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The Screengrab Presents: The Five Kinds of Twist Endings

Gwynne Watkins — Tue, 27 May 2008 14:15:00 GMT

With M. Night Shyamalan's latest opus on the horizon, our thoughts are drifting to one of the best and worst things ever to happen to movies: the twist ending. True, the twist ending hit oversaturation in the early '00s, when it seemed like every film ended with a tacked-on revelation that all the characters were dead or the same person or characters in a giant videogame or something. But film history is so full of con games, double-crosses and startling last-minute revelations that it would be a shame to lose the twist ending entirely. Here's an affectionate guide to the 5 kinds of surprise endings. And yes, many films fit into more than one category. Call it a twist. -- Gwynne Watkins

#5 The Twilight Zone
In The Twilight Zone, something seems wrong or off-kilter for the entire film, but it's not entirely obvious what that thing is. When the twist is revealed, it creates a shift in perspective that can be easily explained in one sentence (such as the classic Twilight Zone example, "To Serve Man -- it's a cookbook!") Films that do The Twilight Zone well include The Others, Soylent Green and Swimming Pool. But when it's bad, it's very very bad; look no further than The Village, a cautionary tale for screenwriters everywhere.

#4 The Scooby Doo
This is the twist ending that reveals all prior events in the film to be part of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by the characters. And they would have gotten away with it, too! It's most commonly seen in con man movies -- The Game, Matchstick Men, The Sting, The Spanish Prisoner -- although it's cropped up to abysmal effect in "gotcha!" films like Basic and The Life of David Gale.

#3 The Donald Kaufman
Named for Charlie Kaufman's fictional screenwriter brother in Adaptation, The Donald Kaufman is the big twist that ostensibly explains everything, but in fact, makes no sense whatsoever. The Donald Kaufman most often takes the form of "They're both the same person!" or "It was all a dream!" Identity, High Tension and Femme Fatale are recent examples.

#2 The Awful Truth
The Awful Truth is the sucker punch of twist endings: a revelation that turns the main character into a tragic figure. Think Luke Skywalker screaming "That's not true! That's impossible!" in Empire Strikes Back, or the final shot of Rosebud in Citizen Kane. At best, it's dramatically satisfying (see Donnie Darko, Memento or Seven); at worst, it makes you want to slap the filmmaker for being a total sadist (see The Mist).

#1 The 20/20 Hindsight
The hardest kind of twist ending to pull off successfully, The 20/20 Hindsight requires the viewer to sit through an entire movie without realizing that a twist ending is coming. Then, after what seems like the film's resolution, the rug gets pulled out from under them. The Sixth Sense and The Usual Suspects are the classic examples; both have a fake-out ending that's quite satisfying, then a last-minute revolution that turns the whole film on its ear. Others include Fight Club, Planet of the Apes and Saw.

The Ten Worst Hairdos In Movie History, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Yeah, we know, we know, that haircut soon-to-be-Oscar-winner Javier Bardem sports in the soon-to-be-Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men is pretty disturbing and awful. But that's not even the worst haircut of Javier Bardem's career. (Read on!) Indeed, thinking about No Country got us thinking about some of the other truly monstrous 'dos we've encountered over the years on the screen. Here's our list of the Ten Worst Hairdos in Movie History.

Mickey Rourke, YEAR OF THE DRAGON (1985)

In his shambling youth, Mickey Rourke had a tough veneer with a sensitive undertone. He might have become a major movie star (as opposed to an object of cult worship in France and some of your better dorm rooms) in the Hollywood Heartthrob, Good-Bad-but-Not-Evil division, if he'd found a few more roles like the Baltimore honeydripper he played in Diner. But he drove his career into a ditch in a misguided effort to show what a tough, hard-slugging badass he was. His performance in this descent into the Michael Cimino-Oliver Stone Thunderdome tells you everything about what went wrong, and much of it is concentrated on his hair. Twenty-eight years old when the film was shot, Rourke seemed a little young for the role of a much-decorated NYPD veteran who learned about the deviousness of the Asian criminal mind while serving in Vietnam, more than ten years earlier. So the decision was made to send him down to the high school and have the erasers clapped together over his head. His chalk-encrusted tresses here make his entrance a guaranteed laugh-getter, especially since he wears a hat that he must have borrowed from a flatfoot in a Bogart movie; when he plops it down onto his noggin, you expect a cloud of white dust to envelop the room. (In some scenes his hair darkens to a grayish tint and then goes white again, suggesting that the testosterone release of beating up Chinese punks and having sex with Dutch-Japanese-supermodel-slash-godawful-actress "Ariane" has youth-restoring benefits, but they wear off fast.)

Sean Penn, CARLITO'S WAY (1993)

Penn's performance as Al Pacino's fast-talking lawyer, who lusts after the bad-boy cred and sleazy thrills that his client has outgrown, is a beautiful comic turn, and the selflessness that makes it possible extends fully to his scalp. With a little mop of frizzy curlicues that suggest that he's had his pubic hair transplanted onto his head, he looks like Art Garfunkel, Superstar. (This effect was especially funny back in 1993, when it was possible to go from this movie to see Jennifer Lynch's Boxing Helena and see that the actual Art Garfunkel had turned into Larry Fine, C.P.A.) His red mop grows more excitable and unruly as his character grows ever more dangerously unhinged. At the end, we hear a gunshot that signals that his character has been put out of Carlito's misery, and it is a great disappointment that the camera cuts away without showing his hair scurrying away under its own power. Nobody in Hollywood knows how to set up a sequel anymore.

Javier Bardem, PERDITA DURANGO (1997)

You think his hair in No Country for Old Men is bad? Pfft. For some of us, our first impression of Javier Bardem was with another bad hair cut, the one he had in Alex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (aka Dance With the Devil). Playing a homicidal, kidnapping voodoo priest, Bardem sports an unholy mullet that could scar your eyeballs. It's a scary character, and the hair cut makes him scarier because you know he knows he can get away with it. And you fear what would happen if you accidentally made fun of it. Nobody's making "business in front, party in the back" jokes around him, we guarantee you.

Anne Bancroft in THE HINDENBURG (1975)

In 1937, a German passenger zeppelin caught fire and exploded as it was preparing to land in New Jersey. The catastrophe was captured on film by a newsreel cameraman, and in 1975, some master of taste and sensitivity got the inspiration of trying to tap into the mid-'70s "disaster movie" fad by making a period melodrama leading up to the horror. Looking to tone this idea up a little, the movie posits that the explosion was set off deliberately, as an act of anti-Nazi sabotage. An alternate theory is that the saboteur felt that it was necessary to wipe Anne Bancroft's hair off the face of the Earth, whatever the cost. Bancroft plays a German countess who is also a morphine addict, which must be pretty mild stuff compared to whatever the hell her hairdresser is on. Since this is the kind of movie that tries to impress you with the historical accuracy of its fashions and knick knacks, Bancroft's grisly coiffure must have been the result of intense research. But could the researchers not have kept it to themselves that the stylish German junkie of 1937 walked around looking, as Pauline Kael put it with baleful accuracy, as if she had "black potato chips stuck to her head"?

Keith Carradine in TROUBLE IN MIND (1986)

Every once in a while, the writer-director Alan Rudolph feels the need to make a movie so strange that all his other movies will consider reporting it to Homeland Security if it threatens to move into their neighborhood. At present, the holder of this title is probably his 1999 Kurt Vonnegut adaptation Breakfast of Champions, but Trouble in Mind, a sort-of-futuristic daydream set in "Rain City", a drizzly place where the local criminal kingpin is played by Divine, took on all comers for quite a while there. This is one of the few times Divine played a non-drag role, but he must have brought his make-up case with him, because it looks as if Carradine got into it and made a hell of a mess. He plays a dopey young punk from the sticks who falls in with the wrong crowd and becomes overly enamored of the decadent thrills that Rain City has to offer. The most garish of these are apparently dispensed at the local Supercuts, because he keeps disappearing for awhile and then returning with his hair drenched in sticky-looking glop and twisted into fun house shapes, with his face painted as if he'd gotten a job as David Bowie's stunt double on the cover of Aladdin Sane. All in all, this may have been Keith Carradine's unstudliest hour.

— Paul Clark, Bilge Ebiri, Phil Nugent, Vern, Bryan Whitefield

Click here for Part 2!

And Now, Movies With People in Bear Suits

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

This week, Ames, Iowa resident Daniel Stender posed the following question to Roger Ebert's "Answer Man" column:

I am a fine arts student at Iowa State University. Currently I'm painting a series depicting movie scenes with people in bear suits. So far I have painted a scene from The Shining and a scene from the The Science of Sleep. I am really proud of what I have created so far, but I've hit a creative road block; I can't think of any more movies with people dressed as bears.

Not to worry, Danny — The Screengrab has got your back!

Here are some off-the-cuff suggestions from our bloggers:

Paul: The Avengers. That scene, bad as it is, is sort of unforgettable.

John: Jackass and Encino Man, both of which involve panda bears. Given Jackass’ status as a serious documentary, I’m not sure it counts. However, Pauly Shore and Caveman-Brendan Frasier slapping around a guy in a panda costume in a theme park most certainly counts.

Matthew: The more recent version of The Wicker Man, as in:

For the record, Answer Man suggested Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game. I'm personally gonna go with Grizzly Man. Damn those bear suits looked real.

Screengrab Presents: The Hollywood Guide to Pregnancy

Gwynne Watkins — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:00:00 GMT

A pregnancy test is not an etch-a-sketch. This is one doodle that can't be un-did, homeskillet. See: Juno

Pregnancy instantly propels the father-to-be into a mid-life crisis. Luckily, women never panic about being pregnant. Women love babies! See: She’s Having a Baby, Nine Months

During your pregnancy, dreams are unusually vivid and strange. Especially when the father is a giant mutated insect. See: David Cronenberg’s The Fly

If you’re not sure who the father is, tell everyone you’ve ever slept with it’s theirs. Babysitters for life! See: Three Men and a Baby

Be sure to get adequate prenatal care, on the off-chance you’re carrying the spawn of Satan. See: Rosemary’s Baby, Village of the Damned, It’s Alive

Virgin pregnancies are only possible in three places: the Bible, Tatooine and Kevin Smith movies. See: Nativity Story, Dogma, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

The appropriate thing to yell when your water breaks is "Thundercats are go!" See: Juno

If you live in a totalitarian regime, and you get knocked up, don’t worry; your kid is probably the savior of humankind. See: Children of Men, Terminator, Willow, The Seventh Sign

Need a bomb to drop during an argument? You can’t go wrong with "I secretly aborted your child!" See: The Godfather Part II, The Anniversary Party, Cabaret

Abortion? What’s that? See: Knocked Up, Boys on the Side, Saved!, The Station Agent, Match Point, Circle of Friends, Dreamgirls, For Keeps?

If you’re pregnant and married to a police detective, you should probably leave town for a while. If you’re pregnant and you are a police detective, just keep doing what you’re doing. See: Se7en, Fargo

Pregnancy in the Deep South never ends well. See: Gone with the Wind, Steel Magnolias, A Place in the Sun, A Streetcar Named Desire

Make sure that the hospital you’ve chosen has all the latest technology, specifically the machine that goes ping. See: Monty Python’s Meaning of Life

The delivery room is a good place for: last-minute apologies, marriage proposals, David Hyde Pierce. It is a bad place for: fist fights, Bette Midler. See: Knocked Up, Lover Come Back, Addams Family Values, Nine Months, Beaches

Wouldn’t it be funny if men could get pregnant? Oh wait. See: Junior, Rabbit Test

— Gwynne Watkins

Previous Hollywood Guides:
The Hollywood Guide to Drinking
The Hollywood Guide to Office Romance
The Hollywood Guide to Infidelity