Wednesday, May 16, 2001
Memoirs of a Spoiler Queen
Warning: This will probably be the most offensive and least read column I ever do here. In this column, I will spoil the plots of many, many movies, telling the ending and/or more than that. If you don't want to find out the plots of the following movies: Message in a Bottle, Untamed Heart, Sommersby, City of Angels, Sliding Doors, Phenomenon, The Horse Whisperer, Shakespeare in Love, Object of My Affection, Saving Private Ryan, Glory, The Sixth Sense, Dark Star, Sleepaway Camp, and Star Trek: Insurrection (oddly enough, I haven't even seen all of these movies!), then LEAVE RIGHT NOW.

If you continue to read this from here on in and then find that you've been spoiled and this traumatizes you, it is your own damn fault and you can't say you weren't warned about it.

Wednesday, May 16, 2001
An interview with the spoiler man
"I get hate mail from people who click on things and then get angry," says Curt Wiederhoeft, the proprietor of Moviepooper. "'Your site sucks so much,' one gentleman wrote to me. 'Nobody wants to know the endings to these movies.' But they have to click, and afterward they wish they hadn't. I think it's funny."

In case you hadn't already figured it out from reading this weblog for a few months (particularly every bit of dirt I pick up on reality TV shows), I love spoilers. Being someone who snoops around for information a lot (especially at work) probably has a lot to do with this. I love knowing the secrets before everyone else, as well as for other practical reasons that I'll get into later. This applies mostly to movies and television, though I have been known to peek at the end of a book to determine if I want to buy it or not. It's a little different with film, obviously.

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

I admittedly do not have much patience for people who don't want to be spoiled, and I don't really make any kind of effort to not spoil on this site. Mainly because tiptoeing around those people is such a pain in the ass. Like I started reading the Buffy newsgroup this week for some reason and was pretty amazed at (a) what they count as a spoiler and (b) for how LONG it has to count as a spoiler to be warned about loudly and then hidden.

"Most TV groups use either the second rerun of an episode, or the start of the next season in the USA. Because some people are more sensitive about spoilers than others, the safest policy is to avoid revealing anything about an episode without giving fair warning to anyone who hasn't seen that episode yet.Spoiler space, or spoiler protection, is a way of warning people about spoilers before they read them. The standard format is to identify what episode you'll be discussing in the Subject heading, then again int he first line of the message. This is because some people's browsers show the header prominently, but others don't. Then you leave 25-30 lines with one or two characters each (we'd say blank lines, but some mailers delete long blank sections) so that the spoilers won't be on the first page of the message, because some people read too fast and might see some spoiler info before the warning sinks in."

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

Sure, I can not reveal the dead ending of a movie (most of the time), but the people who consider any plot detail at all a spoiler are just weird to me. I mentioned in the last weblog that my ex totally freaked at me for mentioning that the character Susan is in Thief of Time, and I was like 'Dude, she shows up at the beginning. That's STUPID to bitch about being a spoiler," because I don't consider general plot details like who's in it from the start to be that crucial a detail to hide. He whined, "But I want to be surprised about EVERYTHING." Um, what??? For the most part I don't get how people with attitudes like that get by in today's society.

"Or, how about the Star Wars prequel? I was lucky on that one and got to it a week or so after it came out. But ye gods, the rumors, the toys, the effing Weird Al song."

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

I don't see how you're not going to find out SOMETHING about whatever it is you want to see. Reviews, trailers, etc., are everywhere and they tell practically everything, a lot worse than I ever have. And while I think anyone who is so sensitive about spoilers should just simply NOT read anything at all about the movie they want to see, it is hard to avoid with trailers. Could anyone NOT figure out what Sweet November was all about from the trailer?

"Robert Zemeckis, director of "What Lies Beneath," was asked by a Los Angeles Daily News reporter about the film's egregious trailer, which reveals such a key plot twist that it basically drains much of the suspense from the first hour.
His response: "To do our art we need people to go see our movies. In a perfect world, you wouldn't have to show a scene like that in the trailer. But that's not the world we live in. I equate it to McDonald's. People go to the movies, and they like to know exactly what they're going to see before they see it. Nobody wants to be surprised anymore."

Come to think of it, I may be that kind of person they're talking about. My main interest in movie spoilers is so that I know if the movie has my one major pet peeve in it-that's a love story in which they kill off one of the characters.. I don't like sad movies in general, and I don't really like paying the big bucks to be bummed out, but why the heck should I get interested in these two characters and their star-crossed love only to have it all shoved in the shredder?

Wednesday, May 16, 2001
WARNING: SPOILERS REALLY START HERE.
IF YOU'VE READ THIS FAR AND ARE SQUICKED OUT BY THE IDEA OF FINDING OUT PLOTS LEAVE NOW!

(See, isn't that annoying to have to do?)

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

An example of the peeve is the completely fucking boring Message in a Bottle. Yada yada meet cute, yada yada they're soulmates despite that whole grieving for the wife thing, and THEN Kevin dies in a tragic boating accident and I'm left thinking "What the HELL was the point of making this movie? They harp on soulmates for two hours and then kill him off! What a waste of two hours THAT was!" Since the characters here were totally bloodless and boring, I didn't care about Kevin's death, but one that really affected me was Sommersby. I loved Richard and Jodie as a couple after awhile, and I was in agony when I found out that for purposes of the plot he had to be executed. And he wants her to watch his hanging, even! GAH! It's heartbreaking that she FINALLY gets a good guy and then he gets killed off, only to leave her the grieving widow forever. Had I but known in those days, no way would I have begged to see it.

It got so my friend who had similar issues and I would do this:
"I saw Sommersby this weekend."
"I saw Untamed Heart."
"Does he die?"
"Yep. Does he die?"
"Yep."

And thus we saved each other from being bummed out more. How I wish she'd still been around for when I stupidly saw City of Angels, which has one of the worst endings I've ever seen: the guy gives up heaven for the chick, they have sex once, then she spacedly rides her bike into a huge truck and dies, leaving him all alone in our fucked-up world. Goodie goodie! Great movie! Not that it was all that great in the first place (except for the soundtrack), but that REALLY wrecked it for me. And there's enough movies like that that I want to know what to avoid, like Phenomenon, which had a cool premise that went horribly wrong as well. Just check the list here: "Message in a Bottle: Kevin Costner dies in a storm... City of Angels: Meg Ryan dies after being hit by a truck... The Horse Whisperer: They don't end up with each other... Forces of Nature: They don't end up with each other... Shakespeare in Love: Shakespeare and Paltrow don't end up together... Object of My Affection: They don't end up with each other...can you see a pattern here?"

So I go around reading spoilers in order to prevent these things. Like I wanted to see Sliding Doors for ages and never got around to it, then found a spoiler that said one of Gwyneth is killed off (the happier one) while the other gets the guy. I decided that despite the split happy/sad ending, that would bum me out, and now I won't whine to see it any more. While I never found a spoiler saying that Tom Hanks (and several other characters, including the Jewish dude I actually liked) bit it in Saving Private Ryan, I at least knew to cover my eyes through the first half hour of total gore. Thanks to the spoiler sites on the net, I know now to avoid seeing Glory for similar reasons. The one movie I've probably been actually surprised about in the last few years was The Sixth Sense, since oddly enough I'd only heard of it the day before I saw it (normally I read up on about every movie I find anything about), and while it was a good surprise, I'm not sure if I would have figured it out if I had read the spoiler. ("Huh? He's dead? Who's dead? No he's not, he's been walking around this entire movie. That spoiler can't be right.")

"I'm told that The Sixth Sense is one of those rare movies with a successful surprise ending that most people are reluctant to disclose. With the joy of ruining things for the few people who haven't seen it, the twist is that Bruce Willis spends the entire length of the movie never realizing that he's already dead. It's a concept that might raise eyebrows in first class but is definitely an old story to anyone who regularly travels coach."

Wednesday, May 16, 2001

In general, the spoiler sites these days are pretty entertaining. Especially when you find movie listings for dreck like Sleepaway Camp, which my roommate had me watch. That is a bad bad bad bad flick, and the ending, well, it involves a teenage girl ripping her boyfriend's head off and revealing she's got a penis. What more can you want from a wholesome 70's summer camp of death?

This site has a good one for a movie that nobody but me, the reviewer and my ex (who made me see it because he LOVES this flick for about five minutes of deep argument. Um, whatever. Look, I'm sure you've figured out already he's weird.) have seen, Dark Star. "Bomb number 20 detonates in the bomb bay, killing everybody on board the Dark Star. Not that any of you have ever, or will ever see this movie. It just has a great ending to spoil." I also liked his spoiler of Star Trek: Insurrection (which I actually slept through it was so dull): "The aging crew of the Enterprise-E help the pretty, perfect, not-never-hurtin'-no-nobody colonists save their utopian planet from the ugly-ass,nasty-face, hard-core evil skin stretching freaks. Cripes, did you really need a spoiler page to tell you how this one was going to end?"

Then there's the folks who REALLY like to spoil, such as Amuse Yourself, which was offering people the opportunity to send e-mail greeting cards containing spoilers for the Best Picture nominees. Since this is probably not working at this post-Oscar point, I can't tell you if they announce in the greeting card that there's spoilers inside, but I'd hope they wouldn't mention it!

And I can't leave out the Spoiler Game, or the Spoilers for Every Movie Ever Made.

Wednesday, May 16, 2001
And if you liked the spoilers mentioned here, you may wanna check out...
MoviePooper, The Movie Spoiler, Movies for Busy People, Movie Spoilers from Amuse Yourself, Movie Spoilers, Spoiler Space, 86 Movie Spoilers...And Counting!, The Movie Spoiler Center and John's Movie Spoiler Page.

And for other people's thoughts on spoilers, look here.