the forgotten Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Oh, I'm sorry -- did I scare you? Did you think, what with all the remake news coming down the pike, that this would be a redo of the distressing 1996 Francis Ford Coppola movie with Robin Williams as an overgrown fifth-grader? No; you're silly. This is something else. This Jack is a "medical thriller" about a doctor who falls in love with an amnesiac patient who, unbeknownst to both of them, is actually a killer. Joseph Ruben will direct from a script by David Venable, whose only feature film credit is on Stuart Gordon's Fortress 15 years ago.

I forfeit all claims of objectivity regarding Ruben's The Good Son -- the Bad Seed rip-off with Macauley Culkin -- which scared the hell out of me when I was 11 and fresh off Home Alone. But I was among the few who liked The Forgotten which, to my mind, played like a good X-Files episode. It was well-shot and surprisingly daring, taking some outlandish left turns along the way; few filmmakers would have had the guts to forge ahead with such an outlandishly direct conception of what an alien abduction would look like. And Return to Paradise is an extraordinary, though little-seen, morality play. Ruben has never had a box-office hit, but I'm glad he's still getting work. Even if Jack does sound awfully trite.

Over at Cracked.com, they've made a list of the top ten worst twist endings of all time. Obviously that list has a lot of spoilers, but I'm going to attempt to write this post without revealing any of them. Why? To make sure you go over there, of course. So, if you're not worried about ruining the endings to some movies you probably shouldn't see anyway, then head over and read the hilariously confusing explanations, or attempts at explanations, and/or how some endings don't make enough sense to bother with explanations. I will let you in on the titles of the movies, just in case you are interested in seeing any of them in the future and would like to go in spoiler free. The ten, in order from "least asinine" to "most asinine", are: Stay (2005); High Tension (2003); Signs (2002); Hide and Seek (2005) and Secret Window (2004), which tie for #7, because they're considered the exact same plot (is that spoiling it for you guys? probably -- oh well, I tried); The Forgotten (2004); Basic (2003); Perfect Stranger (2007); The Number 23 (2007); Planet of the Apes (2001); and The Life of David Gale (2003).

I haven't seen the number one movie, but I can't imagine it's worse than the others that I have seen, especially Planet of the Apes. Basically, I think Cracked.com considers it the worst because it stars Kevin Spacey, who also starred in The Usual Suspects, which pretty much, along with The Sixth Sense, obviously, got Hollywood on this crappy twist kick to begin with (He was also in Se7en, which had another so-so twist ending). Look at those films; they all came out between 2001 and 2007. And what was the most common twist? The main character did it. Either he or she has a split personality, or amnesia, or suffers from some other psychological ailment. Other idiotic yet easily written twists include: aliens did it; it's all a dream (as if you need to steal from Bob Newhart, come on!); and, in the fashion of Suspects, it's all just made-up stories. Personally, I'm upset to not see my least favorite twist ending. It involved a whole crop of great actors who just so happened to be explained as existing inside the imagination of some mental patient. That one had the split personality plus the dream plus the Suspects idea that none of what we watched is real. Can you name it?