again. That's another good movie with a very well layered plot. In particular,

Spoiler

the sexual orientation of many of the characters plays a major impact on the unfolding plot.

I confess that I didn't notice this angle at all the first time I saw the movie, so I got a pretty good shock out of the revelation (it wasn't something I expected in a "gangster movie." But on watching the movie a second time, it wasn't even remotely obfuscated. In fact, several of the characters make reference to it several times throughout the movie (although always in a "polite" way).

I think that what makes these movies so good is that (with the possible exception of The Usual Suspects) they don't set you up to EXPECT a twist. Yeah, if I am expecting a twist, I am as good as anybody at spotting it coming. But a truly good movie engages me in such a way that I am not able to seperate myself from the story to engage in the "meta" activity of looking for spoilers.

I love watching these movies a second time. The Sixth Sense was great for that-- everything was right there for you the whole time.

Wulf