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Rear Window
We watched Rear Window last night -- the James Stewart/Grace Kelly one, which neither of us had ever seen before.
I am fairly sure that a diet of Tarantino/Sixth Sense/Fight Club completely ruins you for being able to accurately anticipate the plot twists of 1950s movies. We spent most of the movie convinced that we were watching James Stewart's character descend into madness, with a hallucinatory girlfriend and ever more paranoid fantasies about the perfectly normal people on the other side of the courtyard. Needless to say, it came as an unexpected shock when it turned out that the guy they thought was a killer -- was actually a killer! Twist ending, 1950s style: everything the main characters thought was going on ... is actually going on! Well, it is a twist ending if you're not expecting it.
Aside from that, and aside from spending most of the movie thinking that Grace Kelly was a figment of his imagination, it was a deeply adorable romance. :D I am not really one for romance except when I am, and I loved that it was a movie about Stewart's character falling in love with his girlfriend all over again as he saw a different side of her. And the entire trope of Stewart being housebound so that the girlfriend and the nurse had to do all the legwork ... that really worked for me. (Especially Kelly scaling the apartment building wall in high heels. Sweet.)
I am fairly sure that a diet of Tarantino/Sixth Sense/Fight Club completely ruins you for being able to accurately anticipate the plot twists of 1950s movies. We spent most of the movie convinced that we were watching James Stewart's character descend into madness, with a hallucinatory girlfriend and ever more paranoid fantasies about the perfectly normal people on the other side of the courtyard. Needless to say, it came as an unexpected shock when it turned out that the guy they thought was a killer -- was actually a killer! Twist ending, 1950s style: everything the main characters thought was going on ... is actually going on! Well, it is a twist ending if you're not expecting it.
Aside from that, and aside from spending most of the movie thinking that Grace Kelly was a figment of his imagination, it was a deeply adorable romance. :D I am not really one for romance except when I am, and I loved that it was a movie about Stewart's character falling in love with his girlfriend all over again as he saw a different side of her. And the entire trope of Stewart being housebound so that the girlfriend and the nurse had to do all the legwork ... that really worked for me. (Especially Kelly scaling the apartment building wall in high heels. Sweet.)
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am i shallow? yeah.
but grace. there was no one like her.
cheers.
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THIS. Okay, my apologies for going on a tangent here, but I'm so very tired of the modern "plot-twist" in which the obvious suspect turns out to innocent. Especially when it's things like a hate crime (gay-bashing, racism, Islamophobia) and the violent bigot who is the prime suspect is somehow--somehow!--wrongly implicated and it was actually the spouse, business partner, etc, who killed the victim for entirely personal reasons. Like it's ~edgy~ to mention hate-crimes, but God forbid you deal with it like it's a real problem that happens in real life. It stops being a "twist" when it happens every damn time.
Anyway. Sorry, I watch too many cop shows. But this movie sounds like a lot of fun. :)
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As for rear Window...it's such a marvelous film. I think my second favorite after Vertigo. The conceit is marvelous, and the many characters he watches are really quite fascinating in their own way...always at a distance from him and yet we get to know them so well...
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I don't know if I've seen any examples of what you're talking about (that I can think of off the top of my head), but the reason is probably that I just don't watch cop shows or forensics/procedurals much. But in general, I agree with your point -- contemporary murder mysteries of all sorts seem to have internalized the idea that "the first suspect is never the actual culprit", which means that almost without exception, the obvious person did not do it. Which makes the "surprise" twist somewhat less than surprising. And as you pointed out, it has real-world implications as well.
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Another interesting recent experience along those lines was watching "The Sting" for the first time since I was a teenager. I really loved the movie the first time I saw it -- I think it's a big part of what gave me a lifelong taste for con/heist/thief stories -- and I remember very clearly the exciting "oh, wow!" moment at the end where it all came together. What was fascinating about watching it as an adult, though, was how obvious all the plot twists seemed. I mean, even though I'd already seen it once and therefore knew where it was going in a vague kind of way, it still seemed like they were telegraphed a mile away, and my husband, who hadn't seen the movie, could guess everything before it happened. What was startling and fun to me as a teenager is old hat to me now. But it was a good reminder that everyone has to encounter every plot twist for the first time -- it might seem stale and cliche to me now, but somewhere out there is someone who hasn't seen it before.
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Heh.
I found that the recent movie style has spoiled me for many of the classics. I've so gotten used to the fast-paced, hectic style and I like those plot twist in general, even if it's often overdone. We watched The Shining the other day because one of the roomies hadn't seen it yet, and - I distinctly remember finding it very creepy scary when I first watched it, but now... really the scariest thing was the 70s decor, and the plot moved at a glacial pace. Modern movies ruined me, I guess.
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Modern attempts at the same thing -- the Ocean's movies, Hustle, Leverage -- only seem to be able to pull it off by leaving key bits completely out of the story, then going back and back-filling at the end to show the audience the bits they didn't see. (Or, worse, back-filling the bits that were perfectly obvious at the time, like watching Parker walk through a room but this time zooming in on her lifting a wallet or something; or worse yet, back-filling by repeating the exact same footage we've already seen on the assumption we can't possibly figure out what the characters figured out.)
I love all three of those movies/shows, but man, I get frustrated at the manipulation and/or the assumption of audience stupidity. The Sting was just so much more elegant about it all. <3
(Also, if you like the movie and haven't read it yet, you should read
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One of the things that caused me to stop watching Leverage, actually, is that they cheat -- I can deal with backfilling the explanation for the audience (though I prefer to be given credit to figure it out on my own), but what drove me bonkers about Leverage is that they never showed you the clues in the first place! I don't recall if they did it often, but enough to annoy me: they'd leave out key bits of the lead-up to the finale, so that you didn't have enough information to put it together accurately even if you wanted to, then show it to you in flashbacks. I hate having information withheld from the audience that the characters already know.
I realize this is an issue with me as a viewer more than with the show -- I like heist and mystery stories in large part for the "puzzle" aspect, so having that withheld felt like a violation of the implicit contract with the writer. Clearly if you're not really there for that aspect of it, that's not going to matter. But I never felt like I was on the same page with the writers; what they were supplying wasn't really what I wanted out of a show in that genre.
Hustle, at least, showed you all the pieces in the lead-up to the con -- well, in the first season they do, anyway, which is still no farther than I've gotten in the series. Then you get to have that satisfying "... oh, that's what that was for!" feeling at the end. But I do agree about over-explaining, and the annoyance thereof.
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*cracks up*
Yeah, you kinda get used to the prevailing style, and then have to adapt. I didn't have too much trouble with the pace of Rear Window because I've been watching some rather slow-paced BBC slice-of-life shows lately on Netflix, but I do think that some of my weird reaction to the movie was because it wasn't quite meeting my (early 21st century) expectations for what a suspense movie is supposed to do.
On the flip side, I've watched a few action/suspense movies from the last few years that are way too hectic and frenetic for me. And the modern (over)use of visual filters ... ouch. I don't remember which movie this was, but on one of the recent ones we watched, it was incredibly distracting -- like those music videos that are so over-filtered that you can barely recognize the characters; at one point I turned to my husband and said, "Someone needs to confiscate their copy of AfterEffects, stat!" ALSO, THOSE DAMN KIDS ARE ON MY LAWN AGAIN.
Movies like Rear Window are restful after that kind of sensory overload. But I still spent much of the first part of the movie waiting for something to happen, only slowly adjusting to the idea that something was happening, just ... subtly. Modern suspense movies are one long adrenaline rush, and movies of an earlier era weren't.
Edited to add: Oh, and yeah, I really like to have my expectations thrown; I like to have to grapple with the plot to figure out what's going on. I found it fascinating that Rear Window was a little bit of an expectation-twister for me precisely because it didn't have the offbeat twists that I've gotten used to!
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