Skip to main content

Guessing the Plot

One of the recent posts about movies (and the Mild Wife's reactions to watching one of the Lord of the Rings movies for the first time) reminded me that I have a very particular quirk when it comes to watching movies. Basically, I always try to guess the plot.

I'm not entirely sure why I think this is fun, but at the end of the day, I do. I think it may have something to do with my propensity for engineering brain, because plots seem like things that have to fit together in a particular way. So if I can understand what the author/screenwriter is trying to accomplish, I can try to piece together the way the movie might unfold. If you want a happy ending, make sure the knight rescues the princess. If you want a horror film, the princess was actually a demon in disguise and kills the knight at the end.

The other thing that probably leads to this guessing game is the fact that I try my hand at writing every so often. I imagine it's sort of like a chef who goes out to eat at a restaurant: you can, and do, appreciate other people's craft, but you also understand a bit of how it all gets put together. I figure you might be curious about how they cooked the vegetables to give them that texture, or what other ingredients they may have added to the house sauce.

Either way, I usually end up trying to guess at what might happen next in a particular show or movie. I usually keep this to myself because there's a chance I might be right, and other folks don't always appreciate spoilers being thrown their way. The Mild Wife, however, thinks this is pretty amusing, so she will often ask me to guess what I think is going to happen next.

The funniest bit for all of this, though, is that we sometimes watch cheesy romantic comedies (i.e., romcom's) when we stay in. Sure, we appreciate critically acclaimed movies with some thought up in there, but every now and then, we just want something very light-hearted. With these movies, it's actually a little bit easier to guess what's going to happen, because the genre is not exactly known for crazy plot twists. Still, the Mild Wife will play the "guess what happens next?" game with me even for the romcom's.

Like I said, the genre itself makes it a bit easier to guess what's coming next, so I tend to guess correctly more often for these. That has led the Mild Wife to joke that, "I could write romcom's." That's hardly my cup of tea as a writer, so the notion usually makes the Mild Wife and me giggle like mad. I'm not sure I could keep a straight face if I had to write flirting scenes or the declarations of love.

I think I may have to start guessing incorrectly more often.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pink

Way back in high school, there was a male teacher that all the girls thought was attractive. It was an open secret that a bunch of them had crushes on him. In fact, the school newspaper even did an article about him that quoted some girl saying, "he's so cute, he even makes pink look good." Yes, he had worn a pink shirt to school one day, and it had apparently been a big hit. I was reminded of this story when my sister-in-law suggested that she would choose pink as the color for her wedding and bridal party. I don't think I've ever made a color look good before, but I remember thinking, "well, I know it's possible to not look stupid in pink as a straight guy, I guess I can try." And I think that's almost exactly what I told her. I also happened to own a gray suit, so I figured the combination would look all right. However, I was pretty much the only one willing to play along. My sister-in-law's brothers wanted absolutely no part of th...

Dreams

Normally, I don't eat very many sweets. I tend to eat pretty generous portions, but I generally prefer savory food over sweet. In fact, I usually prefer things half as sweet when possible. My preference doesn't have anything to do with health reasons, it's just one of those things that I've always liked better. That said, I do inevitably eat dessert, particularly if I'm out with other people. My stance towards dessert is roughly equivalent to those who are social drinkers . If other people want to munch on something for dessert, I'm not about to cross my arms and refuse. That'd be just a tad gauche. So, I do eat some dessert. I even have a few standby favorites that I'll usually order when presented with them (brownies, creme brulee, and apple pie). But left to my own devices, I'm not about to go hunting for dessert. Apparently, this means that the sugar can really mess with my system under the right circumstances. As I've discovered, ...

New York City Trip (Day 1)

After my crappy flight , I was now in Newark, New Jersey at 7AM on a Friday morning. I had done a little bit of reading up, so I knew which bus I needed to take and where I was going to get off. All in all, getting into the city was surprisingly easy. I suppose speaking the language does make things simpler. Through no real planning of mine (a theme of the trip, at least on my part), I picked one of the later bus stops at which to get off, Grand Central. I actually just figured that getting off at Grand Central would give me options, and heck, it's called Grand Central. That just screamed "decent place to disembark that might be close to some stuff" to me, so that's where I got off. However, it also meant that we drove down 42 nd St to get to my bus stop. That just happens to be a big street, and it gave me a glimpse of Times Square as we drove by. My bus stop choice had accidentally given me a rough layout of the city. Go me. I had about 6 hours to kill...