Ramble: Jenny's Favorite and Least Favorite Plot Twists of All Time
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I do have a direct patreon upload pending as a backup but it's been processing for hours and hours, and I know people don't prefer the in-site functionality anyway. But if the youtube link is locking anyone out I can move forward with posting that too. Please don't comment just to say the youtube link is working because that will make it harder to find comments saying it's not!
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Ramble: Jenny's Favorite and Least Favorite Plot Twists of All Time (YouTube)
Comments (325)
Looking back, I love that the "short video" jenny started working on is the incubus video which is, yes much shorter than her previous by several hours but still over an hour and a half long. But a great video none the less.
Transcendence is one of the most bafflingly terrible movies I've ever seen. The lead character dies of radioactive blood poisoning, and yet they have him CREMATED, and then dump his ashes into a creek... I was already over Johnny Depp at this point. His behavior wasn't a secret.
the best twist in my opinion is The Murder on the Orient Express, it has every all the makings of a type 1 twist i will refrain from explaining any further to avoid spoilers, but i would highly recommend that people read the book
Z
I'm late to the party, but in the short story The Mist, it ends with the same group of people in the car and as they're driving south their radio begins to crackle as if picking up faint signals, and they just drive off into the mist and that's how it ends. It indicates at least some hope that if there's a distant radio signal, that means the mist must have an ending to it and if they keep going and if they have enough gas, they can live. Having read the short story, when I saw the movie my jaw hit the floor I was so shocked at how they'd changed it. A rare occasion of Stephen King writing a neutral/hopeful ending and then the movie making it way more depressing.
"I like him because his mouth is closed" is a compliment I get all the time, too!
I believe in Saw in the beginning of the movie you can see some sketches for the reverse bear trap in John's (the Jigsaw killer) stuff in the hospital, but again you wont catch it unless you're looking for it
"A bad movie that I think is funny" gosh, it could be anything "It's tangentially related to the furry fandom" delgo
The Mist also really annoyed me!
lmao this is how I learned me thinking the dinosaur was part human was not actually the plot. The whole time we watched the second one I was like aw they’re siblings 🥹💕
I'm sure people already said this, but Soylent Green was not a Twilight Zone episode. "To Serve Man" was.
I’m only 17 minutes into the video (and loving it heehee), but, regarding Westworld, I really enjoyed seasons 1 & 2, especially in season 2 (I think?) when we learn about the existence of other different themed worlds, like Shogun world, and I really wish they would’ve expanded on that more in future seasons, but I stopped watching after season 3 when they brought the story into the real world! Maybe I’m wrong since I haven’t seen season 4, but I was sad to just learn about the other worlds and then abandon them for the real world, but I would still recommend season 2 if you can accept the dead end so to speak 😭 (if anyone has seen season 4 or remembers season 3 better than I do and they do explore the other worlds, I’d love to know!!)
I think the real problem with The Mist is that it's a Stephen King story. The guy is a fantastic writer (with some faults, admittedly) but the thing that makes a lot of his writing great, in my opinion, is the look that we get into the thought processes and minds of his characters. It’s difficult to show that internal monologue in film, and the result is many excellent stories that get ham fisted into subpar movies.
IMO the worst twists are the bait-and-switch ones that make you feel like the entire story was a waste of time because none of what you thought was happening (and got invested in) was ACTUALLY happening. I haven't noticed this so much in movies lately, but it's a real trend in books right now, and it pisses me off. The worst offender I've read lately is Caraval, where it turns out (spoilers) that the main character, Scarlett, was being lied to and manipulated the entire time by her sister, Donatella (this is a fantasy book, if the dumb title didn't tip you off), as part of a scheme to fake her own death to free them from the controlling grip of their abusive father. Gee, that sounds like the character that had actual agency the entire time, why didn't we follow HER story instead of traipsing around aimlessly with the clueless dumb-as-rocks sister on a pointless sidequest that was never meant to be anything more than a distraction? Glad I wasted my time reading 400 pages of that nonsense. I also hate twists that are presented as last-minute info dumps that don't give you time to process their impact on the story except as some superficial "GASP I WAS FOOLED" endorphin rush. This is why I think the novel The Prestige is better then the film, because it parses out the information more gradually and never even explicitly reveals Borden's secret, just heavily implies it, and that revelation comes at the halfway mark. Chris Nolan just does a holy-shit-it's-a-double-twist montage with a lot of breathless editing and Hans Zimmer's over-the-top score pounding your mental faculties into submission with "this is meaningful!" orchestration. It's not profound, it's comical and campy, but boy it sure insists upon itself. I'm irritated by Chris Nolan in general, though.
Nolan leaves makes an impression but doesn't leave one. His food doesn't reheat well. Also, Hugh Jackman. What an interesting situation. A guy with 75% talent but thinks he's at 100%. At least Keanu Reeves went through his Shakespeare phase, learned his level, and now sticks with what works for him. If Hugh was more realistic, he'd let poor old Liam Neeson and Tom Cruise retire and take over as Action Man in Hollywood.
I think you should rewatch the mist. You missed a few points. (spoilers for 2007's The Mist) The people in the store were sending people out to be sacrificed, they were probably days if not hours from completely eating each other alive, so I doubt the military came through in time to save them. The relative safety of the building was already disintegrating anyway. The people in the car are just the guy and his son, the two other people are unrelated to him. The reason there's a time crunch to decide what to do is because his son is asleep, and the hard decision is to mercy kill right now, or let him wake up and come to understand the despair they're in. They have no supplies, and as they're driving is a montage of hopelessness (including passing by the man's home and seeing the cocooned corpse of his wife). Additionally, a woman in the store early on leaves to brave the mist to get her son from... somewhere. Daycare? School? She's on the military convoy with her son. Also, the military resistance is foreshadowed by some conversation about how the source of things is a military base. I do agree the ending is somewhat cruel, and I usually really hate bitter sad media, but something about the mist resonated with me. It was very sad what he had to do, but with the information he had, it was necessary, and I think it reflects a reality of life that sometimes you're forced to make a horrible decision that's right at the time and turns out to be wrong later. I think overall there's something to it, and it's not just pointless cruelty.
She's not saying it's some kind of plothole. She's saying it's thematically incoherent.
That potential video being "tangentally related to the furry fandom"... I wholly believe it's FNAF lmao
I mean she’s already said she’s working on a FNAF movie video so I think the movie she’s talking about here is something more obscure
I love that you've seen so much classic Twilight Zone, because it's so good!! The Transference twist reminds of this Hitchcock movie I hate. Joan Fontaine spends the whole movie thinking her new husband is trying to kill her for the insurance money. At the end of the movie he says, "I'm Cary Grant, of course I'd never kill you!" and they drive off happily into the sunset. Perfectly fine thriller up until then.
Cary Grant is so good at playing the villain! His eyes just go dead at certain points in that movie and it's really chilling. It's too bad he didn't do it more often--I think that was his only turn at it. In defense of the ending, it seems at least somewhat implied to me that he's still potentially trying to kill her; she just WANTS to believe that everything is fine and dandy at last. All the coincidences piled onto coincidences seem a little TOO convenient...
Youtube video is without subtitles :(
(don’t have twitter so asking here) Jenny, I just read the NYT article about the new Splash Mountain ride. It says it has 48 animatronics!! Thoughts?
Someone else may have commented but Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is a great short story written by a civil war veteran, the Twilight Zone version is a good adaptation but the story is worth reading too
IIRC, the TZ episode is actually just a French short film adaptation of the story with the Rod Serling bookends tacked on. Serling was burned out, so it was a strategy to fill the production order without going to much effort.
Loved the video, ty Jenny, but was surprised on your take on (and other ppl comments on) The Mist. When the military convoy arrive they do a close up on the mother played by Melissa McBride, revealing she's alive! Someone that everyone had written off as dead. For me that gives a karmic end to the film: The woman who put herself in harms way to help others by going into the mist alone was rewarded. But when she asked for help from the others they ignored and rejected her, and they end up dead. Maybe you could interpret this ending as "it doesn't matter if you rationalize being selfish as 'sensible' and 'practical' you're still being awful by refusing to help a woman find her children, and besides you can't expect anything good to come of that."
I dunno. As far as we know the Christian lady demanding child sacrifice and her followers survived, staying in the supermarket. Also, the woman in the truck wanted other people to risk their lives to save her children. She didn't help others, she helped herself save her own children.
The Rey Palpatine foreshadowing could have been accomplished by her shooting electric bolts out of her hands like the emperor did. Maybe she does something good with it, but Luke or someone else knows what that means and it's ominous. It would have looked cool too.
I hate Johnny Depp too
i hate when johnny depp comes up nowadays. so many people are afraid to say that he sucks cause he has so many defenders. so whether or not someone hates (or just mildly dislikes) him based on "the important stuff", his acting, his behavior, or anything else, it's like just a bunch of people who won't comment on him so they don't face the ire of his braindead fandom. abvsing his wife and making a villain out of her made him completely critic-proof, despite the fact that he's just near talentless even if he was a better guy.
I’m going to write a rom com that ends with the death of Queen Elizabeth, ykno to balance the scales
I love the implication that the Queen’s death would also kill the main character in that movie somehow
Some of my favorite twists are the ones in Julia’s Eyes, The Handmaiden/Fingersmith, and Sharp Objects :) I also second those who are recommending The Others!
YES when she talked about that goosebumps plot I was screaming THIS IS JUST THE MOVIE THE OTHERS!!!! That’s a fave of all time! Some of Nicole Kid man’s best work.
If you read The Force Awakens, Rey hears a voice in that moment telling herself to kill Kylo Ren. So yeah, they could have set to up but didn't.
I was watching this video and while I did, it got copyright striked because of "content van CPRAgency for Belga Films." Like what??
lol commenting to help Jacob
haha thank you!
Oh god I assumed Patreon would collapse my comment under a See more button or something but now it's full length and since it's the last comment it's also making the feed longer, I'm sorry. Please someone else comment so it gets bumped under the load more
I've been following your main channel for a while and just subscribed to your patreon this month (partly for the wave of star wars support, partly because my friend recently mentioned the tier prices and I realized they were so much more affordable than I expected) and this was a really fun video to start off with! It was kind of a delightful surprise for me in a couple ways because 1) not even two weeks ago I was looking up "best movie twists" listicles and complaining about them to my friends 2) I'd forgotten you do horror movies too? I was like "I don't think we'll have any of the same favorites because most of mine are horror” and then you opened with Saw and I was like “oh yeah I remember she was tweeting about Megan when they were promoting it”. It’s fun to get to hear you go in depth on horror movies! I know there’s creepypasta on the main channel but I don’t think that counts lol I’m used to interacting with much smaller creators and wrote a long comment like this was a conversation and I was replying to specific topics... I don’t want to delete it now but I do wanna make a point of saying I’m not meaning this as like “I hope Jenny reads my long comment and responds to each part as well” or “I hope commenters here notice my cool points and give me a lot of attention too”, just enjoying discussing movies! I really like your system for types of twists! I feel like I’ve always judged type 2 twists as like “Ugh, they didn’t put any clues in there so it came out of nowhere and that means it sucks!”, and thinking of them as something a little different and recognizing that they can still add to a story helps me appreciate them a little more! As someone who actually liked Imaginary, I completely forgot that the "twist" was even a plot point in the movie at all, which is really funny. Like now that I remember it I'm like "oh yeah because that was the proof for the mom that it was supernatural, because it didn't show up on tape", but that could have been proved by something way more interesting! I was under the impression Chauncy could affect the real world anyways, since he attacked the neighbor, so it's not like this was a "he can only affect your mind" twist. If you count "C.B. is short for Chauncy Bear" then there's two twists from the movie that add nothing, lol. (Also as an unironic lover of single-word titles I feel the need to point out that Imaginary is actually different from a title like "Psycho" or "Sinister" or "Scream" in that it's naming something specific about the movie, like, not every horror movie is about something imaginary in the same way that "Spooky" can be applied to most horror movies. But it is definitely towards the "too abstract to be meaningful" end of the scale) When you pointed out that all of the problems with Don't Worry Darling's twist were "Why didn't they just make the VR do this instead", I realized that's kind of a recurring problem in depictions of simulated realities, like the "why aren't all the shirts as strong as they can be" comment you made about Ready Player One. I think it's because for a writer, it takes more worldbuilding effort to think of all the ways that a simulated reality would be different from just regular life, while when actually making one, programmers have to actively work to include any element of the real world in their reality. I think it's funny that they're on opposite ends like that, like I know stories often simplify fields and don't cover all the little details, but I can't think of anything else where it has that inverse relationship, like, whatever the writers think would be easier means more convoluted work on the programmers' part. I've heard of the ending to the Mist before but haven't seen it yet myself. I'd always thought it was just supposed to be a tragic ending, kind of like Romeo and Juliet, “Oh it’s sad that it could have been prevented if they’d known differently”. But listening to your criticism of it and thinking about your earlier points on what a twist does for a story, I realized I was really just making a surface-level comparison, like, sure, both stories have someone decide to end a life because they think it’s the only choice, but Romeo and Juliet’s deaths have a lot more to do with characters’ choices and the story’s themes than the ending of Mist. I still think there’s things to appreciate about an ending like that – I liked what Russ W was talking about with ordinary people being put in doomed situations – but I definitely think reflecting more on why I disagree helped me have a better perspective about it! I also think including the ending of the Mist on a list of twists is kind of an interesting choice in itself - I personally wouldn't consider it a twist because it only happens at the end and isn't really recontexting anything else in the story other than what just happened. (I might look very stupid now if I’m wrong about that but I already admitted I haven’t seen it) I think it's interesting to see that so many people do consider a twist and to think about how that can even be defined, like, how late do I think a twist can happen? (Also, is it a twist because people knew it was an adaptation, but the ending had been changed from what they knew?) I like that the twist of Trascendence is almost identical to those sitcom episodes that are like "Everyone forgot my birthday and they're avoiding me and being so mean... (but they're planning a secret surprise party)", but like, on a world-ending scale lmao Anyways, this video was a very fun introduction to your patreon content! Love the plushie arrangement talk, too!
RE: your question about whether what happens at the end of The Mist is strictly a "twist", I definitely think there's a difference between a twist and a reveal--a twist is set up in invisible ways that you can typically only see when looking back (or at least that's the idea--the competence of the writing can wreck the effect, but it's the intention that matters as far as classification is concerned), while a reveal isn't set up at all and tends to come out of the blue. Darth Vader being Luke's father is one I'd think of more as a reveal than a twist because there's no possible way you could have guessed it beforehand, not least because the movie itself already lied to you about the fate of Luke's father. I think the true "twist" in Empire is the revelation that the eccentric Muppet Luke meets on Dagobah is in fact the Jedi Master than Obi-Wan Kenobi sent him to meet. Yoda essentially tells Luke that he's the guy Luke flew all this way to meet, with the "I'm looking for someone"/"Found someone you have!" exchange, and it's pretty natural in storytelling to have the first character who shows up in a given location be the character the protagonist went to that particular location to look for, but both Luke and the audience assume that Yoda will be a human who looks powerful in the traditional ways and discount this little frog man as some swamp weirdo who has nothing to do with anything. Using the audience's assumptions against them is a pretty standard way to set up a twist. But in the popular lexicon, people tend to use the phrase "plot twist" to describe any shocking turn of events--the more shocking and unexpected, the more it will be called a twist. So the ending of The Mist could really be defined as either a reveal OR a twist, depending on your point of view.
I always thought Rose was Pink Diamond from Steven Universe was kind of dumb.They always had evidence but there really wasn’t much actually evidence that actually hinted at anything of substance. Then they made a whole episode dispelling the idea only to say psyche like a half season later
Years before that reveal, I saw an elaborate post on tumblr theorizing why they thought Rose was Pink Diamond, and I thought "That's crazy talk. No way that's true." Fast forward a few years and I somehow felt like I got spoiled for something that wasn't even confirmed at the time of me learning it lol.
If a viewer adds one of your unlisted videos to a public playlist, it becomes public to anyone. That seems like a huge oversight from YT. Any way to fix that?
Because most of the stuff on that channel is classed as kids content or something it's not supposed to allow users to add the videos to playlists
i think 6th sense and shutter island are thee god tier type-1 plot twists
Holy shit I forgot about shutter island you’re so right
I'm probably the only one but I found Remember Me's ending to be one of the only movies to really convey how shocking the experience of 9/11 was. Here's this guy with a whole life who had things to look forward to and all these conflicts, friendships, loves and then suddenly, inexplicably his life is cut short by something that has nothing to do with him. I've never seen a movie accomplish something like that before.
Either Goosebumps stole their idea from The Others (Nicole Kidman) or The Others stole their idea from Goosebumps (which I prefer. It's much funnier.)
C c. Z z bb
Personally, my favorite twist is the Swedish ending to Finding Dory.
omg say More?!
Today I Learned: you aren’t supposed to think planet of the apes is earth. I’ve never seen planet of the apes but i assumed it was earth bc otherwise where did the apes come from? Are we just expected to believe another planet had not just carbon based life but dna based life and then also evolved species similar to our own? It being earth at least makes it make sense.
i agree with you wholeheartedly, but also the book that spawned the franchise is canonically not set on earth. most film adaptations just set it on earth--i assume the first one did because that was a good way to surprise anyone who had read the book. one brave adaptation did set the events on a different planet, and the reveal is so nonsensical that thinking about it makes me lose my mind
thanks for the ramble, Jenny!! fwiw, I had a fun time with Westworld Season 2. I remember finding the shift in perspective for episode 8 (Kiksuya) really impactful. and I completely agree re the dual-meaning dialogue twist you mention, that scene gave me goosebumps the first time I saw it! I love when clever dialogue choices add extra resonance to a scene like that. RTD era NuWho was fantastic for that.
I love that the twist of Transcendance is the same twist as The Simpson’s first Treehouse of Horror.
The unexpected deep dive on Transcendence was great. I never heard of it before but it sounds fascinatingly bad. As a recent Patron I'm very keen to dive into more of the content on here, but also just happy to support after all the hours of entertainment over the years. Also love the now prominent Bombermen! My brother and I are often jealously admiring your gamer plushes (the Bubsies always summon a chuckle). Curious to know if you've got a favourite Bomberman game.
“I’m gonna go unplug my fridge” really shows her dedication to this quality content 🔥
Jenny how much money do I have to pay you to read my screenplay and tell me what’s wrong with it lol
I might be stretching it, but in the Mist, when the military trucks pass by, the lady who asked everyone to help her get home and leaves alone when no one steps up, is in tone of them, meaning they all would have been ok had they chosen to help. Regardless of how dumb it might be, its one of my favorite movies, specially for that ending :P
EVERY decision David makes in the Mist is wrong.
If it makes any difference I have been intending to sub to your patreon for about a year and the timing is purely because I got it for my birthday lol not to be super creepy but I've been re-listening to your videos to fill the sudden deafening silence caused by my big loud chatty boyfriend getting a new job requiring travel so all this new content is pretty amazing for me, someone with a poor memory that can easily rewatch content over and over
The Paul Bettany line in Transcendence was so funny - "if we miss uploading just one memory, it might not be him in there!" Like, buddy, even if you got everything, it's not him in there. He will have died. The AI thing is a simulation.
I watched the Sixth Sense knowing that there was *a* twist, but because the "I see dead people" line also entered pop culture I thought that was *the* twist for some reason, so the end was still effective for me.
Yes, same for me.
not me SCREAMING when you revealed the twist to the otherwise standard romance movie was that Robert Pattinson's father died in 9/11
Pretty sure the twist is that Robert Pattinson died in 9/11, he was at the towers visiting his dad who was on his way
Disappointed you left out the best movie plot twist of all: Hans was NOT in love with Anna. I wish I could go back and relive that moment in theaters. That experience was so good.
This suddenly brought back a memory of the Cillian Murphy thriller Red Lights where he plays a scientist who debunks psychics who (spoiler alert) is himself secretly psychic. When the twist is revealed they do the classic bit where they flashback to all that clues, except one of the clues is literally him saying "I'm psychic".
Not mentioned, but one of my favorite shows with good twists is Haunting of Hill House. I remember the first time watching it and being genuinely surprised by what ended up happening Also, I remember when I saw don’t worry darling, my roommate and I burst out laughing at the chase scene at the end. The fact that Harry Styles ends up just being a neck beard was also a cherry on top
And now it's a hit board game, too, with a guaranteed twist every time you play!
I got Remember Me from blockbuster when I was absolutely still A Child and I remember my mom being really cagey and weird and strange and absolutely insisting I pause it and come eat dinner or go help her with something. Only a few years ago did I learn abt the ending and how she was trying to avoid having 10 year old me witness that and then having to explain 9/11 and her personal ties to it after the fact all because of some shitty movie. She definitely “accidentally returned” the disc early or something too bc I remember trying to get it again for months and months and months.
I watched Transcendence in such a different headspace than apparently everyone and I really liked most of it. Oh, and my gf at the time had the same reaction! I think we went in keyed in on the title. So we took it for a given that Depp's character was intact (in the movie at least) inside the machine. That is, he successfully Transcended. There was no twist for us. (And as such I never saw this an AI movie, but more about how durable the human soul can be - which connects to the ending.) He was an eccentric science guy trope. So thinking he could use another body as an avatar seemed like the sort of faux pas such a person would commit (and wasn't that guy like a brain-dead vegetable before? I thought there was that angle to it as well). I also felt the movie went well out of its way to establish that those that seemed enslaved were just in perfect unity. Sure its the kind of unity that requires a Borg-collective kind of communication link but I never got the impression that their individuality was destroyed or lessened. (There should have been scenes showing others in the group actualizing their own goals.) It DOES look creepy when they all move in perfect harmony, but maybe that's just because (most of us) are American and likely over-value individual freedom over the good of the group? It does seem to me that some real teamwork is needed to solve many of humanity's problems, so while this was clunky in execution, I agreed with the basic concept expressed. Imagine a bunch of people, all super in agreement in goals and well-organized enough to implement some of them - how would they look from the outside even if everything they did was for the good of the planet and all humanity? Like a cult? Probably. It was years ago when I saw this, so I won't die on this hill, unless you ask nicely, but when he read every word wasn't he also connected to the machine so it wasn't just recording his voice but also an imprint of brain activity each word activated? For some reason that's what I recalled when I saw those clips. I agree that a human shouldn't have all this power and its weird to be ok with some guy running the show. But that's offset slightly by the idea that a human has the potential for such power and can gain it without losing his identity. But possibly the worst part of this is how we are meant to think they are happily existing forever as molecular computers in water or something? Sounds like a fate worse than death. Human relations would seem to require human bodies, which is something Computer Depp understood thus his faux pas with the intern and later rebuilding his body. I recall the end being bittersweet, and I think that was the intention, but it also seems like they've lost all agency? If I keep thinking about this I may hate the movie more than all of you... I can't defend or make sense of the cancer bullet, maaaaybe it's a reference to Videodrome, in which case 11/10.
The reason Transcendence looked but didn't feel like a Nolan movie is because it was directed by Wally Pfister, Nolan's longtime cinematographer. One of the Peter Principle examples of a dude who was so good at one thing they gave him a chance at doing a bigger thing, and we all realized that he should probably just stick to doing the original thing after all. Like the opposite of Shane Black, who got promoted from writing to directing and it turns out he might be an even better director than a writer.
Yeah I felt bad watching it (since it was indeed really bad) because he's such a good cinematographer! But it's OK to not be great at everything, he's at least already great at his real job
I'll be honest, the reason I suggested this topic is because of a tweet Jenny made a few years ago about how in the 10-minute version of All Too Well by Taylor Swift, she reveals that he missed her birthday at the end of a verse like it's some kind of plot twist 😂 Really enjoyed this video. Can't wait for the next one. 😁
I think remember awhile back you upped your tier for just one month and it didn't get picked, so if you did that again I'm glad your topic won!
I feel like defending the V for Vendetta twist: V didn't do it to test Eevee's loyalty. She had been terrified of being arrested and tortured by the totalitarian regime since her parents disappeared. V decided to subject her to her worst fear while sharing with her Valerie's letter, which is about an LBGTQ woman who describes her life and death under this regime. This gives Eevee the strength to stop fearing the regime and her inevitable death by their hand. That's when V lets her go. And she DOES hate him for it and she DOES leave him. She only comes back a year later to see how his revenge plan works out. Regardless of what you think of the twist, at least get the details right.
Also everything he inflicts on her is what he went through to be reborn as V, including finding the letters. That's why the (amazing) music that plays when she steps in the rain after accepting death is Evey Reborn. That movie was a LOT more clever than Jenny gave it credit for.
Great video! Glad to finally be an official Patron here. Personally, I'm a big fan of The Mist, ending included, and it didn't make me mad as a "twist" since I didn't really think of it that way. Every once in a while I can embrace a movie that wraps up in a complete bummer, earned or not, it's a weird kind of catharsis for me... BUT I think one of the reasons I'm mostly OK with it is because the movie is a single story. And as other people have pointed out, inevitable doom was a frequent M.O. for Stephen King. Where my patience runs out is with long-form works, like TV series or comics or book series, where the entire point seems to be abject misery or cruelty week after week, book after book, issue after issue, and where they just keep yanking the rug out from under your feet. The Walking Dead, for example. I finally bailed on that after 3 seasons... which was far too long, but I had a sunk costs attitude with the show that was hard for me to finally let go of.
I suspect most people who don't like the ending of The Mist The Movie do so because the story by King ended on a hopeful note. Literally, the last word is "hope." I respect the movie for doing something different, though I don't think it was brilliant to just invert the ending of the story.
omg someone else has seen that horrible AI movie! it was so bad!! why was the wife not like "it's cool that you're good and not evil, but what also all this people you brainwashed and enslaved???" maybe it's not that the AI is good, it's that the husband was the terrible one all along, that's the real twist
Yeah it was such a stupid twist because I think it was already clear enough to the viewer that the computer had good enough intentions. The real question the protag should've been asking isn't "is this REALLY my husband in some spiritual sense" but "should even my well-meaning husband have godlike authority over the entire world," or "is it important for humanity to have free will" "Do I feel satisfied that this robot brain is my husband" could've (probably should've) been it's own, way more introspective movie, without bringing in the company town and cult and anti-AI terrorists
There's one game that I think has a HORRENDOUS plot twist but I don't know anyone who's played it. I've been playing this otome game (which is wild bc I think I'm a lesbian, genuinely not sure why I got so invested??) and the first season builds up to an interesting climax before completely fumbling. They make a big deal about needing to not create a time travel paradox, before actually creating a time travel paradox with no consequences. It was infuriating and they NEVER MENTIONED IT AGAIN. Screaming, heaving, throwing up, etc
Whenever I hear anything about weird plot twists, all I can think about is the one from The Boy. Truly haunts me as a wild swing that changes the tone and was insane but somehow not the stakes at all, raising infinitely more questions than it could ever answer? That movie was my polonium bullet tbh
That twist made no sense but was great. And I liked that the twisted it back for the sequel
Finally, someone else who doesn't like that part of V for Vendetta!!!! I feel vindicated
I really wish there were time stamps for each section that she talks about so I can actually skip to the next one so I don't get spoiled for the twist. And if I try randomly skipping to the next five minutes or so I'd probably end up getting spoiled anyway.
I think She’s mentioned in a couple past videos that for some reason the time stamp feature isn’t working for her Patreon videos
Just looked up the ending to Remember Me on YouTube...oh my 😬
A paradox: How to suggest movies on this thread without revealing that they end in a twist.
Suggest a movie without a twist, then the twist is a meta twist that there isn't a twist.
jenny I love your good and correct opinions about johnny depp!!!
Same same same
As someone who has never even heard of Remember Me and certainly never heard of the twist: WHAAAAAAAATTTTT???!!!! I was NOT expecting that omg???!! I am actually so bewildered that someone decided to write that as a twist ending, I legit gasped when Jenny revealed it omg
love all these Patreon exclusive videos, I wish I'd known about this in the past! thanks for all the years of wonderful videos 😊
Loved the video! I hope you give yourself plenty of a break now that starcruiser is out.
Jenny describing the plot of that insane Johnny Depp AI movie makes this ramble an all timer for me
And now you don’t even need to watch it! 😂
Going to push back on the Fantastic Beasts twist, not because I like the movie, but I think the first movie’s twist makes more sense than it’s given credit for here. The twist isn’t just “oh the bad guy is a different bad guy played by a more famous actor”, it’s “oh, I thought that was a pretty low stakes villain plot that the zoologist foiled, turns out, he foiled the plans of magical Adolf Hitler”. So you’re meant to think “omg I didn’t realise how high the stakes are” but also “omg is this spin off series secretly about the Great Wizarding War?” since it’s clearly a tease for future stuff. Not that I liked it, I wish it was a series about fun animals.
I didn’t even consider that the Jurassic World Dino could be part human, but that would’ve been amazing! Also I’m going to rewatch the Pride merch ramble in honor of June — that one’s so fun
Im so sad for the human dinosaur that did not make it
That’s a very human reaction
I watched the Sixth Sense also without knowing anything of the twist, somehow, I didn't even know it was such a meme until after I saw it lol and it somehow was a meme that wasn't on my radar at all. But yes it is super rewarding and shocking when you go in without knowing, it definitely blew my mind, but it's not even my favorite thing about the film, it's just a really good and touching movie on its own. And man, Rebecca Hall is really carrying that film, like she's giving it her ALL despite whatever the hell the movie is doing, truly giving her most sincere effort and she's killing it.
Oh my gosh, same! I watched it about 5 years ago at a Halloween party. I gasped out loud at the plot twist and my friends were shocked I didn’t already know about it. I try to share that movie with the rare ones who have never seen it before. They exist and it’s hilarious.
my sister-in-law spoiled the Sixth Sense for me. In the same year she spoiled a detective movie for me in an interesting way. She told me that the detective was actually the criminal. So as I was watching the movie I ignored all the steps the detective took to solve the crime because I knew it was fake and this big twist was coming. And then the movie ended.
jenny, if you ever want to watch attack on titan, there are a LOT of twists in it throughout the series. of varying quality, unfortunately… i only watched it like 2 years ago and was actually surprised how compelling the first few seasons are. i went in knowing how propagandistic its reputation was, and i gotta say, it’s not *just* military porn. it doesn’t *just* have a lot of irresponsibly incomplete metaphors to the real world… it was very watchable in a way that made me think “this feels like copaganda, but the message is so muddled i have no idea what the author wants to say other than ‘genocide bad’”. anyway. i’m writing this bc one of the twists you talked about reminded me a lot of one of the ones in AoT
I 100% agree, definitely a fun watch, despite all of the meandering and half-baked messages. The twist about the basement was also an all-timer, I never would have guessed what the reveal was but I was completely happy with the outcome. But yeah, the messages are so jumbled that I can only conclude that the whole story is a meditation by an author who has very conflicted feelings about his country's involvement in WW2
Re: What the twist ending of To Serve Man adds to the narrative: It adds a top tier pun, you philistine! 😛
Approximate Timestamps for the movies/shows Jenny discusses (I only listed start times but you can extrapolate the end times based on when the next one starts) for those trying to avoid spoilers. 5:16 Saw 8:27 The Sixth Sense 10:16 Goosebumps The Ghost Next Door 11:15 Liar Game 2 13:35 The Usual Suspects/Scary Movie 14:34 Pirates of the Caribbean 2 15:16 Westworld Season 1 17:31 Remember Me (also discusses ending of unspecified Nicholas Sparks movie) 23:13 Twilight Zone/Soylent Green/Planet of the Apes 32:10 Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker 37:00 Now you see me 1&2 (there might be something between this and the Dark Knight Rises, I skipped forward to avoid Now You See Me spoilers) 38:40 The Dark Knight Rises 39:25 V for Vendetta 40:52 Solo: a Star Wars Story 42:59 Fantastic Beasts movies 44:46 Jurassic World 47:51 Don't Worry Darling 53:33 The Mist/Twilight Zone 1:00:36 Transcendence 1:15:15 future projects
This is super helpful, thank you!
Where did you get the Paragon Park hat?? My dad would *love* to have one of those; he went there all the time as a kid.
They have a small museum where the park used to be! I got it in their gift shop
I also prefer Tails with his mouth closed.
I haven't watched the full video yet but I hope The Prestige is mentioned
The worst thing about the Darth Maul twist in Solo is that if you were like... a casual Star Wars fan who likes all the movies but hasn’t consumed any content outside the movies (or even if you did but not that content specifically)... you still thought Darth Maul was dead from the Phantom Menace! So this was like a massive reveal with 0 context about how this happened, which wasn’t relevant to the plot in any way. That movie was so obviously for people who liked Star Wars because they liked the original trilogy, but that twist doesn’t make any sense for them at all! And it couldn’t even have gone anywhere (because the only logical reason for it was as a set up for that Kenobi movie that never happened because Solo did badly at the Box office) because they’d also already killed Maul off a second time on TV.
yeah, i am a very casual star wars watcher. If it wasn't for tumblr mutuals, i'd think darth maul is dead and gone after Phantom menace. I'd think the guy in solo is just another alien of the same species.
I love you Jenny I just am suprised you watched Saw but you refuse to watch Rocky Horror picture show. You don't have to watch things you don't like but like Rocky horror is tellitubies next to saw.
Why doesn’t she want to watch RHPS? Is there a vid where she talks about it?
The second Jurassic world also has a few details that go nowhere about the clone girl Maise that made people think she is or was originally planned to be a raptor/human hybrid, as though someone writing for them was keen on the concept, but they got overruled and it was written out both times.
Would anyone be willing to share the movies/shows covered so I can see if I’ve seen them? I try to avoid spoilers 😂 I’m guessing I’ll need to do some homework before watching this haha
A couple comments above yours is a list with time stamps!
I'm surprised that Ready Player One's shocking THEY WERE A GIRL THE WHOLE TIME twist didn't make it. I guess that movie was pretty forgettable.
I think if she was hairy-knuckled Chuck but they fell in love anyway would have been a more satisfying twist
Wow, I didn't know Jenny makes that much money. Sure, she always thinks of employees and her own privilege but I don't know. It feels weird.
What did she say that made you think of that I guess I missed it
My prediction for your furry fandom-adjacent upcoming video is Pottersville. It's probably not, since that's a Christmas movie and that won't be seasonal for a while, but I just want to manifest 'Jenny talks about Michael Shannon Christmas Bigfoot Romcom' right now.
I’ve read three different novels where characters surprise die in the 9/11 attacks, and while all three were pretty good novels, only one of them used that twist well. The other two just sort of had these characters that were sketches of a particular kind of person that their respective authors wanted to say something about, and then when it was time for the plot to get going with the other characters, they got removed from the action by 9/11.
As someone who watched the second plane fly right over my head (so low i could see the numbers on the bottom of it), after hearing the first one and seeing the first explosion through my window… i often find it pretty strange/troubling when people use 9/11 as a plot point in fiction. It was very, very traumatic for people who witnessed it in person, and i’m always a bit nonplussed when people reduce it to a plot widget.
🚨 JENNY IS RANKED EIGHTH IN THE WORLD ON GRAPHTREON 🚨😲🔝🔟✊ PS I always think I'm spelling 'eighth' wrong 🤔 Never looks right somehow 🤷♂️
🚨NOW SEVENTH ✊🚨
The hat hid your eyes through a lot of the video which oddly makes it harder to obsorb what your saying I think. Something about being able to see someones eyes makes it feel more engaging
I was trying to evaluate Asteroid City for a twist, but it's kind of hard to pin one down since the story-within-a-story aspect is introduced from the beginning.
(Spoilers for Planet of the Apes 1968) I took down my copy of The Making of Planet of the Apes by J. W. Rinzler to see what it had to say about the "it's Earth all along!" plot point, and Jenny is right about Serling, it was him that inserted the idea into the screenplay. Rinzler even points out that Serling was recycling the idea from his earlier Twilight Zone work! The original Planet of the Apes novel by Pierre Boulle has two plot twists, sort of. In the novel there is a framing device of a couple in a spaceship who find a message in a bottle floating in space, which contains the main story told from a human astronaut's point of view. The surprise at the end of the novel is that the couple are revealed to be chimps, who scoff at the idea of humans being able to write such a narrative. As far as the main plot goes, the astronauts travel to a distant planet (they don't unknowingly crash on Earth) ruled by apes. The main astronaut eventually has a child with a primitive human woman, which causes friction within the ape society. With the help of sympathetic apes they escape to his orbiting spaceship and head back to Earth. By the time they get back to Earth, hundreds of years have passed, and to his horror the first person he sees on landing is an intelligent ape!
What a kind community this is to still mark spoilers for 50 year old movies. Something about that made me tear up honestly. I’m so used to shit like the modern survivor fandom where the east coasters can’t even wait 3 hours to not spoil shit each week for the west coast viewers
Imaginbeary
I would love a video on how your backgrounds have changed since the beginning. Just a really lengthy video on every background from early Jenny videos to now. It is interesting to see you talk about changing the background. Because everyone is kinda a time capsule of your life.
Yeah the link is not working for me (EU)
It's now also no longer working for me. I'm also located in the EU
Jenny Nicholson also hates the ending to The Mist? VINDICATION .gif Also what really drives home how stupid it was, is that it's way less than five minutes between making the decision and the tanks rolling through. There's no damn way they didn't hear the armored company rolling up behind them firing off flamethrowers and generally makings ton of very not mist monster noise.
I always thought the ending of The Mist was: the old Christian witch was right. The Mist cleared as soon as the child died. Also horribly depressing and aggravating, but definitely set up beforehand.
I agree - it's not the best twist, but it is set up better than we think. The witch woman does gain power by insisting that a tremendous sacrifice is the only thing that will free them, and the father is set up to suffer for his sins of adultery. They can't know of the military approach because the mist silences most sound and light. I feel like the point of the ending is that all the people in the car have been the voices of reason all along, and they've constantly made the "best choices" to survive, only for them to realise at the end that this is something that can't be reasoned out of, there isn't a logic they can abide by to power through, it's just a random, awful thing that pushes them to their brink because it forces the father to question whether he was right in so stoically avoiding the spiritual implications of this very unearthly phenomenon. I think making it more obvious how long they'd been waiting would have helped support the decision, but I stand by that it's an ok twist!
The way I was thinking "oh, Don't Worry Darling and Transcendence could be fun to check out, in a bad movie night kind of way, because I do like some of the actors, maybe I should skip those parts of the video and come back later" only to realise I've seen both those movies before and they just didn't make much of an impact on my memory because they were that bad. Like not even amusing bad, just bad
also remember me reminds me of the genre of movie like One Day (i think that's the one? anne hathaway?) where the whole movie you think it's a drama and then in the last 5 seconds of the film the main love interest gets hit and killed by a car and it's like??? what was the point of this? how does this add to the story? all it does is make the audience feel snubbed. such lazy writing imo, like they know a movie can't stand on its own so they have to create buzz around random last minute choices.
From what I can recall of reading the book 12ish years ago, it flowed better in the novel format
Random piece of trivia: in the original Liar Game manga, the character on the rocking horse is a trans woman (she was turned into a gay man for the movie series)! Unfortunately, I don't think she actually rides the rocking horse in the manga (as far as I remember).
About Liar's Game subtitles, it's extremely common here in Japan to not provide foreign language subtitles (including English) in distributions of content, even when they're available. Or even to only have the Japanese dub of overseas shows, with no option to watch in the original language - we have the Fallout TV series on Amazon Prime here, but I still haven't watched it because it's only available in a Japanese dub. There's a few reasons, the subtitle and audio track bundles can come at different price points for a platform / TV station looking to purchase content so they go with the cheapest option, there can be distribution contract clauses limiting release in certain countries because the third party that prepared them has no way to be paid by platforms in those countries... But the main reason is basically that they just don't want to have to deal with non-Japanese language content, contracts, or contact with overseas companies. You could do a four hour video on how much money Japan's production and distribution companies leave on the table just because they don't want to deal with having to work with overseas companies. Nintendo being a fantastic example, especially for their non-game content.
thank you for explaining! I was super curious about this!
i thought your big yoshi was larry the cucumber
One of my favorite rambles ever!
Imaginary is bad but there's one very funny bit in it where one of the girl turns around and sees a big version of the stuffed bear, then turns again and when she looks over again it's suddenly scary looking, and the whole thing is edited like and the monster version looks like the scary Alvin and the Chipmunks puppets from Disaster Movie
I’m going to defend The Mist. It is kind of silly and over the top, and I get why Jenny didn’t like it, but I think it’s definitely memorable. It harkens back to late 70s/early 80s King stories where (mostly) good, normal people are put through nightmarish scenarios and face certain doom. A lot of times characters are just punished for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. King is obsessed with this idea of “what happens when Joe Shmoe loser gets stuck in a horrific decision,” and 9 out of 10 times he’s going to make the wrong decision. That’s what this ending is going for. Not saying it’s perfect, I just think there’s thought put behind it. I also don’t necessarily agree with the idea all stories need a big bold capital T theme or “lesson” to be satisfying. I’m totally fine with some moral or emotional ambiguity in a movie. That being said, I’ve watched Jenny’s script doctor vids and she seems way more into the mechanics and construction of a script than I am, and this is probably a difference in taste. Regardless, I like hearing Jenny’s takes and always appreciate hearing her stance on different kinds of media.
I guess I agree you shouldn't disregard a story for not having a "theme" or "lesson." Gun to my head I don't think I could tell you what Eraserhead was about and I did still love it. But some narratives are definitely structured such that those things serve an important purpose. You've got the audience following and invested in the cause and effect of the character's actions, if you record scratch into something really out of their control it's refusing to deliver on what your set up promised. And I think making that really bleak is kind of a cheap shot on top of that. I don't like to be prescriptive because there's all kinds of stories out there, but I think punishing your audience for being invested is almost always a misstep.
Can't believe you didn't mention The Empire Strikes Back! Although at this point it's such common knowledge that it kinda doesn't even count as a twist anymore. Great vid though.
Yeah, in my life I never experienced that as a twist because it was already a meme. I remember as a kid my mom had to explain to me the joke in the simpsons where Homer is leaving the movie and blurts out the spoiler, because I had never considered it would have been a big surprise for an audience
New sub! Don’t know how i missed Jenny until the hotel video. 🤷♂️ Just binged the whole Millennial Falcon series and it was stellar. 😂 Her videos are one of the few things on YT that make me genuinely laugh out loud. 🏆 Hi everyone. My best videogame plushie is a Parappa the Rappa with his bestie PJ Berri.
I don't know if I think it's a great movie, but there's this little movie with Anton Yelchin I remember watching on Netflix called Odd Thomas and while in hindsight the twist felt obvious, the first time I watched it it absolutely smacked me in the face. Sixth Sense really is just such a classic twist movie, as cliche as it's become.
I like how you don't spoil the one movie I still want to see in this video.
"'an occurrence at owl creek bridge' has a perfectly executed twist" is an amazing joke holy shit
Thank you for covering my topic Jenny, and thank you to everyone who voted for it since January 🥰 I feel honored to be the first post-starcruiser patreon vid, and welcome all new patrons!! You're gonna love it here! Guess it's time for me to go watch/re-watch more of The Twilight Zone 😆
Goosebumps book isn't that just the "Others"
I normally love your videos but I'm sort of confused about the Soylent Green one... that's not the twist of the movie. The twist is something else. The twist is *why* it's Soylent Green and it's unrelated to Twilight Zone.
I think she was probably confusing it with the Twilight Zone episode "To Serve Man." Both twists are about eating people, and both have iconic moments where a character shouts the twist out loud. Also "To Serve Man" involves aliens, which Jenny falsely claims about Soylent Green.
I had to stop the video when you mentioned the Barbossa reveal in POTC 2. YEEEEESSSS. Why don't people talk about this?! It was so cool. I had no expectation of this happening and I was hyped seeing it in the theater and my friend basically shrugged. I finally feel seen.
I really thought she was gonna do a twist for the last movie and say "actually it's a good twist!" but then she said the film lmao Also "why did he send an intern to have sex with his wife?" is such a funny phrase
Hi Jenny! Don't bother watching the rest of Westworld lol. Season 1 was by far the best one, and then HBO cancelled it after season 4 even though the creators wanted to do one more season to finish the story
Agreed. I thought Season 4 was really good but it’s pointless to watch if there will be no season 5 to conclude the story.
we're so fed
One of my favorite bad twists is in the movie Serenity from 2019. Genuinely insane stuff, if you somehow haven’t seen or heard of the movie (which I hadn’t, because I picked the showing at random at my local theater!). It stars Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway saying “daddy” about ten times more often than you would expect, and a fish called Justice.
Serenity is a big ol terrible cheese sandwich
Really fun to watch! But there's no aliens in Soylent Green, so I was very confused when you got to that part. Are you thinking of They Live, the John Carpenter movie with the sunglasses that let the main character see the aliens in disguise?
Yeah, I was confused about this as well. I really liked Soylent Green. The ending was kind of an anticlimax because I had already heard of the twist, but the film's depiction of the squalor of overpopulation and environmental devastation was really interesting to me. The ending's kind of foreshadowed by basically everything else being the worst possible thing that could happen lol.
Since Stepford Wives was mentioned in passing, has Jenny ever discussed that in a video? Given the centrality of animatronics I wouldn't be surprised if there was a digression about it somewhere.
she hasnt as far as i know, but princess weeks talks a lot about it in her dont worry darling video!
I love you Flora plush. She'd my favorite Animal Crossing villager!
Jenny. You have to watch Lost.
Honestly, I don't know if I can recommend it to her. It's not a very good show
I love it when old radio dramas reveal that the narrator was the ghost all along! I've heard at least 3 that do that so far, and this one's my favourite: https://archive.org/details/MysteriousCircumstancesBBC/BBC+Mysterious+Circumstances+1963-04-18+Blind+Man's+Hood+(by+John+Dickson+Carr)+.mp3 Night Drive to Dover, earlier on that list, also has a good twist. And The New Catacomb, but that one's really easy to guess. No less fun to listen to though!
Nice. You may know.. lots of pulp ‘weird fiction’ from that era also has great twists (sometimes those short stories were made into radio dramas as well). There are some good audiobook YT narrators who read that stuff. Horrorbabble and Bitesize Audio are favorites.
I love Fight Club because Marla goes from disgusting to extremely grounded and reasonable after the first watch.
GRADUATING HIGH SCHOOL AND A NEW JENNY VID BEST NIGHT EVER
Congratulations!
I remember watching The Monsters on Maple Street in high school because it was specifically written as an allegory for McCarthyism which makes it even more strange that Darabont incorporated that into his script. iirc the Steven king story ends differently
I love that a 40-60 minute video is short hahaha. Will watch anything you put out 👑
Hey jenny if you could allow comments on the cooler jenny channel itd be nice especially for this vid cuz im sure someone would add time stamps so people could skip the spoilers for movies they havent seen
Yeah I am waiting for someone to post timestamps somewhere, maybe here or on Reddit, but YouTube would be ideal!
Wow, seeing clips of Transcendence I had completely forgotten the huge tonal gulf between the actors performances and the silly subject matter.
Liar Game is a very fun manga (never saw the live action movie). It's been years since I've read it, but I remember all the games being like who can con the other side better, with the heroine being sort of the only beacon of purity (though she gets much more savvy as the series progresses). Anyway, much more fun than Squid Game, which I was never really big on (note, I'm Korean, I watched the show (Squid Game) when I happened to be in Korea visiting relatives, and we were all pretty meh on it). Re: The Mist, the ending is ironic tragedy. There are no lessons, no learning, nothing set up. The cruelty, as it often is, is the point. Because, sometimes, you just want to tell a really bleak story (see anything Cormac McCarthy). I genuinely loved the movie, far, far more than the original King short.
I think the twist in Imaginary wasn't just "there is not bear" it was "the mom was also being controlled by the same bear." I thought it was a bad movie but I still had a fun time. I heard someone compare it to like a dcom halloween movie level of younger audience horror and I think it could be good for that maybe. I thought all the CGI elements made the movie so unserious and unscary to me, but I do think it would have terrified me as a kid. I also think the way all the characters were portrayed the whole time was kind of unsettling in a stiff way where I'm still not sure it was on purpose but it did kind of unnerve me bc everyone felt like robots.
Oh also, the Mist plays better if you watch it in the black and white version. The studio made them do it in color but it was intended b&w and looks more atmospheric /retro that way and the effects are more seamless
(Unrelated to the twist, obviously)
I saw like, 6 minutes of Transcendence in a hotel one time, but I guess I mixed it up with another movie and often say that I want to be an uploaded consciousness like Johnny Depp in Mortdecai. Apparently, that's very much not the right movie, lol.
Nah, Mordecai is the movie where Gwyneth Paltrow throws up a little every time she kisses Johnny Depp.
Congrats on the new vid being so successful!
I agree that was one of the best moments in Westworld S1. I am also a big dummy so didn't realize the different timelines for a long time and that black hat guy was the young nice guy so I was also shocked by that one. It's very weird to me how off the radar that show dropped after the first season, I didn't watch any more of it and I feel like no one I know did?
I watched seasons 2 and 3. Season 2 wasn't bad, but not as good as season 1, and season 3 was pretty WTF.
Update: I think I'm ok. I'm through the favorites and I only skipped West World. Feeling good. :)
I've always thought that Transcendence was secretly elon musk's fanfic about his own relationship with talulah riley. 'one day you'll regret leaving meeee when I'm alll powerfulllllll' the film.
I don't know how to feel about this new background layout...Mostly because Rouge has been separated from the Bubsy twins I've been thinking of as her two sons for some reason...
The Mist was based on a book which had an entirely different ending. Instead of everyone getting shot, they drive away in the car, their fate unknown.
There's a radio transmission that says something like "Hartford" and "hope" iirc, implying there's other survivors they could maybe find
Re: Westworld, one of my favorite things is the one character (same one with the robot in the twist) who gets Anthony Hopkins to monologue at them a second time. Like, you should have ran as far as you could after the first monologue.
I've just started (first 2 I've seen, 3rd idc) but I'm so nervous I'll be skipping like half this ramble bc I don't want to have every movie/piece of media spoiled, esp the "best ever" category. :/
Unfortunately, Westworld goes downhill as each season goes on. There are a couple outstanding episodes in Season 2, but for the most part you've seen the best the series has to offer.
Thank you for the welcome :) I've been having such a nice time watching the backlog of videos on here, your patreon is amazing, thanks for giving us a heads up about it in your pinned comment
That 'The Mist' ending was just so inappropriate, tonally. My reaction was to laugh out loud, which I imagine wasn't quite what they were hoping for.
I have a friend who went to see The Sixth Sense in theaters and the theater lost power right before the twist was revealed.
omg that’s nuts Did they get comped tickets? Did your friend get to see it later?
I've read the "Liar's Game" manga, and I like it, but what you described is what happens in most of the arcs. The main character says, "If we all do this, we all win!" Then some character who you thought was cool is like, "I did something else which screws over all of you and makes me win!" Then half the time the main character goes, "I figured you were going to do that, so some of us actually did this third thing that screws you over!"
I will NEVER forget seeing Pattinson's Remember Me in theaters. I had no idea what I was getting into. My sister and I asked our mom to take us, so we could support the idea that Edward Cullen is a Respectable Actor (also how I ended up seeing Cosmopolis!). I was too young to understand any foreshadowing, if there was any. The movie was so boring and almost over. Then, as Jenny describes, the teacher starts writing the date on the blackboard, and Rob Pattinson is staring at the plane. Honestly I still get upset thinking about it, so (respectfully) I would never show it to anybody unaware. But Jenny is absolutely right that the movie itself provides no context for its ending.
The way Robert has repeatedly gotten me to watch movies I found highly distressing... chose High Life as my birthday movie because I thought "omg space movie with Robert Pattinson and Juliette Binoche! this is going to be a good time" it was not a good time
The most recent Twilight Zone was mostly interesting but the stories really did not need a full hour of television.
This is true even for that one season of the original series where they switched to hourlongs for some reason.
Love that you have so many Twilight Zone call outs. Such great show. I miss the ride in CA adventure. Another great old twist anthology show was Alfred Hitchcock presents.
There wasn't a 70s Twilight Zone but Serling did do a series called "Night Gallery" that was similar in theme to Twilight Zone and had some good work. The 80s and 00s series both have actors who went on to bigger things but most of the episodes aren't memorable.
Loved Night Gallery!
Oh, FWIW, ugh I apologize for being nitpicky, but The Mist DOES foreshadow that awful death. Maria Gay Harden's character believes that everything will be all right if they sacrifice Thomas Jane's son, a beloved innocent. The ending is infuriating because you realize that awful woman and the awful version of Xtianity she worships is actually real. Which is a pretty Lovecraftian, drive-you-mad-with-hideous-knowledge conclusion, to me.
Wait, what? No, you realize that if they'd just held out longer they'd have been rescued, which makes it tragically ironic that he thought he was mercy killing his son and the others, not that sacrifice works! No, she's still clearly evil and insane.
The talking porg looked super natural btw
For me the plot twist with Hans in Frozen is one of my least favorite twists. It's one where at first I was like 'WOW I was not expecting that, can't believe they did that.' But after the shock wears off it's so stupid. I think a better twist would have been realizing no they're not actually in love. It's infatuation, you can't marry a person you just met because real love isn't like a Disney movie where you instantly fall for your soulmate. Then go with the love she shares with Elsa to save the day.
As soon as he mentioned being the youngest of thirteen brothers at the beginning of the movie I knew he was definitely doing a speed-run romance on Anna because he's way too far down the line of inheritance to be getting much of anything or to be a politically tempting enough match to have a decent marriage arranged for himself if he doesn't go out and grab a decent place for himself, and with all the ways (up until the real twist) that he was otherwise acting like a decent guy who would treat Anna kindly and try to do right by his new people I would have found it so much more compelling if they just let him be that; a prince whose kiss wouldn't work because he doesn't actually love her but who genuinely did intend to try to have an otherwise happy life with her because he has the political acumen to assume that's the best either of them can hope for (since Elsa's been so hermity for years that he'd have no clue she doesn't care if Anna's eventual marriage isn't used to form/strengthen political ties)
I’d never heard of Transcendence but the fact that the twist was ‘Johnny Depp is comically evil, manipulates his wife, and convinces everyone that he’s the good guy’ is. Uncanny.
Damn...
Westworld the show is really good (this is a very based opinion - some if not many might disagree.) I was fascinated by it because the 1972 movie was the only screenplay that Michael Crichton wrote that he wrote AS a screenplay, rather than him writing a book that then became a screenplay. Nolan and Joy (showrunners) did a great job expounding on the themes from the 70s movie and even though it ended one season before they had planned the entire show arc for, the 4th season ends in a satisfying enough way that you can be ok with what was left open-ended. In my opinion (tm).
I agree. I love Westworld, all of it. But most of the critiques are also fair. I think Season 3 might have been my favorite after Season 1. My biggest annoyance with Season 4 was never finding out the deal with transcendence.
The Ghost Next Door is such a well-loved Goosebumps book that it was the most important book outside of the Slappy ones for the film a few years back.
I'm so glad that Transcendence taught me the value of good communication in a marriage that you're trying to open up to a mind controlled intern!
Soylent Green is people, but To Serve Man is a cookbook, just to clarify 🤣
The "it was Earth all along" thing that Rod Serling was a way for him to say that "people are the real monsters". Serling fought in the Philippines during WWII and didn't want to tell stories about ghosts and goblins when he saw how horrible people could be to each other
In "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" the aliens aren't just observing, they are responsible for the weird events that keep happening, like one house getting power when they neighborhood is blacked-out. I've always felt that kind of undercuts the message a bit.
I still think it works in the context of the 50s-60s Red Scare, where Serling was as openly anti-McCarthy as you could be while still being pretty firmly anti-Communist. Like, yes, there *is* an alien threat, but giving in to suspicion and turning on each other only serves to weaken us in the face of the threat. All the aliens have to do is mess with people a little to get society to descend into chaos. Luckily, in the real world Russia would never go on to attempt a disinformation campaign preying on mankind's proclivity for reactionary paranoia, and everything is great.
After 5 years of debating it, subscribing to your Patreon has been the BEST decision I've made in those 5 years. Super excited to work on the backlog of videos!!
I joined three minutes before this post dropped. Felt immediately validated.
I love saying "the ghost next door" when it's also the twist from The Others. I guess I don't know which came first, but still amusing.
THE DOCTOR IN THE TRANSCENDENCE CLIP IS DR SEEKER FROM THE DINOSAUR PRESHOW OMG
OOOOOHHHHH MY GODDDDD I WAS WONDERING WHY HE LOOKED FAMILIAR
The great thing in the Mist is that Tom Jane looks like the typical hero- handsome, take-charge, etc- but makes all the wrong decisions along the way, including giving up hope prematurely. Whereas Toby Jones looks classic side character little guy, but he has good ideas and shows bravery. I look at the Mist as a companion piece to Shawshank: both show the importance of hope, one as a happy ending and the other as a cautionary tale.
I once read a romance novel that started totally normal, set in the Scottish highlands, where a lady had to live in a castle with a handsome brooding hero, yada yada yada. Anyway, right at the end the Black Death hit and almost everyone died. It was awesome. I think about that book a lot.
Do ya’ll remember the Lightyear twist. *sigh*
"Soylent Green" is actually a movie with Charlton Heston and a fantastically tender performance by the great Edward G. Robinson. The Twilight Zone episode Jenny's thinking of is called "To Serve Man" and stars Richard Kiel with a giant prosthetic butt on his head and it makes him look SO MUCH like Michael Shannon...
I'm a newcomer to the Patreon, but I've been watching for years! (Looks around the room) I like it here.
My favorite part of the Mist twist is how the guy's tiny little son wakes up just in time to see that his dad's about to shoot him in the face, and then the dad does it anyway like some kind of lunatic. As far as that kid was concerned, his father just murdered him for no reason. They're trying to be all dark and emotional, but it's. Just. So. Funny.
Oh man I think I tried watching Transcendence when it came out but fell asleep and didn't finish it but hearing Jenny's recap makes me want to see it for the laughs! Also the real twist was that Mr. Porg could talk all along 😱
Of course. He hosted an entire section of the Starcruiser video in a stunningly good impression of Jenny`s voice.
The Ghost Next Door? girl, The Others..
I loved this video the only thing that was driving me a tad crazy was I think she meant "To Serve Man" instead of "Soylent Green"
oops
It’s funny you said Transcendence seemed to be going for a Christopher Nolan type vibe because the director, Wally Pfister, was the director of photography for Inception and the Dark Knight trilogy. I went to theater for it back in 2014 solely for that reason and was very underwhelmed. Also, I remember there being one review on Rotten Tomatoes that said Depp had “Skyped in his performance” which I thought was really funny.
OK, sorry it's not related to this ramble but I'm really curious about the porg mask from the Star Wars Hotel video- Where did you get it from?
It was very random, iirc it was on Amazon but might have been the Walmart website. I got an ad for it and was shocked because it was like well after the release of TLJ, maybe even post TROS, and well after they'd stopped making new porg merch. I was like well, I'd better get this
Glad to see The Mist (2007) on the "least favorite" list here when it gets placed on "best twist endings" lists way more than it should, confusing cruelness/darkness with being interesting.
Could fault a lot of Black Mirror on that score
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
I've been watching for a while but I had no idea you had a patreon until I read a comment on the Starcruiser vid - but glad I found out! Thanks for all the great work!
I think Zepp wanted to be in a Saw trap? There's some spinoff short that talks about I think lol
HOW have I never heard of the Johnny Depp cancer bullet AI movie?? This sounds absolutely hysterical, amazed I don't remember this coming out...
Great ramble Jenny! Looking forward to seeing your new hat next month!
I saw transcendence on a plane. I don’t remember it at all, except Johnny depp computer.
I am convinced this movie was shown exclusively as an inflight experience
I'm so happy you're seeing so much success on the Starcruiser video. You deserve it!!! I hope you're healthy and happy and well and all the good things keep happening.
Soylent Green is actually a movie, not the Twilight Zone. You're thinking of the episode "To Serve Man"
It’s a film industry accomplishment in restraint that there aren’t more romantic movies involving 9/11. Good job everyone
Give it another few decades
Don't blame her for not remembering but the Mist ending is def foreshadowed with the crazy religious lady wanting to sacrifice people to stop the mist. Kinda solidifies the themes around faith and the unknown better than the book did at least.
It’s interesting, I got a fairly different read on The Mist even though we came to the same conclusion (that the movie was meant to be hopeless from the start). I don’t think they ever were going to be saved until the final sacrifices were completed. If you track the religious lady’s prophecies, everything she claims ends up coming to pass including the final death count. When that death count was reached, the mist relented and allowed him to be found. 🤔
Wait then that's insane that the writer compared it to the twilight zone eps right. Because then the better parallel would be, dad believes the cult stuff, kills everyone, is wrong and has to live with the consequences. For the hysteria to be warranted & him to meet the conditions accidentally and unselfishly, it's like the opposite outcome right? I'm not doubting your read it just makes the writing feel even worse to me
omg I had to pause and look up that 911 scene
Fun Fact: Apparently Robert Patterinson was an executive producer of this movie lol
I think the first Twilight Zone episode you're thinking of is actually called "To Serve Man" - Soylent Green is a movie (same basic twist, though)
Side note, Soylent Green is a very strange movie to watch if all you go in knowing about is the twist.
Hai from a noob that meant to subscribe awhile ago - SORRY!!
My favorite part about the updated filming set up is that now there are porgs on both sides, and the way they're framed is so ridiculously funny to me because their relative size and general vibes are polar opposites. Like I honestly had to pause the video just to look at them, it's SO GOOD.
Thank you for commenting on that, I'll be enjoying the Porg Argonath for the entire video now!
I've been a fan for so long this is def the best investment I've made so far 😍
Had I registered that you have a Patreon, I would have been here before that Star Wars hotel video. But it was a damn good video. Love the big Sonic.
I would like to formally congratulate jenny for sliding this one under the wire. as someone in the financial industry this is 10/10 'end of period' content.
i have one caveat for your claim that any possible relationship between han solo and darth maul would make the movies worse: if they had an intense homoerotic longing and had a titanic-style kiss and then darth maul died, it would actually make the entire solo series an instant 10/10
No, you’re so right. Also it’s incredibly funny because this would imply that for some reason Han never brings this up ever again.
Sadly it is not worth watching the later season of Westworld. The writers tried too hard to have complicated plots and never managed to catch the lightning in a bottle of season 1 again
This is a really good prompt omg
Turns out The Sixth Sense was totally a ripoff of The Ghost Next Door. Also I completely agree with you about The Mist. This movie is almost always brought up on Reddit as one of the best endings in movie history, but it's just dumb.
Do not watch the Jordan peele reboot Jenny. Sorry I’m kind of live commenting your video. This will be my last, but please please do not watch.
Counterpoint: twilight zone flop reboots are also kind of interesting
I feel bad for laughing but the fact that someone made a completely unrelated romance movie and then at the end the lead dies in 9/11 is so funny wtf
when she says he gets hit in the face with a plane, i came apart
ROM COM 9/11
New member here! I've been watching your videos for a long time but just joined up here. :) I haven't checked out all the content yet but if you are taking recommendations - talk about the Barbie movies please. You know.
If you have not watched the Patreon content you may not be aware that she has been talking about & actively working on a main channel video about the Barbie movies for.. it must be literally years now
It is not worth watching the other seasons
This video taught me that there is a goosebumps book with the same plot as the Nicole Kidman movie The Others
i didn't realize the horse in the background was a desk! that's so cute i love it!!
The biggest twist is Jenny being a big shyamalan fan
m night shyamalan movies are the perfect amount of stupid; the beach that makes you old lives rent free in my head
Welp, time to get high and mumble along to another Jenny Ramble Sesh TM
Omg so many new people after Star Cruiser!! Yayy!
I respect your commitment to maintaining a consistent background, but I'll always enjoy the video where you gave the explanation "I moved."
I know this might be an odd question, but which video was that, if you remember?
Ahh the lil shoulder Porg! I got one at Disney and the galaxy edge cast members kept asking if I was gonna eat him later 😭 I told them my boyfriend was transformed into it by a witch
yay! excited to watch the first brand new video since i became a patron! genuinely don’t know why i’d never thought to join before, i’ve been subscribed for years.
the white stitching looks so good against the blue on your shirt
matches your paleness and blue eyes well lol
I’ve been sucked into a multi-day rabbit hole of your content since subbing a few days ago. I think I need to address this issue.
I’m a newcomer 🙋♂️ Got tired of rewatching the same episodes, needed some new content to get things done to 🙏
Just wanted to congratulate you for the success of the Star Wars Hotel video essay. It was a really well made video and seeing this project coming up together in the last 2 years through the Patreon was really cool. It was worth the wait and you should 100% be proud- I'm probably not the first one to say this lol.
Agreed, and I'm so happy for her that she gets to be done with it lol. I always felt bad at the ends of the rambles when we got updates
Are there any spoilers in this video?
not a single one. watch with abandon!
What perfect timing I've been browsing my streaming services for like half an hour trying to find something to watch but here comes Jenny to the rescue :D
Jenny needs a beauty and the beast sized library but just stuffed with all their plush.
I couldn't agree more
The talk about the plushies at the beginning had me wanting a Humongous entertainment games ranking but then looked at their wiki page and there’s so many more than I remember. There are 12 putt putt games alone!
I don’t even remember this one being on the poll but I am SO hyped
Welcome to the post star cruiser era everyone!
First time poster. Thanks Jenny, can't wait to check it out!
Thank you Jenny!!!
omg i was just checking patreon to see if anyone had posted something to watch.... thank you
Ma’am you’ve been cooking this month 🔥
let's gooooo!
so excited!! welcome to the club to any new faces after the amazing star cruiser video!! 🫶💕
Almost forgot there was gonna be a Patreon upload this month after all the Star Cruiser excitement! Congrats on your latest video blowing tf up Jenny!
I’m new. Good job. 👏🏻
close one jenny. but Ill let it slide this month
‘You’ll let it slide’ what are you the arbiter of the Patreon? What if it hadn’t come out in the month would you have made a snide little comment - oh wait you already did that
I live for these tbh
yoooo so hype for this, the topic sounds great!! love all the viddies with movie snippets so much hihi
