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Book Review: More Happy Than Not

8/22/2016

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Book Review:

More Happy Than Not

By Adam Silvera
 
Soho Teen, 2015
 
A-

The Basics:
 
Aaron is struggling to find happiness after his father’s suicide and his own suicide attempt. The closest he’s come is the time he’s spent with his new friend, Thomas, but that happiness comes with a confused bundle of other feelings and dangers, especially for a kid living the Bronx in the not too distant future, where levels of sexual equality and understanding haven’t changed a whole lot. What this future can offer him, however, is Leteo, a medical procedure that can alter his memories and the feelings attached to them to “straighten him out.” He’s beginning to think it’s his only chance.
 
The Downside:
 
The speculative and hyper-realist elements here unfortunately work against each other at points. Aaron’s social world is so grounded and lifelike that it at first feels like a brutally and beautifully honest look at a particular teenager’s life, before the sci-fi side of the story takes some of those true-to-life moments and puts a less grounded spin on them, making them more technically complicated but emotionally simpler. In particular, what appears to be a refreshingly positive sex scene turns out to be something else entirely.
 
The book as a whole is also unfailingly depressing. Not a flaw in and of itself, but the ending tries to offer some of the hope hinted at in the title, and that hope comes off a little more hollow than seems to be the intent.

Less integrally, there's also a fandom mentioned in the More Happy Than Not universe that's clearly a Harry Potter stand-in, which is fine on its own but feels out of place in a book that calls all its other pop culture references openly by name, including mentions of Marvel characters and even Emma Watson.
 
The Upside:
 
The Leteo procedure is a strong and fascinating sci-fi storytelling concept, and would likely garner no complaints from me if the story’s every turn were not so compellingly written that the whole equation feels like the stifled potential of multiple stories. It’s a twisting slight-of-hand narrative that throws itself whole-heartedly and skillfully into the feelings of every scene, even the illusionary ones.
 
The depictions of gender role prejudice, pressure, and violence, while hardly pleasant to read, are admirably unflinching. That part of the honesty remains throughout, and though the many fake-outs sometimes cloud the story’s direction to the point of clouding its meaning, by the end, the spirit of self-acceptance, kindness, and respect for differences is perfectly clear.




Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome (just keep it civil, folks)! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Five More of Fi's Fiction Pet Peeves #3: The Cock-a-Doodie Lie!

5/17/2016

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See also:

Fiction Pet Peeve: Rape Gang Alley.

Fiction Pet Peeve: That Thing Designed for Dramatic Effect and Nothing Else.

Fiction Pet Peeve: "I Have to Go Now, Honey! I'm More Important Than You!"

If you already know what I’m getting at based on the title above, Horror geek kudos to you. Double kudos if you happen to remember the 2009 3D remake of My Bloody Valentine, to which I will be taking a sledgehammer in this article.
 
Oh, and for which there will be spoilers, in case you care.
 
Now, to explain this peeve to anyone who hasn’t guessed it, I’m going to turn the mic over to my good friend, Annie Wilkes.


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"The bad guy stuck [Rocketman] in a car on a mountain road and knocked him out and welded the door shut and tore out the brakes and started him to his death, and he woke up and tried to steer and tried to get out, but the car went off a cliff before he could escape! And it crashed and burned, and I was so upset and excited, and the next week, you better believe I was first in line. And they always start with the end of the last week. And there was Rocketman, trying to get out, and here comes the cliff, and just before the car went off the cliff, he jumped free! And all the kids cheered! But I didn't cheer. I stood right up and started shouting, 'This isn't what happened last week! Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us! This isn't fair! HE DIDN'T GET OUT OF THE COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!'"

Thanks, Annie!
 
In the book version of Misery, Annie expands on this by contrasting it with a different week of her favorite serial, in which the cliffhanger left Rocketman in a crashing plane, and the start of the next episode showed him finding a parachute under his seat.
 
Maybe not the most likely thing to happen, she admits, but she finds it acceptable. And that’s the real point of this peeve. Drawing the line where manipulation of the audience crosses over into just plain cheating.
 
That line is crossed when the story lies.
 
A couple of my favorite movies sadly nudge their toes over this line. Sorry, Ex Machina and Saw II, you’re in the hot seat this week.
 
Overall, Ex Machina is a seriously smart and intense Sci-Fi thriller, and if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend skipping the spoiler section here and watching it asap.
 
But it does have two little lines in it that drive me crazy…
 
***Ex Machina spoilers ahead***


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"Ava isn't pretending to like you."
 
Nathan says this to our hero, Caleb, about the flirtation he’s developing with Ava, the artificial intelligence they’re testing together.
 
What Nathan means in that scene is that he programmed Ava to be capable of sexual interest as a human would be, not to flirt with Caleb in an artificially pre-scripted way.
 
But later on, when Nathan is trying to ease Caleb out of the head game he’s put him through for the purpose of testing Ava, he proposes, as an alternative to Caleb’s debate between believing that Ava likes him and believing that she’s an imitation of a person liking him, the third option that, “She’s pretending to like you.”
 
The pause after this suggestion might as well include a "dun dun DUN!" music sting.
 
What Nathan is saying this time is that Ava is not imitating flirtation because she was programmed to, but because she is conscious and intelligent enough to view Caleb as a means of escape from Nathan’s lab and is manipulating him for this purpose, which turns out to be exactly the case.


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It’s a great twist, mostly, but it’s undercut by the She’s not pretending to like you/She is pretending to like you contradiction.
 
The most satisfying twists are the ones that were hiding unnoticed under our noses the whole time. Twists that come out of nowhere can be okay too, but twists that come out of a place we were explicitly told not to look, those feel like a cheat.
 
***End Ex Machina spoilers***
 
Saw II pulls almost exactly the same gambit.
 
***Saw II spoilers ahead***
 
The premise of Saw II is that Detective Matthews and a full S.W.A.T team have John Kramer (a.k.a “Jigsaw”) cornered in his lair while one of Jigsaw's deadly games plays out, with Matthews’ son stuck inside it. The twist is that the game has already finished, the monitors in the lair are showing a recording, and that Matthews’ son was being protected throughout the game by a Jigsaw accomplice and is now inside a time-delay safe that will open and reunite him safely with his father, if Matthews can only wait around that long without doing anything rash.
 
It’s my personal favorite of all the obligatory Saw twists, enough so that it actually topped my list of favorite underrated twist endings.
 
There’s just one teeny little line you have to ignore, or it ruins everything.


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“[You can waste time here until your son] starts to bleed from every orifice he has. Oh yes, there will be blood.”

Jigsaw is referring to the sarin gas that kills the losers of the game, and he’s explicitly stating that this will happen to Matthews’ son in the near future, as if the game is still in progress.
 
All the other cryptic gibberish Jigsaw feeds Matthews throughout the movie makes sense in retrospect, knowing that the sarin game is over and Matthews’ own game only requires him to sit still while the timer runs down, but this one line has no alternate interpretation that works that way.
 
It’s just a flat-out lie.
 
***End Saw II spoilers***
 
The Ex Machina and Saw II offenses can be somewhat defended by the fact that Nathan and Jigsaw are both untrustworthy characters. They damage the sanctity of their own experiments by lying to their subjects the way they do, which doesn’t seem to mesh with their motivations, but they’re imperfect, not entirely sane people. Jigsaw’s even dying of a brain tumor. It can be rationalized that they’d make a few mistakes and occasionally fail in adhering to the scientific method.
 
What can’t be excused is when the story lies directly to the audience, without a fallible character as an intermediary.
 
Your turn, My Bloody Valentine 3D.
 
This one’s simple. It’s a whodunit slasher movie with a shrinking cast of suspects. Classic! Let’s all try to guess who the killer is before our friends can!
 
Wait a minute, let’s not.
 
There’s really no point, not when the culprit, Tom, is effectively absolved not too long into the movie by being locked in a cage while more killing happens outside his reach.


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It’s a killer-with-multiple-personalities twist, so some moments can be explained away as an unreliable narrator. Tom interacting with the masked killer, for example, is written off as a hallucination, but this doesn’t work on the cage scene.
 
The cage is not a hallucination. The pickaxe that the the killer uses to bend the door, trapping Tom inside, is not a hallucination. The big reveal montage showing how everything was done has Tom using the pickaxe to bend the cage shut from the inside, but… Annie, would you like to field this one?


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THE PICKAXE WAS ON THE COCK-A-DOODIE OUTSIDE OF THE CAGE!!!!

You’re the best, Annie. Please don’t hurt me.
 
We enter into fiction expecting to be misled and misdirected a little, sometimes more artfully than others. When we go to a movie called My Bloody Valentine 3D, we should probably expect tricks as tacky as a parachute under Rocketman’s seat. But we always deserve better than the Cock-a-Doodie lie.
 
It means the difference between a cheap, cheesy good time and the joyless futility of playing a guessing game with Chris Griffin.


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Chris: Guess what word I’m thinking of. And it’s not kitty.
Meg: Is it kitty?
Chris: GET OUT OF MY HEAD!


Hey, audience! Guess who the killer is. And it's not Tom.

It's Tom! Betcha didn't see that one coming, did you?

I don’t want to play anymore, do you?


Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!


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Fi's Five Favorite Horror Movies That Deserve More Respect #1: Saw (Entire Series)

10/29/2013

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(Click the links to read Horror Movies That Deserve More Respect #2, #3, #4, and #5)

Okay, it’s more than one movie, and the installments are of varying quality, but overall the Saw series gets nowhere near the respect it deserves. I’ve already written about why the end of Saw II is one of my favorite underrated twists, and now it’s about time I stood up for this Halloween-shaping horror epic as a whole.

First, a word on “torture porn,” the common, derogatory term for the subgenre of horror Saw popularized, the one it suffers the Prometheus Syndrome backlash for.

It’s hard to dispute its technical accuracy. Saw just isn’t quite Saw without its signature trap sequences of graphic, creative mutilation. Those are the parts that define the series and what people come to see.

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As usual, I’ll go light on these.
But the term is also loaded, accusatory, and inaccurate in spirit. It not-so-subtly implies perversion and assumes an unhealthy, even dangerous sort of enjoyment which, while it no doubt exists in a certain rare and scary type of viewer, is far from the intent. Let’s not forget, the common thread of the horror genre is supposed to be horror.

Okay, yes, sometimes there’s a cartoonish element of “look at our amazing trauma makeup!” or “bet you’ve never seen someone die like this!” And that is a part of Saw, but it’s also nothing new.

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Pictured: Not torture porn?
So what does make Saw revolutionary? What makes Jigsaw different from Freddy and Jason? Well, Jigsaw victims do tend to die more slowly, it’s true, and due to the game format of his kills (he is a killer, no matter how clean he likes his hands), most of them will mutilate themselves and/or each other trying to escape. Some will even succeed. Jigsaw games pose the question, “What would you be willing to do?”

It’s that unsettling question, combined with the long, detailed, visceral scenes characters spend demonstrating their differing answers, that makes Saw so differently powerful and horrifying. And what’s the point of innovation in horror if not to ask unsettling questions and probe deep, dark, frightening parts of the mind?

Sometimes this can be done most effectively by showing less, sometimes by showing more. Saw openly goes with the more approach and succeeds spectacularly.

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Okay, last one.
This alone would be enough to make Saw a groundbreaking classic, but there’s more to it than that. On top of being superb visceral horror, the Saw series is also one whole, cohesive, seven-part epic story that I’d go so far as to compare with Lost. Both have some extraneous, incompletely thought-out plot developments that don’t entirely make sense (Jack’s tattoos, Nikki and Paolo, large parts of Saw IV and Jill’s personality transplant in VII), but both are complex character dramas with some mind-blowing twist and wrinkles.

****First movie spoiler alert****

Unlike so many horror franchises that only keep a concept and maybe a villain signature and plug in an entirely new disposable cast for every entry, Saw is about the original Jigsaw, John Kramer, a terminal cancer patient with a deeply flawed, hypocritical, yet often understandable vendetta against people who waste life, and about the people who fight and follow him.

It’s about his falling out with his wife, his confused feelings about the struggling patients at her methadone clinic, his cat and mouse game with the cops, and the relationships between him and the other members of the slowly growing Jigsaw cult, mostly surviving victims who embrace and sometimes reinterpret his perspective.

****End spoilers****

Saw demands a strong stomach, no question, but if you’ve got one, and if you’ve ever been intrigued by a blurb that included a phrase like “these twisted souls and the secrets that bind them together,” check out the original Saw theatrical trailer and think about giving the series a chance.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!
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Fi's Five Favorite Horror Movies That Deserve More Respect #4: Scream 4

10/8/2013

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(Click the links to read Horror Movies that Deserve More Respect #5, #3, #2, and #1)

The Scream series is another one that’s suffered from Prometheus Syndrome (my term for taking the blame for inferior imitators), in this case for popularizing meta-horror. I’ve written before about how much I love Scream both as a masterpiece of metafiction and a groundbreaker for the genre, and for the most part, it does receive its due acknowledgement.

The sequels, on the other hand, get no more respect than any nameless imitator. I’ll freely admit that I have no love for part two and haven’t even bothered to give part three a try, but the trailers for part four drew me in when it was released in theaters.
Lucky thing, because it’s not only an excellent follow-up to the original Scream but one of my favorite horror movies in its own right.

Here’s how it goes:

Sidney returns to her hometown as part of the tour for her autobiography about surviving and healing from the ordeal of the first movie. A new killer (or more, this is Scream after all) takes up the Ghostface mantle and terrorizes the high school once more, including Sidney’s now teenaged cousin and her friends.

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This picture is timeless, scary, AND spoiler-free. Enjoy.
As well as the residual resentment for Scream’s genre-changing impact, Scream 4 has lots of general, undiscriminating sequel hate to contend with. Admittedly, there are many terrible, lazy, cash-in sequels to good movies out there. There are also many excellent movies that happen to be sequels, and I would argue that Scream in particular is a concept that demands the occasional addendum.
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This addendum does not include the line, “What were you doing with a cellular telephone?”
Scream is a commentary on its genre, and that genre changes over time, partly because of Scream, making new commentary necessary. This time, in the characters’ efforts to predict a killer horror geek’s movements, they get to acknowledge and analyze how the rules, as made infamous by the original Scream, have changed and become far more fluid.

It’s a celebration of artistic evolution, and the inclusion of so many of the surviving characters from the original gives the series the feel of one mind-blowingly huge, fifteen year study.

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“Your ingénue days… they’re over.” – Actual line, in spite of how amazing Neve Campbell still looks.
Metafiction aside, the regular whodunit slasher fear and paranoia is played just as straight and effectively as in the first movie, and the killer (or killers, no spoilers here) is/are just as creepily sick yet comprehensible, the twist complete with smart social (as well as artistic) commentary for a new generation, taking on the culture of accomplishment-free fame-for-fame’s-sake.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or keep up with my fictional musings by joining me on Facebook, on Twitter, or by signing up for email updates in the panel on the right!

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Fi's Five Favorite Works of Metafiction #3: Scream

7/16/2013

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****Spoiler Alert****

No list of metafiction masterpieces could be complete without this one.

The original Scream was the first major horror movie to take place in a universe where horror movies exist and the characters are aware of them. It was the one to lay out the survival rules, including the infamous

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"Sex equals death!"
Our pool of slasher suspects takes horror movie tropes into account as they analyze their predicament, except for our heroine, Sydney, whose interest in the genre is understandably ruined by the helpless female stereotypes who preceded her.
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Yes, I’m reusing this pic of Barbra from Night of the Living Dead. She’s just that awful.

The group’s fascination with the slasher in their world goes beyond wanting to avoid becoming a victim, allowing for a scene in which one of the girls is cornered by what she assumes is a friend in an approximation of the slasher’s costume and plays along. Just before she realizes how bad her situation is, she offers this futile request:
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“Please don’t kill me, Mr. Ghostface! I want to be in the sequel!”

It sounds like a lot of meta, and it is, but what saves it from being pure gimmick and elevates it to the level of a classic is the fact that it’s also a strong, scary horror movie in its own right. The opening kill is so drawn out and lifelike that I still find it a little difficult to watch.
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Ouch.
The twist hits like a two-by-four while playing with the whodunit formula in a subtler way that the rest of the commentary. All along the audience is led to believe the mystery can be solved by accounting for all the characters’ whereabouts at times that could absolve them, until Ghostface is revealed to be… a tag team of two.
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And these two are a scary team, in spite of the way they frequently appear to be humping each other. They’re horror geeks, but that only helps them tailor their theatrics. They’re serious psychos all the way through, with or without the theme.
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“Movies don’t create psychos; movies make psychos more creative!”
Side note: Yes, Billy Loomis is dreamy. And yes, his resemblance to Nightmare on Elm Street-era Johnny Depp is too striking to be unintentional. Two things that must be mentioned whenever his picture appears.

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Just one more of these.
I’ve heard people complain that Scream broke the genre, and like any extremely popular work that did something remotely new, it was followed by a rash of imitators of varying quality, but I’d argue that the permanent effect it had on horror was the necessary kind of breaking, the essential artistic evolutionary function the best metafiction serves. By spelling out the rules, it dared people to break them.

Moviemakers rose to that challenge so spectacularly that in Scream 4, a new generation of geeks discusses strategy for surviving a horror movie and concludes (more or less) that there no longer is one.

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I can’t think of a prouder moment for metafiction as a device than this callback, nearly fifteen years later.

Agree? Disagree? Comments are always welcome! Or join me on Facebook or Twitter for more fictional musings!
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Fi's Five Favorite Zombie Moments #1: "Another one for the Fire" (Night of the Living Dead)

6/26/2013

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(Click the links for Zombie Moment #2, #3, #4, and #5)

F
or another zombie moment this week, check out Matt's top zombie moment here.


****Spoiler Alert****

If there’s anyone out there reading this list of great zombie moments who doesn’t already know, Night of the Living Dead is the first of George A. Romero’s Living Dead movies and the first zombie movie. Period.

As a movie, I can’t claim it’s one of my favorites. It’s not one I can call near-perfect, and it’s certainly not one I can watch over and over.


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Mostly because of this bitch.
But I’m naturally grateful to it for creating the subgenre I love, and I respect it as an independent horror movie that did bold, revolutionary things, including but not limited to creating the classic zombie.

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Most of Night of the Living Dead is a pretty basic zombie movie, or rather, the basic zombie movie, since it’s the one all others jump off from. A motley group of survivors take shelter in a farm house, struggle to keep the zombies out, fight amongst themselves, and are whittled down by a combination of pettiness, sentiment, stupidity, and bad luck. A radio broadcast informs them that destroying the zombies’ brains will stop them and that extermination teams are on their way to resolve the disaster by doing just that to every zombie they can find.

Our hero, Ben, does his best to keep everyone safe until that can happen, but the aforementioned whittling forces are just too strong, and by the end of the night, the series of mishaps has left him completely alone.


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Ben does manage to survive until morning, when he finally hears the shots and shouts of one of the cleanup teams headed his way. He goes to the window, and…

Gets mistaken for a zombie. The movie ends with the cleanup guy’s line, “That’s another one for the fire.” And that’s it.

The first zombie movie, released in 1968, when every Hollywood movie still had to end with an uplifting monologue about the American spirit, instead went to an even darker, bleaker place than most horror movies will go today. There was no way it could not be number 1.


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Fi's Five Favorite Underrated Twist Endings #1: Saw II

5/30/2013

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The Saw series comes under a lot of fire, largely due to the infuriating Genre Work + Popularity = Devil’s Excrement phenomenon that seems to grip public opinion, but whether you love or hate it, most of the focus usually falls on the graphic, stomach-turning setpiece trap scenes, and with good cause.

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Just one of these pictures, I swear
The traps are the backbone of the series. Without them, it’s not Saw, but believe it or not, there is a story stringing them together, and most of it’s actually pretty good.

The Jigsaw family of villains goes through a character drama worthy of at least a separate post or two over the course of the seven part series, and the end of each volume tries for a good, sturdy gut-punch to top off any lingering queasiness, with about an 80% success rate (even the so-so entries usually twist pretty well). Part II has my favorite of these, so here’s how it goes:

Jigsaw (the original Jigsaw, John Kramer), has his current group of victims locked in a house full of diluted nerve gas and a smorgasbord of traps containing doses of an antidote. Detective Matthews and his team track Jigsaw to his lair, where the “game” is playing on a set of monitors, to find that Matthews’ teenage son, Daniel, is one of the victims, and the others are ex-convicts Matthews planted evidence on over the course of his career.

Jigsaw swears that if Matthews will just sit with him and hear him out while the game timer runs down, he’ll find Daniel safe at the end, but no matter what the cops do, he won’t tell them where the house is. At least, not until near the end, when Matthews utterly loses it and beats up our terminal cancer-riddled evil mastermind, at which point he agrees, after a cryptically threatening grunt of “game over.”


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When Jigsaw and Matthews get to the house, one of the “victims,” Amanda, a repeat player who won her game in the first movie, attacks Matthews, locks him up for one of the series’ classic Poe-style deaths, and reveals that she was converted by her first game experience and is apprenticing to become the next Jigsaw.

Not a bad twist, but the real fun comes from the back and forth cutaways to the cops who stayed behind in the lair. While Matthews charges into the (eerily silent) house, his colleagues trace the feed playing on the monitors and hurry to back him up, only to find another, less blood-splattered empty house. Empty, that is, except for a VCR.

One of them presses the pause button, and a cop still watching from the lair voices the real twist, the shattered assumption more basic than the one about Amanda’s motives,

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It's not live.
And just as the clock would have timed out on the recorded game, a time delay safe in the lair opens to reveal Daniel (complete with oxygen tank), “safe,” as promised, since before Matthews even realized he’d been taken, just waiting to be found if Matthews had played his side of the game the way Jigsaw told him to.

Ouch.

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Fi's Five Favorite Underrated Twist Endings #2: Wreck-It Ralph

5/23/2013

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Of course,

****Spoiler Alert****

This one’s not on any lists of classics for the simple, obvious reason that it’s too recent, but what praise it has received focuses mainly on its cuteness and its reverence for the videogame culture it draws on, not its beautifully executed twist. Here’s how it goes:

Ralph is an arcade game villain who wants to prove to the other characters that he can be something more. Such aspirations are frowned upon, ever since two early racing games were destroyed when the hero of the older one, Turbo, abandoned it and tried to take over the newer one. “Going Turbo,” has even become slang in Ralph’s arcade community for endangering a game by deviating from the assigned roles.

Ralph’s quest forces him to team up with Vanellope,

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A glitchy, accidental extra character in the new candy go-cart game, Sugar Rush, who wants to win the secret, characters-only round that determines the next day’s list of available avatars, so she can become a full character in the game.

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King Candy, ruler of Sugar Rush, is against giving her this chance and offers the seemingly reasonable explanation that if people are given the chance to play with a glitchy character, they’ll think the game itself is broken and have it shut down, but Ralph discovers that King Candy has already made alterations to the game, and he’s really afraid that if she competes, she’ll reset everything to normal.

The race is on, King Candy does everything he can to stop Ralph and Vanellope, and in the struggle, he glitches up as well and reverts into Turbo,
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Who was not killed along with the two racing games he altered, as everyone assumed, but continued on to alter and take over the newest one, Sugar Rush, by partially deleting the original ruler, Princess Vanellope.
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It’s another one of those perfect “I should have known!” endings with just the right number of clues (including Ralph’s in-passing joke about how overpoweringly pink the castle is), but it still comes as a shock, because it’s not the sort of movie that even needs a big twist.

The climactic sequence already has Ralph’s 2D fix-it game, the candy-themed racing game, and a nearby humans vs. aliens first person shooter colliding with all the awesomeness that combination demands, plus the Disney heartstring-tugging of Vanellope chasing the hell out of her dreams and Ralph making peace with who he is, AND one of the great Disney villain deaths involving man-eating insects, Mentos, and whole lot of Diet Coke.

Getting to see the mysterious pieces fit together is icing on the fresh baked racing cart.

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Fi's Five Favorite Underrated Twist Endings #3: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

5/15/2013

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As always:

****Spoiler Alert****

Finally, a Harry Potter entry! Long overdue, considering the fact that if I were ever to do a list of my five favorite stories of all time, the Harry Potter series would rank number one.

I am, of course, far from the only deeply devoted Harry Potter fan, so it’s rare to call anything about it underrated, but compared with the phenomenal world-building, action, and character relationships that define the series, the head-spinning, mystery-style plots are often overlooked.


Prisoner of Azkaban is the most intricately crafted example, and yet, most discussion of its ending centers around the one less-than-understated detail, the new teacher by the name of Remus Lupin turning out to be *gasp*

A werewolf.

Being considerably better versed in Latin and world mythology now than I was at nine years old, I can’t entirely argue with that complaint, but Lupin’s condition is just one small wrinkle in a much bigger, extra-twisted tapestry of a plot. Here’s my best effort at a painstakingly abridged refresher course:

Harry’s supposed to be hiding from an escaped prisoner, Sirius Black, who was friends with his parents before betraying them and causing their deaths, and who now intends to kill Harry too. Harry keeps seeing omens of death, particularly an enormous black dog, and also has to deal with his best friends, Ron and Hermione, fighting over Ron’s ailing pet rat, Scabbers.

Ron gets attacked by the dog, which turns out not only to be solid but to be the magical alternate form of Sirius Black.
(Cue another snare drum for imaginative naming)
He also turns out to be falsely accused and bent on killing, not Harry, but the real traitor, Peter Pettigrew, who framed him, faked his own death, and started a new life in his own alternate form as the aforementioned rat, Scabbers. Lupin was friends with both of them as well as the Potters back at school, and his lycanthropy was their reason for developing animal forms in the first place.

Then the moon rises, Lupin transforms into a killing machine, and there’s some time travel,


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(Minus the improbable pink hoodie and 6-foot-long necklace chain, it looks like this)
So that Harry and Hermione can retroactively save their own lives and help Sirius escape to stay on the run.

It sounds ridiculously complicated and potentially tedious and/or confusing in its ultra-condensed form, but the true beauty of this twist (or, more accurately, series of twists) is that it came before Rowling developed her reputation for paving-slab-sized tomes. As mentioned above, I’m one of the many people who would happily follow her through any number of pages, but that doesn’t mean I’m not dazzled by the way all the layers of Prisoner of Azkaban are somehow all perfectly, easily explored in a scant four hundred-odd.

Every single scene in the book sets up the finale, from the subtle mentions of Peter and Scabbers’s matching missing digits to the break-in when Sirius not-so-mistakenly goes after Ron instead of Harry in the dark, giving every reveal that perfect “I should have known!” effect. Scabbers’s reveal as the surprise villain is made even more perfect by the fact that he’s been part of the series since book one.

And when it’s finally time to explain things completely, there are no rambling expository chapters. The monologues are short, emotionally loaded, and punctuated with necessary action and a Back to the Future-esque scramble to set things straight.

If you skipped that spoiler alert because you’ve read Prizoner of Azkaban just once or seen the movie, I highly recommend going back to read or re-read it; it’s such a perfect, textbook example of the complex variety of twisted plots.

And if you skipped it without already knowing how the book ends, all I can say is that I am so, so sorry.

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Fi's Five Favorite Underrated Twist Endings #4: Watchmen

5/8/2013

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Watchmen
As this month’s list naturally demands:

****Spoiler Alert****

Watchmen is many things, a deconstruction of the superhero genre, a creepy psychological character drama, an ethical conversation-starter, and, structurally, a whodunit mystery.

It does start with a dead body, after all, and a scramble to identify the culprit before more former superheroes can fall victim. It’s the sort of story that’s expected to have a surprise ending, or it hasn’t done its job.

The inevitable villain reveal part of the twist is a perfectly satisfying one. It turns out that one of the ex heroes, Ozymandias (a.k.a Adrian Veidt), has a massive god complex and is trying to prevent the other heroes from interfering with his plan to unite the world and avert a nuclear apocalypse by staging an alien invasion (and killing millions of people in order to sell the act).

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Of course, with a hero name like “Ozymandias,” a stunt like this probably should have been anticipated, but to the other heroes’ credit, the guy is a genius philanthropist who’s really, really good at secretly executing a plan, and he believes hard enough in his own good intentions that he comes off as a perfectly decent person if you don’t know the details of his designs.

That much makes the twist satisfying, but not exceptional. The extra push that puts it on this list happens here:

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Unlike just about every other fictional mad “genius” ever, Adrian actually bothers to make his plan truly unfoilable before explaining it to the heroes. Well, not entirely unfoilable. They could still expose him to the world and ruin the positive, world-saving part of the plan, but because the killing-millions-of-people part is beyond preventing, they don’t do that, just as he knew they wouldn’t.
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Homer: Marge, I’m confused. Is this a happy ending or a sad ending?
Marge: It’s an ending. That’s enough.
No matter how you feel about it, no matter if you see Ozymandias as a hero who saved the world, or if you’re on team Rorschach, opposed to accepting moral grey areas whatever the cost, or if you’re in the middle with Dan and Laurie, ready to make the practical best of a bad situation, the ending of Watchmen is another of those great gut-punches that lands as hard as it does by artfully and successfully breaking the unwritten rules.
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