I never really “got into” watching movies until I was 13. For one, I was just an edgy teenager going through a weird phase. I found no hope in anything modern. Art, Musicals, Music, and of course, that included movies. I couldn’t care less about any pieces of media that were made after the 2000s.
My dad asked me to go watch a movie with him and my sister. Naturally, I refused at first because it was a new movie that came out and I “couldn’t care less” about any modern media.
“C’mon, it’s just a normal Christmas movie, it will be fun!”
“It’s like two hours, it will be fine!”
Eventually, I gave in. Mostly because I was tired of them trying to persuade me, and also because I was bored and had nothing better to do.
The cinema wasn’t too full. “Not a really popular movie, I guess,” I thought to myself. The lights turned off, and the screen lit up.
The next two hours and thirteen minutes changed my life. For the better, surprisingly.
The Holdovers is a movie about a teenager named Angus Tully at a New England Boarding school during Christmas time. Angus’s mom cancels their trip, which forces him to stay in the school with a couple of his other classmates, his English professor, and the lunch lady. Eventually, they all leave except for Angus. Angus is forced to stay in school over the most wonderful time of the year. His supposed-to-be “strict” English professor ends up warming up to Angus. And ends up making Angus’s Christmas wish come true.
While reading the general plot of the movie, you’re probably thinking, “Sounds like a normal movie to me; there’s nothing too special about it. How could this movie possibly change your view on cinema?”
And to that I say, yes. It is a very normal movie.
And yet, that is what I needed at the time, an actually normal movie.
Now you’re probably thinking, “What could she possibly be talking about? There are TONS of ‘normal’ movies!”
And to that I say, yes.
I want you to think about the last time you saw an actual stereotypical, normal, cliché movie in the movie theatres. No twists. No complex characters. A movie that just tells a story. Every time a new movie comes out, there’s always a twist. Now, I’m not saying that twists are horrible in movies. In all honesty, I love twists. They can really make or break a movie.
Take Frozen, for example. If you haven’t watched it, stop lying. Everyone and their mother has watched Frozen. When first watching, you will, of course, assume that Anna and Hans will get together in the end. Just like every stereotypical Disney movie, it was “love at first sight!” And then out of nowhere, the most surprising, shocking, backstabbing line in Disney history appears. “Oh, Anna, if only there was someone out there who loved you.”
This was an amazing twist! Twists are amazing when people can predict that it will happen later in the movie. When there are signs at the beginning to show that it will happen later on that the audience ignores. Twists that aren’t that obvious, but still possible to think of. Frozen is a perfect example of how to make a great twist.
When I think of a bad twist, I think of one that’s obvious, or the complete opposite, impossible to think of, with the movie giving you nothing to theorize about. When I think of a really obvious twist, the first movie that comes to my mind immediately is Scream. It’s genuinely so obvious who it is and not surprising at all. If a movie suddenly introduces a character for no reason in the beginning of the movie and they don’t really play a significant role in the rest of the movie, there is always a reason they are included. To be the twist villain.
Another bad twist, to me, is one that gives the audience nothing to work with. Big Hero 6 is a perfect example: the villain reveal felt random, with no clues to build up suspense. What I hate more than twists that you can figure out right away are twists that are genuinely impossible to formulate. When there are no signs or clues at all to get the viewer thinking about it. Big Hero 6 did not get me thinking. It was quite literally impossible to figure out who the villain was. How the heck is an audience member supposed to theorize that the villain is someone that the movie confirmed was dead? Of course, “characters that are supposed to be dead but are really alive” exist, but when the movie rarely brought them up again? It seems like they just chose who the villain would be at random. This is a twist that can really break a movie.
Twists are now in almost every movie. Now they can be really good, but it just gets repetitive when every time you go to watch a movie at the theatre, there’s a twist. It’s kind of refreshing to see a movie where it’s all straightforward. No twists, no secrets. Just telling a story.Most movies now just try to be different in some way —mainly through twists, which is exactly why I used to hate modern movies. I thought that now that everything that was “different” was actually all the same. “Cliche” or “stereotypical” movies nowadays are hard to come by.
13-year-old me didn’t need a mind-blowing twist. I needed a story that felt like one I would hear when I was a kid. What I needed was to feel like a kid again, not like someone watching others figure out a mystery.
After watching it, I started having some hope in cinema. I started to actually “get into” watching movies again, just like when I was a kid. If it weren’t for this movie, I wouldn’t have gotten to watch some of my favourite movies, such as The Phoenician Scheme or The Fabelmans. Really, this movie gave me hope and the motivation to actually watch movies again. It turned out that denying everything that seemed “normal” was the exact opposite of what I needed.
Sometimes “normal” movies are actually more different than we think.