Ben Cahn summarized 23 famous movies using Vine, saving us hours watching films we never wanted to see or never want to make the time to see today. The series #famousmovies has already collected more than a million loops and inspired hundreds of others to post their own versions in the past two days alone.
Take the film Jaws, for example. Yes, I know it's a great story and it has amazing performances and inspirational camera pans. But I will never see Jaws unless it's by accident, or in this Vine:
Or how about Apollo 13? I saw it when it came out 10 years ago. I never want to watch it again — that is, unless it's in a few seconds:
Cahn's trick to fitting everything in? He doesn't. If you care about things like character development, themes, cinematography, political symbolism, or nuanced narrative arcs, none of these Vines offer spoilers of the actual films. Cahn repeatedly uses the same structure (a.k.a. a meme) to explain the climax of a film's plot and the most common resulting reaction of the audience or protagonist. The results, viewed one after the other, are weirdly hypnotic. Here's how it works:
Step 1: Become the narrator. Explain the climax to the audience/protagonist of a film. Start your sentence with "Sir". Walk across the room.
Step 2: Respond to the narrator by starting out with the phrase, "Fuck!" —dragging the F as long as you can — and reply as informally as possible with your first reaction.
The Vines have an odd way of cutting to the heart of the movies they summarize: like was the point of Avengers really that the Avengers stopped the aliens, or was it that New York was destroyed? Is the point of the Fast & Furious movies really, well, whatever the point of those movies is, or is it the fact that this street team keeps getting away with the same trick, over and over again?
Here are five more #famousmovies (you can watch the full series on Vine).
The Avengers
The Fast and the Furious
Angels in the Outfield
Independence Day
Jurassic Park
