No Good Deed — A Twist on the Gothika Rule

Posted on September 11, 2014 at 10:10 am

The critics screening of this week’s release, “No Good Deed,” was cancelled just hours before we were supposed to see it. The reason: “There is a plot twist in the film that they do not want to reveal as it will affect the audiences’ experience when they see the film in theaters.”

Translation: The movie is so awful we can’t risk having it come out without a single good review. It’s hard to believe they would have been harsher than the reactions of the critics to being excluded from seeing it. Here’s my favorite:

NO GOOD DEED Ending Odds: “They’re the same person!”- 10:1 “He’s Satan!”- 5:1 “He’s the kid’s dad!”- 3:1 “She’s the real villain!”- 2:1

— Russell Hainline (@RussellHFilm) September 10, 2014

A couple of times a year I invoke my legendary Gothika rule — if an ending is truly terrible, I will give it away to anyone who sends me an email to ask for it. Since I haven’t seen this one, I’m going to let you guess the twist and send it to me. Give me your best ideas at moviemom@moviemom.com — if I hear from you by September 14th, I’ll send you a free e-copy of my book 101 Must-See Movie Moments.

Here’s my guess: I’m going with the full Bobby Ewing. It was all a dream.

It may be that the good deed here was allowing us to skip the film. GOTHIKA RULE ALERT: I will be happy to spoil the twist for anyone who wants to send me an email at moviemom@moviemom.com.

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Upcoming Show Business Memoirs

Posted on July 8, 2014 at 8:00 am

Mashable has a very intriguing list of upcoming show business memoirs, by everyone from Oprah Winfrey (What I Know For Sure) to rapper Ja Rule (Unruly: The Highs and Lows of Becoming a Man). I’m particularly looking forward to Yes Please, by Amy Poehler (more a series of essays than a memoir), and Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir, by Alan Cumming of “The Good Wife” and Broadway’s “Cabaret.” I’m not a fan of “Girls,” but I respect Lena Dunham and would like to read her upcoming Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned”. I think I’ll skip Joan Rivers’ Diary of a Mad Diva, though. I read and enjoyed her earlier memoir, but even before last week’s distasteful controversy, it seems to me she had become more sad than funny.

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Red Riding Hood

Posted on March 12, 2011 at 8:00 am

Oh, Grandmother, what a big, bad movie you have.

So, apparently what happened here is that for whatever reason director Catherine Hardwicke did not get to make the second and third “Twilight” movies, so she decided to make a different hot supernatural teenage romance triangle instead, even keeping one of the same actors in a similar role (Billy Burke as the girl’s father). Twilight may not be great literature but it sure feels like it next to this mess.

Hardwicke’s two great strengths are her background as a production designer and her skill in working with teenagers. Both desert her here. We’re in trouble right from the start, when we see the little village. Instead of evoking fairy tales or rustic, rough-hewn country construction, it looks over-produced and over-designed, like a Christmas ornament rejected by Thomas Kinkade.

The village has maintained an uneasy peace with a savage wolf. Each full moon, they leave out their choicest livestock for him, and the rest of the time he leaves them alone. But the fragile pact is broken when a girl in the village is killed. Valerie (doe-eyed Amanda Seyfried) is the younger sister of the girl who was killed. She is a spirited young woman who has been betrothed by her parents to Henry (Max Irons) but plans to run away with Peter (Shiloh Fernandez). With her sister gone and the town at risk, she is not sure about leaving her parents and grandmother (Julie Christie).

Henry’s father is killed in an expedition to kill the wolf, but the hunters bring back a wolf head and prepare to celebrate. But the local priest (Lukas Haas of “Witness”) has brought in an expert (Gary Oldman), who tells them that the animal they killed was an ordinary wolf. The creature they must kill is a werewolf. That means he or she is human by day. And that means that the killer they are looking for is one of them, someone who lives in the village. Suspicion and betrayal become as critical a threat to the village as the wolf itself.

But neither as as big a threat to the movie as the inability of Hardwicke and screenwriter David Johnson to maintain a consistent tone, with drippy voiceovers (“he always had a way of making me want to break the rules”), anachronistic howlers like “Get me outta here,” and a sort of 18th century rave dance-off. The fake-outs intended to be archetypal and creepy are simply silly, and by the time someone yells, “What happened to the rabbit, Valerie!” any connection to the power of the original story is gone for good.

Those of you who know what the Gothika rule is know what to do!

The Worst Surprise Endings in Movie History

Posted on October 22, 2009 at 3:59 pm

Huffington Post has got a list of the nine worst surprise endings in movie history (well, in the past few years). I was pleased to see three of my Gothika Rule picks on the list, “Perfect Stranger,” “23,” and “The Forgotten.” (For newcomers — the “Gothika Rule,” named for a movie with one of the worst endings of all time, means that I will give away the surprise to anyone who sends me an email to save them what I had to suffer in watching it.) Be sure to check out the comments from readers with their own suggestions. I’d add “The Pink Jungle,” “Desperate Measures,” and, of course “Gothika.” Any others?

Knowing

Posted on July 7, 2009 at 8:00 am

When MIT astrophysics professor John Koestler (Nicolas Cage in one-note mournful mode) looks distracted and thoughtful as he invites his class to debate randomness vs. determinism, you don’t have to be much of a determinist to figure out that as inevitably as night follows day, John is about to be hit with some Evidence of a Greater Plan. This isn’t determinism, the idea that events that may seem random are a part of some greater pattern. This is just predictable hogwash, and it gets even hogwashier until it arrives at an ending that manages to be inevitable, uninspired, and preposterous.

John’s son Caleb (a sincere Chandler Canterbury) attends a school that is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The ceremony involves opening a time capsule filled with drawings from children on its opening day. But the envelope Caleb is given to open does not have a drawing of spaceships. It has an apparently random string of numbers. John notices that one string is 09/11/2001 and the number killed that day. A night-long Google search later, he has assigned many of the numbers to known disasters — and figured out that the final three dates are still in the future.

And then this becomes just another big, dumb, loud, effects-driven movie. Forget determinism; if one character behaved in a rational manner, the movie would be 20 minutes long. Three dates in the future? That of course means that the first one is there to prove the theory. Next, John figures out that the next one will happen in NY. Instead of staying in Cambridge, he heads for the location so that he — and the audience — can be in the middle of a technically impressive but narratively brutal catastrophe. And then we are all headed for the big finish (and I mean FINISH), but first there is a lot of completely pointless racing around in a fruitless attempt to build some tension.

The movie sinks from dumb to offensive first when it devotes so much loving detail to the graphic, even clinical depiction of pointless calamity and second when it ultimately and cynically appropriates signifiers of religious import in an attempt to justify itself. Professor Koestler, in a world of rational determinism, this movie would never have gotten the green light. Case closed.

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