The post that was quoted here has been removedI'm still left guessing. I knew that he was Soze, but everything surrounding the guy is urban legend, including what he and everyone else is saying. You never know for sure, but yeah, I "got it" on the first watching (That he was Soze and all that that is meant to entail), though it definitely becomes clearer with a second or third viewing.
Originally posted by Bobla45Mine was the one shot scene of Kevin Spacey walking down the pavement and bit by bit becoming Soze.
I thought it was one of the best movies I ever saw. I had no clue who Soze was, when Chazz started reading the bulletin board and dropped his coffee mug I thought it to be one of the best scenes ever made.
The plot unraveled nicely, I didn't think it was too hard to follow and you were given enough hints to know what would happen. I started having my suspicions about Keyser's identity about halfway through, the plot twist was still quite good.
A problem with these kinds of "shock" plot twists are that they do become predictable, I remember watching the first Saw film with a friend, I suspected that the "dead" body in the room with the two captives was the murderer within the first few minutes and said so... I was right and was accused of seeing the film already when I had not.
I don't really watch many films or much television anymore, I tend to get bored rather quickly, as well as being annoyed by directors' "my audience will take everything I show then as fact!" attitude. It seems to me that being able to draw your own conclusions and have your own thoughts on the plot, characters and outcome are no longer part of the cinematic experience, everything is dictated to you.
There are too few plot driven films being released and to be honest I'm really tired of the comic book conversions, these weak "porn torture" films and not to mention the fart, fat, ugly and sex driven "comedy" films.
Satire is one thing, parodying every film from the same season into one two hour brain fart is another.
Sorry, post turned into a mini rant...
Great film, but spoiled slightly by a shot of a descending plane that switches in one second from having four engines to two engines..
Saw is okay, basically an update of The Abominable Doctor Phibes. I didn't see the twist with the dead body coming, but I was much more shocked by the fact that the villain was the chap who played Peter Kingsley, the evil CEO in season two of 24.
Review: The Usual Suspects
BY ROGER EBERT / August 18, 1995
The first time I saw "The Usual Suspects" was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, and when I began to lose track of the plot, I thought it was maybe because I'd seen too many movies that day. Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July, I came armed with a notepad and a determination not to let crucial plot points slip by me. Once again, my comprehension began to slip, and finally I wrote down: "To the degree that I do understand, I don't care." It was, however, somewhat reassuring at the end of the movie to discover that I had, after all, understood everything I was intended to understand. It was just that there was less to understand than the movie at first suggests.
The story builds up to a blinding revelation, which shifts the nature of all that has gone before, and the surprise filled me not with delight but with the feeling that the writer, Christopher McQuarrie, and the director, Bryan Singer, would have been better off unraveling their carefully knit sleeve of fiction and just telling us a story about their characters - those that are real, in any event. I prefer to be amazed by motivation, not manipulation.
The movie begins "last night" in San Pedro, Calif., where an enormous explosion rips apart a ship. Who set the explosion? Why? A cop named Kujan (Chazz Palminteri) wants to know. He has one witness to question: a shifty-eyed, club-footed criminal named Verbal, played by Kevin Spacey with the wounded innocence of a kid who ate all the cookies. Kujan and Verbal are closeted much of the time in the cop's cluttered office, where Verbal lives up to his name by telling a story so complicated that I finally gave up trying to keep track of it, and just filed further information under "More Complications." The story is told in flashback. We learn about a truck hijacking some weeks earlier, and the five suspects who were picked up by the police. They're a mixed bag of low-life characters, played by Gabriel Byrne, Stephen Baldwin, Benicio Del Toro and Kevin Pollak, in addition to Spacey. I'm not sure if they were all involved in the hijacking, but the way Verbal tells it, in jail they began to plot a much larger crime, involving millions of dollars of cocaine.
This is no ordinary heist, because the dope belongs to a mysterious figure named Keyser Soze (sounds like "so-zay" ), a Hungarian mobster so fearsome that when some bad guys threaten his family to get to him, he kills his family himself, just to make it clear how determined he is. This Soze is like the hero of a children's horror story; the very mention of his name curdles the blood of even these tough guys. But no one has ever seen him, or knows what he looks like. And then there is Mr. Kobayashi (Pete Postlethwaite), Soze's right-hand man, who is himself so sinister that we begin to wonder if perhaps Kobayashi himself is Soze.
The interrogation between the cop and the suspect falls into a monotonous pattern: friendliness, testiness, hostility, a big blow-up, threats, reconciliations and then full circle again. We hear amazing stories about Soze (one survivor of the boat explosion, with burns over most of his body, drifts in and out of a coma but can talk of no one else). As Verbal talks, we see what he describes, and his story takes on an objective quality in our minds - we forget we're only getting his version.
To the degree that you will want to see this movie, it will be because of the surprise, and so I will say no more, except to say that the "solution," when it comes, solves little - unless there is really little to solve, which is also a possibility.
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com
He classes it as amongst the worst films he's ever seen.
- Joined
- 20 Oct 02
- Moves
- 601288
Originally posted by AmauroteI generally find a lot of my favorite movies are hated by critics. Goes to show theres no accounting for taste.
Review: The Usual Suspects
BY ROGER EBERT / August 18, 1995
The first time I saw "The Usual Suspects" was in January, at the Sundance Film Festival, and when I began to lose track of the plot, I thought it was maybe because I'd seen too many movies that day. Some of the other members of the audience liked it, and so when I went to see it again in July ...[text shortened]... rt.suntimes.com
He classes it as amongst the worst films he's ever seen.
