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SMC Pod #224: Movie Twists, shock endings, and comic buttons! · Secret Movie Club Podcast

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Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 224 Movie Twists.
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My name is Craig Hamill. I'm the founder, programmer, Secret Movie Club.
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It's always awesome to be here and to be talking to you guys.
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You're going to be hearing this roughly july 16th 17th 2026 and onwards,
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we are about three weeks minus under three weeks from our,
0:33
sixth sense and unbreakable 35 millimeter saturday august 1st matinee double
0:39
feature at the mill at the palace theater
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A thousand seats. We can't wait to have you.
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Actually, it's because we're showing The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable that we're
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doing the movie Twists podcast today.
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And then that night, 7.30 p.m., we're showing The Big Lebowski and then having
0:57
a party upstairs where they shot Maude's apartment.
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I'm working to put together a fun, great party. We are going to have a lot of people there.
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The movie itself, the party is sold out. The movie itself is almost sold out.
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So when you hear this, I think we're, I know we'll probably have like,
1:17
you know, 20, 30, 40 tickets minimum left, but they are going and we're at the low ticket point.
1:23
So if you do want to see Big Lebowski at the Palace, grab your ticket,
1:27
go to secretmovieclub.com events, or you can go to our Eventbrite,
1:31
just Google Secret Movie Club and Eventbrite, grab tickets.
1:34
It's still early bird. The early bird sunsets July 26th.
1:38
So as long as you get the tickets now, they're $12. I have gotten the initial
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and preliminary okays for our September event.
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I still have a few things to do. So I, again, I'm going to be vague,
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but I am working to launch our September event in the next week or two.
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God willing, inshallah, and then just keep going.
1:59
Then work on October. I'm working on a November thing right now.
2:03
As always, you can go to secretmovieclub.com, scroll to the bottom, get on our newsletter.
2:10
The newsletter always hears about things Tuesday at 10 a.m. So if we're announcing
2:15
things, the newsletter gets the first announcement ahead of the social media.
2:19
You can go to Eventbrite. We sell tickets there. We sell tickets on our website.
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We announce things on our social medias at Secret Movie Club.
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And as always, you can write us community at secretmovieclub.com about anything.
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You can call us 213-834-9117. I don't think I've ever heard.
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Given our business phone over the podcast, but you could even call us.
2:41
Best way to get a quick answer from us is email.
2:44
So community at secretmovieclub.com, definitely the best.
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And then Secret Movie Club podcast 225 will be the cult movie,
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and that'll come out next week.
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But today we are talking movie twists. So let's get to it.
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So there are going to be a ton of spoilers today.
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You cannot talk about movie twists without explaining what the twist is.
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So let me tell you the movies that we are going to discuss.
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If you have never seen these or you want to go into them blind and fresh,
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you want the twist to really take you, just don't listen to this podcast.
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See all the movies of this list that you want to see and then come back because
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we have to spoil. So this is like spoiler alert at the very beginning.
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We may be talking about Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village.
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M. Night Shyamalan has built a career where a lot of his movies are based on the twist.
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In some ways, unfortunately, he chased the twist for a long time because it defined him.
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We're going to talk about Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. We'll talk about the 1960s Planet of the Apes.
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We'll talk about Empire Strikes Back, the Star Wars movie David Fincher's Fight Club.
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We'll talk about another David Fincher movie, Gone Girl. We'll talk about The First Saw.
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We'll talk about the movie The Usual Suspects, a great early horror movie from
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the 21st century called The Others.
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We'll talk about Shawshank Redemption, a Fellini movie called Toby Dammit.
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We'll talk about the TV show The Twilight Zone, which in a way was almost every
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second or third Twilight Zone was like a little mini movie with a twist.
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We'll talk about Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
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We'll talk about a really fun.
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Lindsay Lohan movie called I Know Who Killed Me, a movie I showed at what was
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Secret Movie Club before Secret Movie Club became what it is now.
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Back in the day, Secret Movie Club was a bunch of friends.
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We called it Secret Movie Club, and we'd want to show movies to each other that
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would blow the group's mind, but would not be an obvious movie.
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So in other words, you wouldn't show Jaws.
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Jaws is an amazing film, but you wouldn't show Jaws. You would show a movie
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like Lindsay Lohan's I know who killed me.
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And I showed that movie at my friend Laura, now Laura Langley, at her house at the time.
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It was very kind of her to host. It was a nutty film, but we would do that all
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the time. This was a movie I showed.
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We'll talk about Jacob's Ladder and we'll talk about Billy Wilder's witness for the prosecution.
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So if you, any of those movies you want to see, don't listen to this podcast
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because I might be spoiling the twists. And in almost every instance I just
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mentioned, the twist is a big part of why you watch the movie or a big part
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of the enjoyment of the film.
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What I wanted to start off with is a distinction. Interestingly,
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there are different kinds of endings that I would argue.
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I looked up what a twist ending is in cinema just to make sure I understood definitionally.
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And I like the definition, which is it is often an ending that makes you question
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the reality of everything you have
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just seen and totally reconfigures and recontextualizes the entire film.
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I think that's a pretty good definition of how I would define a twist.
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And that is different from, say, a shock ending.
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A shock ending is not a twist. So an example of a shock ending,
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the definition of a shock ending, and again, I'm going to spoil these.
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So I'm about to talk about The Departed, The Mist, and The Second Invasion of
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the Body Snatchers, the one directed by Philip Kaufman in 1978.
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And I'm about to jump into these. Just don't listen to this if you don't want to hear these endings.
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But a shock ending is where something happens at the end that's shocking.
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That is not a twist. Example would be Martin Scorsese's The Departed,
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which itself is a remake of a great Hong Kong film called Infernal Affairs.
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And both movies end basically the same way.
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And what happens is the premise is there is an undercover cop who is embedded with the mafia.
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And then there is a mafia foot soldier who is embedded with the cops.
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And in both instances, they meet at the end, these two embedded main characters
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who we've been following the whole movie.
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And we at first think that the undercover cop in The Departed,
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played by Leonardo DiCaprio, has gotten upper hand on the embedded mafioso who's
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playing a cop who here is played by Matt Damon.
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But in The Departed, as Leonardo DiCaprio arrests Matt Damon and is going to
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take him in, the elevator opens and Leonardo DiCaprio gets shot just point blank in the head.
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And it is revealed that there was a second embedded mafioso that Jack Nicholson,
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the mob boss, had and just didn't tell Colin, the Matt Damon character.
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And this is all a pattern of the movie. There was two embedded cops.
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There were two embedded mafiosos.
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The embedded cops did not know about each other. The embedded mafiosos did not
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know about each other because the powers that be did not want anything messed
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up. You totally get it. So in a weird way.
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That is a shocking ending, but it is organically probably the inevitable ending
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of the sensibility and tone of the movie, which is very dark.
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The Departed and Infernal Affairs both have a fairly bleak view
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of human nature and the world, especially The Departed feels like a movie where
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Scorsese was despairing about the Bush administration, where the country was going after 9-11.
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It's as close as Scorsese's ever gotten to that kind of tone.
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Another movie I would say is a shock ending, not a twist. And I would argue
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here that a lot of people say it's a twist ending, and I don't think it's a
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twist ending, is the ending at the end of Frank Darabont's adaptation of Stephen
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King's The Mist, which was a short story.
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Here a mist engulfs a small town and monsters come out of the mist and these
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people all hole up at a supermarket and they have different viewpoints and they fight.
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Uh ultimately they realize we got to get out of here we got to try to get out
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of this mist and in the movie the book ends on a ambivalent ambiguous hopeful note,
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the mist basically the car runs out of gas there are these monsters in the mist
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that are going to come and almost certainly kill them.
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And the dad makes the decision to kill everybody and spare them.
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So he does, including his own son.
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And then he points the gun at himself, runs out of bullets. At that moment,
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the mist clears and the military appears and they're sort of clearing the area
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and the monsters are gone.
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And so the dad is left having just killed his son and the people in the car.
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Horribly bleak ending crazy ending an ending that i i really think is bold and
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a lot of people see the mist you're like whoa but i don't think you would call
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that a twist a movie twist because in some ways.
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It doesn't make you question the reality of what you saw before.
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The mist was still real. The monsters were still real.
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It's just that it seemed like they would never get out of it.
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They made a decision and then it cleared.
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But that's very much like life is. Sometimes you make a decision.
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You think you've run out of money or you think you have all the money in the
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world. And something suddenly happens that changes all of that.
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But that's not quite a twist.
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The second Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie directed by Philip Kaufman,
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which i really like and a lot of people prefer but i am i prefer the don siegel
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original the 1956 original invasion of the body snatchers i love that film
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the phil kaufman version i really really like i watch it anytime and the ending is dynamite,
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but i actually prefer the original but anyway,
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the ending of the remake the 1978 remake with donald sutherland and leonard
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nimoy among others in brooke adams i think is.
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Basically you think that donald sutherland has to pretend,
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to be one of the body snatched to exist in san francisco because it's been overrun
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by these aliens these body snatchers that take over people by placing a pod
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next to them recreating who they are and then wandering around as if they were them
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and you see donald sutherland at work and he's walking in the street and then
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a character i think it's veronica cartwright i could be wrong about that but
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uh a character who had disappeared she's hiding she's scared she pops out and
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she sees donald sutherland and she calls out to him
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and he turns and looks at her and then he points at her and emits this horrific
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alien sound and he has been taken over he is he is a pod alien,
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and it's a great ending great ending and if you know it it's in dialogue with
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the first movie where the main character played by Kevin McCarthy, Kevin McCarty.
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He is saying like he's the only living one from the city, but no one believes
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him. Everyone thinks he's crazy. So here you have the last character.
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You think it's going to end like that where he's the last person standing, basically.
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But no, he's been taken over by a pod.
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Great ending. But I don't think it's a twist ending because it doesn't really
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change anything that you saw before.
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Yes, you have an assumption about him at the very end of the movie,
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but it wasn't an assumption you had the whole movie.
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Like the twist would have been we thought he was a human being the whole time
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and he'd been a pod person from the beginning and that's not true he's a human
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up until the last four minutes of the film or three minutes of the movie so
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i don't think that's quite a twist so those are shock endings which are great
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and when they're done well are have the power of twist endings but they're different,
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uh there's the o henry twist ending which would be you know i haven't read too many O.
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Henry stories, but knowing the O. Henry twist, which is a thing people talk about.
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O. Henry was a short story writer where the ending was always satisfying because
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there was some kind of ironic twist at the end of it. Example of an O.
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Henry story would be The Gift of the Magi, where this very down on their luck
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couple want to get each other gifts.
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The wife has beautiful hair. the husband I think has a really beautiful expensive,
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heirloom watch and the wife.
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Does all these things to get the money to buy the husband something for his
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watch and the husband does everything he can to get the wife a nice comb I think
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for her beautiful hair and when they meet each other the wife has cut off her hair and sold her hair
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to get the thing for the watch and the husband is pawned the watch to get the comb for the hair.
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That's an example of an O. Henry twist.
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And I don't know that it's the same as a movie twist, because again,
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you don't question the reality.
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It doesn't totally reconfigure everything that came before.
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It's a really beautiful, ironic twist.
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It is a twist in the literal sense of that word, like the story twists at the
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end in a way where you're like, but it's not the movie twists as I understand them.
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And we'll get into that. We'll get to the main course in a moment.
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An example of a movie that has an O'Henry twist would be the John Landis film
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Trading Places with Dan Aykroyd and Nettie Murphy from 1983,
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Jamie Lee Curtis, Ralph Bellamy, Don Amici.
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I love that film. There may be some things that haven't aged that well about that movie.
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But if you love that era of comedy, and I do, I do, you know,
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Caddyshack, Vacation, Trading Places, the John Hughes comedies,
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all of which have issues now for sure.
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But trading places, the O. Henry twist there is Ralph Bellamy and Don Amici
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play these brother stockbrokers, well-off patrician, you know, mega rich guys.
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And they make a bet that they could take Dan Aykroyd, who is an up-and-coming
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stockbroker, switch him with Eddie Murphy, who is kind of a.
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Street-wise poor black guy, and basically Eddie Murphy would be a great stockbroker and Dan Aykroyd.
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Would suddenly kind of embody people.
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What they would consider low-class behavior of the street.
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And what happens is Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy meet each other.
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They realize what's going on, and they join forces to turn the tables on Don
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Amici and Ralph Bellamy, and they do.
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And at the end of the movie, they basically manufacture a trade that Don Amici
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and Ralph Bellamy didn't see coming, and they lose all their money, and they become poor.
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And Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy suddenly have all the money in the world.
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Great twist oh henry twist ironic twist again doesn't really change the reality
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of everything you've seen in the comedy
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and then there are movies where you might call them problematic twists i don't
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even know that i like that i i would actually classify most of these movies,
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actually two or three for sure are twists,
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but these would be movies like the prestige old boy shutter island the game
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those are definitely twists because you you'd suddenly look at the reality but
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i would say that they don't they kind of.
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They they pop something on you at the very end that yes it was set up,
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yes i and i actually like all those movies i like prestige i like old boy i
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like shutter island i like the game quite a bit all of them but,
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at the end i almost feel like the twists are not my argument here is going to
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be that a good movie twist tells you everything at the beginning.
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And that when it happens at the end, you're like, oh, of course.
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And it's like a good prank in a way.
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You suddenly realize that you had been given everything from the very beginning,
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that the filmmaker told you everything.
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In other words, the filmmaker had been straight with you in a way about what
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was really going on, but was clever enough that you didn't fully cotton on to
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it until the twist is revealed at the end.
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And I would say that with a problematic twist,
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The filmmaker, to make it work, did withhold something from you.
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So again, I'm about to spoil prestige, old boy, Shutter Island in the game.
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Prestige by Christopher Nolan, old boy by Park Chan-Wook, Shutter Island,
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Martin Scorsese, the game, David Fincher.
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Prestige definitely, I think, sort of hides something from you for the ending
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to work, which is that, yes, Christian Bale turns out to be twins. That's actually great.
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And I don't actually feel that that was withheld.
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I think that was handled quite well. But what's withheld is that Hugh Jackman,
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the competing magician, seems to have developed a way to do the trick the way
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that Christian Bale does.
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And what it turns out is that it's this pseudoscientific cloning device that
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he's gotten from Nikola Tesla, where he clones himself and.
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One of him goes and is immediately killed in a tank so that they're not two of them.
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And then the other one appears because of electricity. It's kind of a science
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fictiony thing. And at the end, you're like, it's a cool image and it's a cool reveal.
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But one, you're like, ah, I don't know what kind of science does this.
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And two, it feels like he had to withhold too much and then reveal too much all at once.
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Old boy, the same in a little bit of way, although I think it's better set up.
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But you find out maybe I just feel like it's too much at the end,
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as interesting as it is, you find out that the main character has been partnering
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with a young woman who turns out to be his daughter and they have slept together,
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which is horrible and really unsettling.
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Now there's a karmic aspect to that because the villain of the movie was caught
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in an incestuous relationship with his sister. So.
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I understand, if anything, there's a bit of the O'Henry, like really dark,
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bleak O'Henry to Old Boy.
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But I also feel it's a little, I don't know, for my sensibility,
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it's a little like, oh boy, okay.
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But that's me. I loved Old Boy up until that reveal. And then I was just like, okay.
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It just felt like melodrama that doesn't work to me. It was too much,
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too intensely silly to me.
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But that's me. That's me. I know a lot of Old Boy fans are going to take me to task on that.
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Shutter Island, I actually don't even think there's a twist.
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I think you know what's going on from the beginning.
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So I would just argue in that instance where it turns out that Leonardo DiCaprio
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is not an active police detective, but an inmate in the mental institution that's on the island.
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You know that from the beginning. It's like Scorsese doesn't even want to hide it from you.
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So that's an example where there is a twist, but it's not really no effort.
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Or rather, it's actually just Scorsese fights.
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Hiding it from you and instead tells you everything, which I actually think
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works to the benefit of the movie as a character study.
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But that would be that. And then the game, the problematic twist there is that
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at the end, it's revealed that the game is so good.
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Michael Douglas plays this alienated, disaffected billionaire who just is isolated
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from everybody in his life. He starts playing this weird game.
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And at the end, he shoots his brother, played by Sean pen.
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And he can't believe he's done it. And he jumps off a building like his dad
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did. He commits suicide like his dad did.
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And then he breaks through this glass window onto a big, huge, inflatable tarp.
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And the game even knew he was going to do that. And there's his brother.
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He didn't really shoot his brother. And it's almost like a Christmas carol, a la David Fincher.
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He gets another lease at life. And he kind of wakes up out of his alienation
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and his emotional remoteness and it feels like he's going to have a good relationship with his brother.
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And he might even start up this romantic relationship with Dara,
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Deborah Cara Unger, who plays a woman who is an actor within the game.
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It's fun. I actually love the game, but I find that ending to be a little too convenient.
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It, it, it, it posits that the game could anticipate any, uh.
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Outcome, just any, any, like it could predict anything, which is not how life
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is. So again, like the prestige, there's a bit of shenanigans you feel at the
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end. You're like, I don't know.
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I don't know that they knew he would jump off this part of the building and
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the glass went cut him and he'd land right smack dab. And, but you know,
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some movies, and I think the game is one of these. And I think David Fincher
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tells you that that's the movie you're watching.
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Some movies are fantasies and you just go, okay, great.
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Another, and then we're going to get to the real movie twists.
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But another kind of twist that's really, I think, more, I don't even know what you would call it.
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It's almost like a button. In fact, I think that's what it is.
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It's like the button to a three-part joke.
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Preston Sturges was great at this, specifically in movies like The Palm Beach
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Story or The Miracle at Morgan's Creek, where something happens at the end that is a reveal.
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If I'm remembering Palm Beach Story, there's just a hilarious reveal that they're
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twins involved and you're like oh of course twins explain everything and excuse me,
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and a miracle morgan's creek the miracle turns out to be that betty hutton has
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like eight kids she has like octuplets or septuplets and eddie bracken is like
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but those aren't really twists those are just fun.
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Wtf kind of like whoa taste sort of taking the whole comedy or taking whatever it is,
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you know and having a button which is a kind of joke a kind of twist but it's
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different okay so anyway having gone into all of that let's get into real movie twists here we go.
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So I think that the danger with a twist and a very close cousin to the twist is the whodunit is that,
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once you know the twist, just like in a whodunit, once you know who the killer was at the end of it.
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And these are movies like Agatha Christie movies, Rian Johnson's Knives Out
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movies, which I love. I actually, Rian Johnson has, you know,
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brilliant. He's created his own series and they're great to watch.
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They're incredible casts. They're all different.
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So I have mad respect for him. I wish I was as talented as Rian Johnson in what he has crafted.
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So this is not disparaging. And I love the Hercule Poirot movies,
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the Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express, etc.
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But the danger with the whodunit is once you know who did it,
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when you watch it again, it might be fun to see, oh, this is how they set that
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up. This is how they set that up. But you know who did it.
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And in a bad whodunit, there's really no reason to watch the other 80% or 90%
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of the movie anymore because it really is all leading to the satisfying here's who did it.
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And in a twist once you know the twist if the movie isn't uh done well enough
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then there's really not a reason to sit through the whole movie again you know
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the twist the twist was mega satisfying
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other than to see how they set it up,
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and so i think what's interesting about.
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M. Night Shyamalan, Sixth Sense, and Unbreakable is specifically in those two.
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And those are my two favorite Shyamalan movies. I have not seen them all,
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but I have seen Signs, The Village.
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With Sixth Sense and with Unbreakable, I would even argue Unbreakable more than Sixth Sense.
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The twist enrichens the movie, deepens the movie, makes the movie really the themes of the movie.
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It does everything a great movie twist should, and it makes the movie really
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fascinating. So in other words, in The Sixth Sense, Haley Joel Osment is a child
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who says that he can see dead people, that dead people speak to him.
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His therapist, played by Bruce Willis, is trying to be a good therapist,
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is not telling Haley Joel Osment that he's wrong, but is trying to get at the
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heart of what's going on. And does he really see dead people? Does he not?
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And Bruce Willis is dealing with his own trauma at home.
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He was attacked by a patient a year before, and it seems to have affected his
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marriage. And just he really feels he failed this patient who committed suicide in front of him.
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And now he's trying to redeem with this young patient played by Haley Joel Osment,
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and he just doesn't know if he can do it.
25:17
And so the reveal at the end that Bruce Willis died at the beginning of the
25:22
movie, that his patient actually shot him and he died of his gunshots before
25:28
the patient committed suicide, it's the definition.
25:32
And when people talk about movie twists, the sixth sense is almost always in
25:36
the top five of like all time, which is at the end, Bruce Willis realizes he's dead and that.
25:43
Haley Joel Osment clearly talks to dead people and can see dead people because
25:47
he's been talking to Bruce Willis the whole time.
25:49
And when you look at the movie, then in retrospect,
25:52
Every scene where Bruce Willis is with somebody else, Tony Collette,
25:56
Haley Joel Osment's mom, or his wife, Olivia Williams, I think,
26:01
in the movie, you realize that they're never really having a conversation.
26:05
They're talking past each other. You realize that Bruce Willis may have been
26:09
in the same costume for the entire film, which is really clever.
26:12
And uh but what i would argue here is that the sixth sense it that reveal that twist.
26:21
M night shamalan told you everything in the very first scene in the movie the
26:24
very first scene in the movie is bruce willis's unstable patient coming shooting
26:29
bruce willis and shooting himself and then this fade out as bruce willis is
26:33
bleeding out from his wounds so,
26:35
what's great is the moment,
26:39
you can't look back and be like, oh, M.
26:41
Night Shyamalan cheated me or tried to pull a fast one on me because he told
26:46
you from the very beginning everything you needed to know.
26:49
Unbreakable, I think, goes even one better where Bruce Willis survives this
26:54
train wreck that kills everybody but him.
26:57
And he begins to think that what's going on? Why am I not only the only one
27:02
who survived of that train wreck, but I didn't even have a scratch.
27:05
And this character played by Samuel Jackson shows up and basically says,
27:11
you might be a superhero.
27:12
And the twist at the end is this reveal that Samuel Jackson is like a super villain.
27:18
And the great thing about Samuel Jackson is that he has some kind of bone condition
27:22
where he breaks bones very easily. So he has to be in a wheelchair.
27:26
He has to have a cane. He has to be very, very careful.
27:29
So of course he would be fascinated if he exists, he'd be fascinated with someone
27:34
who is unbreakable like Bruce Willis.
27:36
Again, the reveal at the end that Samuel Jackson create caused that train wreck,
27:40
caused all these other accidents that have bedeviled the Philadelphia area.
27:45
It reinforces the themes of the movie and everything was told you at the very
27:49
beginning of the film so that what you get at the end of Unbreakable and at
27:54
the end of Sixth Sense is good writing, good storytelling.
27:59
The twist is the culmination and delivery of all the thematic development that had happened before.
28:10
So that, to me, is just the definition of, I think, how great movie twists can
28:15
work, because then you want to see the movie again.
28:17
Now, I think, and I've talked about this movie in so many different contexts,
28:21
so many different ways that I'm going to touch on it here, and I'm not going
28:24
to talk about it too much.
28:25
But my favorite movie twist of all time, and I talked about this movie,
28:30
I think, in the last podcast, I will, you know, talk about this movie many more
28:36
times to come, but is Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
28:40
This to me is the ultimate ultimate movie twist.
28:43
Ultimate movie that shows you how to do a movie twist because i i,
28:48
i can watch psycho once or twice a year i never get bored of it,
28:53
i think it is a fascinating film
28:55
the cinema is incredible the themes are incredible it is so satisfying
29:00
and there the twist is that you think the killer is norman bates mom and that
29:06
norman bates is under his mom's thumb, which he is in a way,
29:10
and that he is hiding her murders, which is a weird thing to think when you,
29:14
ultimately find out what's really going on, when you're like,
29:17
why would I have actually ever thought that?
29:20
Why would I have thought that a 70 or 80-year-old woman could overpower,
29:25
you know, like a hard-nosed police detective and kill him, played by Martin
29:29
Balsam and stuff? You really look back on like,
29:31
Why did I think that? Because the reveal at the end is that Norman is pretending
29:36
to be his mom. And he's a psycho.
29:39
It's right there in the title. It's great. It's just right there.
29:42
I mean, to show you how confident Hitchcock was in his powers,
29:46
he calls the movie Psycho.
29:48
Now you think the psycho is the mom. That's probably fair. When you find at
29:51
the end of the movie, at the climax, that it's been Norman the whole time,
29:55
you look back at the whole movie and you're like, of course. Of course it was Norman.
30:00
Why would I think otherwise? Of course, it had to be him. And
30:04
I just think that that twist, coupled with the brilliant, revolutionary,
30:09
transgressive storytelling, where it's really like a three-act short film, every act,
30:16
that then totally pulls out the rug from you and reconfigures reality every act.
30:20
It's almost as if the killing of Marion Crane, played by Janet Leigh at the
30:24
end of the first act, in a way, if you want to call it that,
30:27
or the midpoint. You might even call it the midpoint sequence.
30:30
It pulls the rug out. So when the rug is pulled out again, when Martin Balsam,
30:33
the detective, gets killed, you've already known that the rug is going to get
30:37
pulled out because it's already been pulled out. And then at the end,
30:39
the rug is almost pulled out from you again. So it's just a brilliant movie in its structure.
30:44
I can't watch it enough. I love that film. And the reveal, and you're thinking
30:50
about Norman, and you're thinking about the whole film and its worldview, it just is, to me—,
30:57
the dictionary definition of how a movie twist movie should be.
31:03
Now, there's so many other movies and I'm not going to speak about them in as much detail here.
31:09
I will say Planet of the Apes is a great movie twist and often cited because,
31:15
it's a bit of a shock ending movie twist.
31:17
Very end of the film, Charlton Heston, who is this astronaut who thinks he's
31:21
landed on this planet where apes are the dominant species and men are like monkeys.
31:27
Discovers that it had been Earth and he had time traveled somehow to the future
31:31
because he sees the Statue of Liberty buried in sand in this great final shot.
31:36
That is a twist ending because it reconfigures the reality of everything we've
31:40
experienced before. But it's also a bit of a shock ending. It's not,
31:45
a reconfiguring like psycho is it's just almost like we withheld this information
31:50
from you and now we're giving it to you
31:52
fight club is sort of classic almost in the psycho vein
31:56
where at the end you realize that edward norton and brad pitts tyler durden
32:01
are just one person and that edward norton has schizophrenia in a way it's like
32:06
psycho it's a psycho kind of reveal,
32:08
i love fight club i love fight club i think it it does the same thing i think
32:13
it totally sets up that ending i think you're given everything from the beginning,
32:17
period i'm not there's no qualified i love fight club but fight club's a lot
32:20
of fun uh but it just in the end there's a glibness apocalyptic dark humor.
32:28
Which i don't know feels wholly earned in the way that say the ending of uh
32:33
stanley kubrick's dr strange love that feels wholly earned when you know slim
32:37
pickens rides the bomb all the way to,
32:41
its target in the Soviet Union and the world ends, you're like,
32:44
yeah, you earned that ending. That ending's crazy. You earned it.
32:47
And when the buildings blow up at the end of Fight Club, all the credit union
32:50
buildings, it's a great ending. I love the Pixies. I love finding out that Tyler
32:55
Durden and Edward Norton are the same person, but slightly different.
33:00
Man, we could go through all of these, but I will say,
33:03
I love the Gone Girl twist. I mean, it's a twist in Gone Girl is that Rosamund
33:10
Pike's wife character has faked her own death.
33:13
And we discover that really at the midpoint of the movie, which I think is really good too.
33:17
In some ways, I'd say I prefer Gone Girl to the way that the twist in Fight
33:20
Club happens because Gone Girl, and this is probably a result of the strength
33:25
of the source material because Gone Girl is based on a novel, but.
33:29
The movie reveals, it's very Hitchcockian in a great way where it reveals the
33:34
information you need to know right about where I think you need to know it.
33:38
So rather than hiding that she has faked her death until the end,
33:43
you find that out in the middle of the movie and it recontextualizes the first
33:46
half of the movie and it complicates her character, it complicates the Ben Affleck character,
33:52
and it makes the second half of the movie great because you have all the information
33:55
you need to see how these two characters are horrible people.
34:01
And the ending, I think, is maybe Fincher's in some ways most successful darkly
34:06
comedic ending. Again, my favorite Fincher movie by a country mile is Zodiac.
34:11
I think that's one of the masterpieces of the last 28 years, 26 years.
34:16
But I've talked about that. That's a movie that doesn't have a twist ending.
34:20
It's just a different kind of movie.
34:22
The Gone Girl, I think, has a more successful comedically dark ending because
34:27
Fincher, he played it straight in that he gave you all the information you needed.
34:32
He didn't hide anything from you. He gave it when you needed it.
34:35
So there's this kind of high wire act when you're doing movie twists where.
34:41
It's a magic trick, like all movies are a magic trick, but it's a magic trick
34:45
where the audience has to feel like you gave them everything they needed.
34:51
You gave them all the information that they needed.
34:54
And so they don't feel like, oh, you know, they don't feel resentful of you
34:59
or they don't feel like, oh, you had to cut corners to get this ending.
35:03
You have to feel like you deserve it. That's great.
35:06
You told me everything. I didn't see it. It was all right there.
35:09
And what's great about those movies, like a Gone Girl, like a Psycho,
35:13
like Sixth Sense, like an Unbreakable, is they're eminently rewatchable.
35:17
Empire Strikes Back is eminently rewatchable. So I think that's another,
35:21
I would add that for me personally as a definition of a movie with a great twist.
35:25
But the fun thing about I Know Who Killed Me is, one, it's a ridiculous film.
35:28
But in the greatest possible way, I do not, if anybody involved with I Know
35:32
Who Killed Me is listening to this.
35:34
I've said this many times, but the worst movies are the movies that are forgettable
35:40
or the movies that are cynically made just to get your cash.
35:45
Movies that leave you profoundly unsatisfied.
35:49
And I don't even know that I'd use the word the worst because making movies
35:52
is so hard. I don't want to paint anybody.
35:55
I really don't want to paint anybody in a negative light. You get a movie made,
35:59
you've already accomplished a miracle, whatever its reception.
36:03
And I take my hat off to anybody who gets a movie made and released, period, full stop.
36:09
What I want to say about I Know Who Killed Me is that as ridiculous as the plot
36:13
is, and as you watch the movie, it is so enjoyable. And the reveal at the end
36:18
being that Lindsay Lohan is twins.
36:21
I mean, I'm sure I know rep people must have shown this with the parent trap for sure.
36:25
But that she turns out to be twins and that they're both alive.
36:30
And that's how it's explained. And it's just one of those satisfying,
36:33
ridiculous films that where the all of the things that happen are so hysterical
36:39
and crazy and fun that you do take your hat off. You know, that was great.
36:43
I had a great time. It's just a great movie to kind of get drunk to and be with
36:47
a bunch of friends and watch.
36:48
And I love that film. But that's the twist is that, oh, she was twins because
36:53
she comes back after she's ostensibly been killed. And she seems to be a different
36:57
person to have no memory of who she was before. And you're like,
37:00
what's going on? Who is this person? And that's that answer.
37:03
One final movie I'll talk about here is Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder with Tim
37:09
Robbins, a wonderful film.
37:12
Easily probably my favorite Adrian Lyne movie, where Tim Robbins' character,
37:18
is living in this world where all these weird things start to happen.
37:24
And weird that he sees like a monster sexually accost his girlfriend.
37:28
He sees faceless people. He has memories. He can't really contextualize.
37:33
He doesn't know what's going on.
37:34
And as he's living his life, he's just having more and more of these unsettling
37:38
visions or hallucinations.
37:40
And the reveal at the end of the film is that he's dead and he's in some kind
37:43
of purgatory, some kind of liminal space.
37:45
And his son finally leads him to what we conjecture to be reincarnation or something
37:53
better or the next level of existence or heaven, whatever you want to call it.
37:59
I love that film because it, too, is honest with you. It's an honest broker.
38:04
It tells you everything you need to know from the beginning.
38:07
You're given all the info you
38:08
need to understand that he is dead and in a purgatory or a liminal space.
38:12
But it does it in a wonderful way. And so by the end of the film,
38:16
I just actually read this amazing Philip K.
38:18
Dick book I highly recommend called Ubik, U-B-I-K, often considered one of his
38:23
great books. I had only read Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said,
38:26
which I love, another book I love.
38:27
And I'm a huge Philip K. Dick fan in terms of Blade Runner, Minority Report,
38:31
Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly.
38:33
So I read Ubik, and Ubik has a very similar, it turns out that your main characters
38:39
are in a kind of liminal space. And that explains the decay of the world.
38:43
But it's so well done that you feel like, yeah, yeah, okay.
38:47
You gave me all the information I needed in the novel, Philip.
38:50
Okay, Dick, thank you. You feel the same way in Jacob's Ladder.
38:55
And I got to talk about one more. I am also a big fan of Billy Wilder's Witness
38:59
for the Prosecution. I am not going to ruin that twist here.
39:03
I love Billy Wilder, and it says something about,
39:07
what an amazing filmmaker Billy Wilder was, that Witness for the Prosecution
39:12
is a movie not talked about a lot, even though if any other director had directed
39:17
it, it would be considered that director's best movie.
39:20
Basically, it's a courtroom drama. It's a banger cast, Charles Lawton, Marlena Dietrich.
39:25
And basically, Lawton is defending someone.
39:29
And there's a twist, which I don't want to ruin for you, that's really great.
39:35
That when it's revealed what it is at the end of the movie, you just laugh out loud.
39:39
And it's just really well done. And it's Billy Wilder's, you know,
39:43
him doing like, I'm going to do a twist movie.
39:45
And it's great. It's just so satisfying. Check it out. Witness for the process.
39:56
Okay, so I will wrap this one up just by saying that there are many different
40:01
kinds of endings that are related to or in some ways associated with a twist
40:07
or give you the feeling of a twist.
40:09
But it is probably important if you are going to be a movie maker and a storyteller
40:12
to understand or think about the distinctions.
40:15
Again, I do not proclaim that I think these are the ways to divide them or this
40:20
is the way to categorize them. It's just the way I do it.
40:23
But I would say that a movie twist basically reveals something that makes you
40:29
realize everything you've seen before.
40:32
It recontextualizes your understanding of the reality of everything you've seen before.
40:37
And movies like Sixth Sense, Psycho, Gone Girl, Saw, which we didn't even talk
40:43
about, which is so fun. Although I might argue Saw isn't a twist so much as
40:48
a shock ending, but someone can take me to task for that.
40:52
Jacob's Ladder, Witness for the Prosecution. These movies give you everything
40:56
you need to know. And so they really they they do more than most movies with a twist do.
41:03
And that's why they're the most successful and they are rewatchable.
41:06
And every time you rewatch them, they deepen like all great movies do.
41:10
I mean, I think ultimately the definition of a great movie is you can watch it over and over again.
41:17
It never gets old. You always get something new out of it.
41:21
It's a meal that keeps on giving. It's just a gift that keeps on giving.
41:27
That is a great movie. And I think the greatest movie twist movies would just
41:33
by default have to be like that.
41:35
They would have to be rewatchable and be the gift that never stops giving.
41:40
And Psycho, specifically, of all the titles I talked about, the best.
41:43
And no surprise that that's a movie with Alfred Hitchcock at the height of his powers.
41:50
Probably left it all on the field in a way with that movie.
41:53
Took everything he had worked for for 30, 40 years in his career and just put
41:58
it all into Psycho and got away with it.
42:01
And it's incredible. And I will say that there are a lot of movie twist movies
42:05
where the twists are a lot of fun, just like whodunits, but they're not really
42:09
rewatchable. And that's, again, they don't have to be.
42:12
You know, some movies are one and dones and you have a great time and you have
42:16
a great feeling and you feel like, hey, I got my money's worth. I had a great night.
42:21
That was a lot of fun. And you know what? You talk about that movie,
42:24
maybe 20 minutes to an hour combined for the rest of your life.
42:28
And it provides also another hour or so a great movie conversation.
42:32
And if a movie does that, it is a wild, wild, wild success.
42:37
But these are the movies, and those are my definitions of, I think,
42:40
the most successful movie twists. And then I would just say shock endings are
42:44
not twists. They're just endings that shock you, but they don't really make
42:48
you re-question everything that you saw that came before.
42:51
And O'Henry twists are just where, again, you don't question everything you
42:55
saw before, but there's an ironic ending that really hits you in a very poignant
43:00
way or a very powerful way.
43:02
And it's a slightly different kind of ending. Secret Movie Club podcast 225
43:07
will be the cult classic movie. These are movies like...
43:12
Todd Browning's Freaks, the Coen brothers' Big Lebowski, the Rocky Horror Picture
43:17
Show, movies that over time gain a really ardent following, Brian De Palma's
43:23
Phantom of the Paradise.
43:24
And they may not have been hits.
43:27
People may not get them, but a small group or a certain subgroup of people love them.
43:33
And they get together, watch the movie, and it just brings them endless joy.
43:36
And I want to examine it because there's some cult classics like Freaks and
43:40
like Big Lebowski that I think are some of the greatest movies ever made.
43:43
So I would argue that in some ways they were ahead of their time.
43:48
Ahead of the curve, and they are just legitimately great movies.
43:51
And it just took all of us 5, 10, 15 years to catch up with how brilliant those movies were.
43:57
But then there are also cult classic movies where they're definitely not for
44:00
everybody, but there is a subsect of people that love that film and it is a
44:07
cult classic. And we are going to dive into all of that next week.
44:11
In the meantime grab your big lebowski tickets if you want to come see it august
44:15
1st 7 30 at the historic palace theater in downtown la we,
44:19
only have a handful of tickets left and when they're gone they're gone we're we i hate overselling so
44:24
i am not going to oversell everybody who has a ticket is going to have a seat
44:27
but it will be it'll be near or almost sold out so uh definitely grab your ticket
44:32
now at secretmovieclub.com slash events or secret movie club eventbrite,
44:37
I will also say that we are working hard, and we will.
44:40
We'll be announcing, God willing, I mean, again, inshallah, we'll be announcing
44:45
our September event in the next week or two, and go get on our newsletter by
44:49
going to secretmovieclub.com.
44:51
Email us at community at secretmovieclub.com. Call us at 213-834-9117.
44:57
We will work to get back to you immediately.
45:00
All the best to all of you. I know we're all.
45:04
Fighting our own fights, running our own races, trying to keep whatever faith we have.
45:11
So we have the motivation to do things. And it's a hard fight. It's a hard fight.
45:15
Life is unrelenting and it is hard to get up after you've been knocked down
45:23
for 40, 50 years and say, okay, getting up, I'm trying again,
45:27
but please keep doing that.
45:28
Please keep making movies. Please keep working.
45:31
I'm doing it. I'm trying to work on myself, work on my movies.
45:34
You do the same and let's make great movies. And we're going to have another
45:38
great chapter of cinema. We are.
45:40
All right, guys, all the best. Have a great week. I will talk to you next.