One of my favorite movies ever is "Ocean's 11." I was first introduced to it accidentally. I was riding with a friend's mom to some field trip along with a bunch of friends, and she put a movie on in the back of the car because the ride was going to be a little bit longer than she wanted to listen to all of us for. Understandable. That movie was "Ocean's 11."
Most of the people around me were wholly uninterested in the movie, but for some reason it captured my attention and held it. I got completely wrapped up in the story of the heist, the witty dialogue, and the sleazily glamorous sets. This was the remake of the movie mind you, the one with George Clooney and Brad Pitt, not the one with the Rat Pack.
Steven Soderbergh captured something in the relationship between those guys, and the mind-bending plot twist at the end, that I've never seen in any other heist movie. There are so many, and many of them are enjoyable, but not many of them have made me so incredibly impressed with the plans and the execution.
The best thing about that movie for me was the fact that you weren't let in on the secret until the very end. The unreliable narrator style really pulls me in and makes me so much more interested in the story, and that's true across the board. The unreliability of Elliot Alderson, the self-delusion of Briony Tallis, the many different versions that Nameless recounts to the Emperor of Qin, all of these unreliable narrators put these works in a more respected and more interesting category for me than they would be if we knew what was happening all the time.
Perhaps there's something that appeals to a certain kind of person about being able to retroactively put the pieces together, especially after you've already come to conclusions about how the story went. It's sort of like life: you go along, making the best decisions you can with the information you're allowed, and then once several years have passed and you know (sometimes) the whole story you look back on it and put it all together the right way.
However, because it is so rare in life to get the full story even after a whole bunch of time has passed, there's something so satisfying about getting all the information at the end and knowing exactly what happened. It's like finding the last puzzle piece to a big jigsaw you'd been working on for hours, and watching it fit perfectly into the last space. Watching "Ocean's 11" is like that for me, because you so rarely get things tied up perfectly with a big red bow. It's nice to see it all come together sometimes.
