Given that I am sort of Paste’s resident Shyamalan guy, for better or worse, having ranked all of his movies, I was pretty excited for Glass when it was first announced. “My new film has a twist in it can we go back to 1999 again, when people kept comparing me to Alfred Hitchcock?” How were you approaching this much-anticipated film in light of the Shyamalanaissance, and how did it go over for you? So maybe you’d like to give us some background on Glass, Jim. But I think we need to save that one for last, since it is both less popular than the movie you saw and because it’s so dumb it needs its own space for discussion. It certainly gives the audience at least a good 30-45 minutes to think about the ending, which is a terrible idea. Ken: I would charitably call it the third reel of the film. Although with Serenity, it’s not a crazy ending so much as it is the entire second half of the film, right? The Glass twist, on the other hand, is classic “AHA I GOTCHA!” M. Jim: Having read about Serenity and its insane ending, I think I can agree that it sounds like a semi-”valid” twist, but still a completely and utterly ludicrous one. And since I saw the former and you saw the latter, we find ourselves in the unique situation of being able to put our heads together and wonder what the hell Hollywood is thinking right now. It joins Glass in the ridiculous twist ending club of films released in January. I refer, of course, to Serenity, the “noir thriller” starring no less than Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway and Diane Lane (and not, sadly, the 2006 sequel movie to the beloved space Western TV show). Ken: In that regard, I think at least one of our two subjects today can be said to be a technically VALID twist ending, in that a sharp-eyed viewer could possibly have picked up on it. Or in other words, you can end any romantic comedy with Katherine Heigl pulling off a rubber mask to reveal that she’s been a lizard person the entire time, but that doesn’t mean the audience should accept this as a brilliant twist ending if she hasn’t been discreetly displaying lizard person traits throughout. The moment a twist is revealed, the audience’s reaction should be “Oh, so THAT’S why _ and _ how did I not see this coming?” If there’s no reasonable way for a perceptive, intelligent viewer to intuit at least the general outline of a potential twist, then the convention becomes a lying cliché. To be a proper “twist,” you need to have legitimate foreshadowing. As I tried to write about in the piece you linked above, the problem with so many twists in modern Hollywood film is that they aren’t really twists at all-too often, they’re outright lies. A twist is just a storytelling convention, albeit one that audiences don’t always understand. Jim: Well of course there can be a “good” twist ending, Ken. I’ve called us here to ask: Can there EVER be a good twist ending? What makes a BAD twist ending? And as always, what does this say about our cultural moment? I recalled with amusement your own examination from a few years ago of when this trend truly goes beyond the pale. Ken: Jim, 2019 has barely dawned on us and yet I think we already have a new and dubious trend: The completely-unasked-for twist ending. Note: As any discussion of twist endings must, this piece contains significant ending spoilers for two movies that are still in theaters. The other, in the form of Serenity, came completely out of left field and quickly left the film world reeling, our collective mouths agape at its sheer audacity and outright silliness.īut which of these two twists was more unearned? Which was stranger? Which could have been salvaged? Jim Vorel and Ken Lowe, who are more than familiar with some of the most common ways movies go wrong, sat down to discuss Glass vs. Night Shyamalan, a filmmaker whose entire oeuvre was built via attempts to replicate his first (and by far most successful) twist ending in The Sixth Sense. One comes from an expected source in the form of M. It’s 2019, and insane twist endings are back in fashion! The first month of the year is hardly in the books, and already we have two contenders for the year’s most absurd twists.
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