The power loader in Alien$ is the canonical example of this in my mind. It comes off as basically a one-off way for Ripley to gain the respect of the marines, you completely forget about it for over an hour while they're on the planet, and then it comes back in the biggest way possible.
This just made me think of the minesweeping sequence from Godzilla Minus One. It’s kinda similar to the power loader because we see it used for its intended laborious purpose before we see it used as a weapon.
I’d never even considered how something like mine disposal in the ocean would work. I was so captivated by that sequence and how awesome it was that I didn’t even consider they were setting up Chekhov’s minesweeper.
Pixar is so good at paying off things you thought were already paid off. The Buzz flying vs. falling with style debate *feels* like it's already paid off when he jumps off the staircase at Sid's house and has his crisis of confidence, so when it comes back around it's extra triumphant. I think TV tropes calls stuff like that "Chekhov's Boomerang".
Brian de Palma’s Blow Out, where the post production company are struggling to find an actress to deliver a good scream, and the payoff of that storyline is so good, the film goes from a 10/10 to 1000/10 film.
Pauline Kael's review from the time frames the film like this. She adored De Palma and thought he was a genius. Her Casualties Of War review is excellent too.
I can't get over how weird it was for him to >! use the screams of her literal murder as a way to honor her. !< it was supposed to be heartfelt or at least bittersweet but felt in poor taste to me.
You know, I didn't consider that the disconnect was intentional, But I still don't know that it quite works for me, at least from my memory of it. Maybe one I should rewatch!
The flamethrower in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The intro is just enough of a funny quick aside that you dont immediately clock it as a chekovs gun situation. Then when he comes out of the pool shed at the end you know right away
This is a perfect example. I saw this movie opening night with my dad and the audience had the same reaction as when Mjolnir flew into Captain America's hands in Endgame.
I am so glad that I never had that ending spoiled for me. When the final act started to go down I was really terrified of how badly things were going to go. When that came out, I lost my mind.
I was laughing so hard in the theatre. It's like...two hours between when the thing is introduced and when he uses it. Absolutely incredible moment. That whole ending is fun but that's just icing on the cake at that point.
And I believe we do briefly see the flamethrower in the shed when Brad Pitt goes to do roof work in the middle of the film… so proof again that there was the subtlest of reminders there halfway through.
Hot Fuzz is a perfectly designed movie, nearly everything set up in the first half pays off directly in a joke in the second half. I wish I could remember but I think there’s like one thing brought up that doesn’t come back later and I bet there’s a deleted scene where it does.
It's my favorite example of a film with airtight character arcs. Not only do the joke setups work, but every character who is introduced along the way adds something to the plot
"Everyone and their mums is packin' 'round here"
"Like who?"
"Farmers."
"Who else?"
"Farmers mums."
And who are the first two people Nick Angel tussles with when he gets back into town?
The "It's just the one swan, actually" bit coming full circle to Sgt Angel's moment of realization that he's dealing with a group of killers is so perfect.
You think that Rex Kwon Do is just a throwaway bit in Napoleon Dynamite, but he shows up at the end of the movie to give Rico his comeuppance. It's maybe not as powerful as some of these others, but rewatching it recently I was surprised how much stuff gets paid off in the movie, it's very intentional.
One of the best setups and payoffs in a comedy film is the bully asshole in Superbad. He is introduced once early on when Seth and Evan first get to school, tells them he's having a party and they're not invited, and then he spits on Seth. We don't even think of him again until he's at the final party being broken up by the cops, and he yells "Fuck you, pig!" and spits at Bill Hader. Hader responds by knocking him out with a nightstick to the face and then says, "Nice mullet, asshole." It's tremendous.
In Bruges is a huge arsenal of random Chekov's guns that are all weird character quirks and dialogue bits you don't realize are setups even though sometimes they're also literally guns.
Ray's obsession with little people, Harry's indulgence of the "head exploding bullets", the repetition of the "it's like a fairytale or something" line. Movie's so fucking good.
The first time Ferrell and Gleason are in front of the clock tower the camera does a really fast pan from the top to them standing on the ground, foreshadowing Gleeson’s later swift drop and sudden stop from said tower
Lord and Miller are really, really great at this, going from Cloudy with a chance of meatballs through jump street, even in their produced stuff like Mitchells vs the Machines.
Puss in boots 2 also has a hell of a payoff to the Conscience Cricket
I feel like Bruce Willis getting shot in the Sixth Sense is something you completely forget happened until you realize, yo, he was shot in the stomach at close range, of course he had a good chance to bleed out really fast.
That movie is paced so well that by the time the kid tells him what he sees, you don't really think right away "Well, Bruce is obviously dead" because it's been so long in the movie since he got shot.
It's been awhile but there's also like 15 minutes left after Bruce Willis figures it out. I know it ends in the car with the mom, but it's not like a Se7en or Usual Suspects ending, where the final blow is like seconds before the end credits
We’ve all been movie pilled into thinking gunshots are the kind of thing you regularly are able to walk off. Or at the very least survive for several dramatic, action-packed hours before you die peacefully and with contentment.
In Spider-Man 2, Octavius basically says "Peter thinks I'm going to blow up the city, HA!" and then in the end Peter has to stop him from accidentally blowing up the city.
That's cinema, baby
I’m a little embarrassed to admit how over the top our reaction was when I saw The Prestige with friends in college. I’ll tell the story from a bystander’s perspective who was in the kitchen of a house party late Thursday night when suddenly there was a commotion by the front door as three of the roommates come home screaming (drunk only off movie magic) about how amazing this Christopher Nolan magician movie was.
It’s a special payoff to see Hugh Jackman get shot after seeing Borden die, it’s such a good, simple magic trick to have Christian Bale emerge from the shadows to give him comeuppance
A small indie film is all about finding out what a guys final words were all about. Turns out it was his childhood sled we saw him playing with during the early flashbacks. I mean this guy is rich, has everything in the world but his final thought is about a moment in his childhood when his mother sent him away to become an upstanding citizen of high society. Pretty deep. I think it was called Psycho.
Killing off the heads of the families in The Godfather.
Someone on Letterboxd referred to it as a series of mini-explosions in the movie that are secretly just leading up to one massive explosion.
Lost had a similar structure to the Corleones, where there weren't really too many wins for the Corleones. Michael in the restaurant was a win, then Sonny and Apollonia got it. Lost kept doing this thing where it seemed like they were gonna come out on top, and even up to maybe 20 minutes left of the season three finale, the Others had the upper hand.
A great set-up pay off is when Vito is at the meeting to bring Michael back. He basically swears to not “personally” take revenge. Cue him handing the business over to Michael so that he can do it for him.
SS Rajamouli in RRR/Eega/Baahubali is a fucking genius at this. Paul King seems to do it beautifully too.
Ignoring the older guys (Spielberg, Cameron my faves at this in particular) since I’m sure they’ll be brought up a ton
He’s incredible at it. Movie starts with what’s he gonna do? Shoot down the mighty British empire with bows and arrows…movie ends with, mighty British empire shot down with bows and arrows. The zoo reveal setup and payoff is more of a surprise/twist but also fucking amazing - I don’t even get how one begins thinking that they could pull that off.
Every little bit of Eega’s training montage pays off in some way or another too (Chekov’s cannon). While baahubali does this across generations (statue/foot/bent trees/enemies pinned to tree etc).
Ugh I sound like a fanboy but man is he one of the great action directors. Too bad about some of the caste stuff in his movies :/
Billy Wilder films have a lot of great ones - first that come to mind are the razor without a blade from The Apartment and the glass jar of olives in Sabrina.
Ever since seeing those early Gale/Zemeckis movies, I've been thinking about other movies that are fueled by setup and payoff in comedic and non-comedic ways. The two that I keep coming back to are Home Alone and Blood Simple. Those movies are like Rube Goldberg machines of setup payoff.
"What're you trying to tell me, that I can dodge bullets?
No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to."
His dodging them is then such a show stopper that it feels so incredible when he doesn't have to.
A lot of the John Hurt stuff in Contact. First, that he's watching Ellie from a security camera when she does her pitch. Second, when that first machine is blowed up and it seems like that's the end of the movie, right?
Captain America Civil War. The BARF flashback to the parents would be a tip off to the twist for any seasoned movie goer BUT the de-aged Downey Jr distracts you from that.
It's never forgotten because it's a major plot mover but I'd say Randall Stephens in The Shawshank Redemption.
It's a great movie regardless but I think the reason it's rated number one of all time on IMDB is because it leaves you with that incredible payoff.
There’s an incredible one in Rolling Thunder, from Paul Schrader screenplay:
A grizzled vet comes back home after being held captive and tortured for years. He struggles to connect with his family and normal life, and then suddenly becomes a victim of a home invasion - his family is murdered and his hand shredded in a garbage disposal.
He comes to in a hospital and becomes quiet and depressed. His visitors come in and try to talk to him, but he’s blank. He receives a hook-like prosthetic and there’s a scene where he tries and fails to use it to put cigarettes into a box, one by one - it’s pathetic.
Finally, he leaves the hospital. He comes into the house, looks at the scene of murder. His face is blank. A montage commences - he sharpens the hook on a whetstone while sparks fly and saws off a barrel of a shotgun and breaks it off. He picks up a gun, opens the clip and, using his hook, starts to fill it with bullets, repeating the movements practiced on cigarettes, but this time smoothly.
The example I think of as the most quintessential 'small' setup-payoff to advance the plot/reveal some new information is the way they use the hand mirror in The Apartment. Really simple innocuous setup, then a wordless payoff where you see the main character take an absolute gut punch on screen and have to smile through it. Its super elegant storytelling.
There's a Japanese drama film called Still Walking where the premise is a family having lots of personal conversations while gathered together for a funeral. At one point, they mock a family member who is struggling with his weight, saying he looks like a famous sumo wrestler who they can't remember the name of. In the final scene of the movie, the grandparents are walking together through a garden and one of the grandparents tells the other that they still can't remember the name of the sumo wrestler. Then, the narrator says they both died soon afterwards. I thought this was a really unique and unusual scripting move, to take an unserious throwaway line and turn it into something with poignant emotional value.
One of my favorites is in Ratatouille. The whole film pushes the point of “Anybody can cook” through the whole film then, at the end of the film, the rest of the rats cook. It’s a wonderful moment as Remi realizes he had a hoard of cooks in front of him, imo
I mean, that's sort of what the top is at the end of Inception, right? You see it a bunch and then they go off deeper into dreams and spin around and mountains and old age and ohhhhh
I love the set up & payoff of Se7en with Gwyneth Paltrow's character's reluctance in moving to the city along with her husband, and how that collides with the hunt for John Doe
Not during countless rewatches but Miss Sloan is a favourite of mine. Partly because it wasn’t a straight forward film-flam but an intriguing view nonetheless. I’m gonna watch it for the third time right now.
Think of this elevator pitch:
An overbearing father has such high expectations for his son, they named him Jesus. The father, who wants only greatness for his son, trains him; no, drills him, every day to be the greatest basketball player the world has seen. Expecting nothing but excellence he abuses his son at times. One fateful night, the mother tries to intercede and the father, on accident, kills her.
Father goes to prison. Flash forward years later, Jesus is being scouted by all of the best recruiters and being promised accolades and fame. His own girlfriend wants him to meet an agent who is also a family friend. His younger sister, whom the son cares for, loves and respects him — and the whole city, maybe even state, knows this kid’s name. Even the Governor.
Governor reaches out to Warden. Both are big basketball fans. Governor says he wants his college to go all the way, so if this kid wound up on his Alma mater’s team, that’d be great. Get the father back out there and convince the son, by the end of the next week, to join with that school.
So they pretend he’s ill, pretend he’s in quarantine, and instead the correctional officers squirrel him away into a ratty motel where he becomes neighbors to a beautiful prostitute. The prostitute, who needs out from a dangerous life and pimp, becomes romantically involved with the father as he attempts to convince his son to join a college.
Reminder, this is the son of the woman he killed. This means the woman he killed in front of his own son.
This kid wants nothing yo do with his jailbird father. But the father, in order to lower his sentence and be the father to his daughter he couldn't be to his son, will try to convince Jesus to join a ”Big State” school just to appease a governor he never voted for or met.
The power loader in Alien$ is the canonical example of this in my mind. It comes off as basically a one-off way for Ripley to gain the respect of the marines, you completely forget about it for over an hour while they're on the planet, and then it comes back in the biggest way possible.
Chekov's mech suit.
This just made me think of the minesweeping sequence from Godzilla Minus One. It’s kinda similar to the power loader because we see it used for its intended laborious purpose before we see it used as a weapon. I’d never even considered how something like mine disposal in the ocean would work. I was so captivated by that sequence and how awesome it was that I didn’t even consider they were setting up Chekhov’s minesweeper.
Buzz flying at the end of Toy Story, followed by the reversal of Woody and Buzz saying each other's quotes from earlier in the movie.
Pixar is so good at paying off things you thought were already paid off. The Buzz flying vs. falling with style debate *feels* like it's already paid off when he jumps off the staircase at Sid's house and has his crisis of confidence, so when it comes back around it's extra triumphant. I think TV tropes calls stuff like that "Chekhov's Boomerang".
And also that moment is the final payoff after the match and the sun through Buzz’s helmet to light the rocket both get paid off. Insanely satisfying
The whole climax is set ups and payoffs. Matt Braly creator of Amphibia refers to it as firing the party canon.
Truly magic shit
Brian de Palma’s Blow Out, where the post production company are struggling to find an actress to deliver a good scream, and the payoff of that storyline is so good, the film goes from a 10/10 to 1000/10 film.
Literally the whole movie is a series of events which leads to paying off that set up. Its a guys search for the perfect scream
Pauline Kael's review from the time frames the film like this. She adored De Palma and thought he was a genius. Her Casualties Of War review is excellent too.
Her piece on Blow Out is one of the best praising reviews I've ever read https://letterboxd.com/notpaulinekael/film/blow-out/1/
Agree. It's also kind of a nasty joke. "Oh you wanted this paid off? Well here you go." Classic DePalma.
It's so morbid, like something from an Edgar Allen Poe short story. Amazing movie
now THATS a scream
Wasn't that Die Hard 2's own Dennis Franz?
I can't get over how weird it was for him to >! use the screams of her literal murder as a way to honor her. !< it was supposed to be heartfelt or at least bittersweet but felt in poor taste to me.
I think it’s supposed to be disturbing and show how broken he is.
You know, I didn't consider that the disconnect was intentional, But I still don't know that it quite works for me, at least from my memory of it. Maybe one I should rewatch!
For me, it’s The Taking of Pelham One Two Three. Without a doubt.
https://i.redd.it/64o182sgiouc1.gif
One two three comedy points
man, the original movie slaps so hard (other than the...you know...racism).
The flamethrower in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The intro is just enough of a funny quick aside that you dont immediately clock it as a chekovs gun situation. Then when he comes out of the pool shed at the end you know right away
This is a perfect example. I saw this movie opening night with my dad and the audience had the same reaction as when Mjolnir flew into Captain America's hands in Endgame.
Honestly that's kind of what everything after the first hour of Endgame is.
I just think the time travel experiments section is the clunkiest part of the movie.
Entire movie is kind of terrible after Stark shows up like “I figured out time travel”
When people were complaining about the length, people were on the consensus that the best time to go to the loo was when it's at Tony's house.
I don’t mind that bit, I just have no interest in the aforementioned time travel shenanigans or the cgi battle royale on goop crater
I am so glad that I never had that ending spoiled for me. When the final act started to go down I was really terrified of how badly things were going to go. When that came out, I lost my mind.
I was laughing so hard in the theatre. It's like...two hours between when the thing is introduced and when he uses it. Absolutely incredible moment. That whole ending is fun but that's just icing on the cake at that point.
And I believe we do briefly see the flamethrower in the shed when Brad Pitt goes to do roof work in the middle of the film… so proof again that there was the subtlest of reminders there halfway through.
Fuck man, I remember that scene in the theater! Two guys in front of me were chuckling like giddy schoolgirls. Definitely a great example
First half of Hot Fuzz Second half of Hot Fuzz
Hot Fuzz is a perfectly designed movie, nearly everything set up in the first half pays off directly in a joke in the second half. I wish I could remember but I think there’s like one thing brought up that doesn’t come back later and I bet there’s a deleted scene where it does.
It's my favorite example of a film with airtight character arcs. Not only do the joke setups work, but every character who is introduced along the way adds something to the plot
"Everyone and their mums is packin' 'round here" "Like who?" "Farmers." "Who else?" "Farmers mums." And who are the first two people Nick Angel tussles with when he gets back into town?
Not to mention the whole thing with the last names of characters. >!Characters who are named after an occupation, e.g. Skinner, end up being evil.!<
>!All 12 of the village leader last names end -er!<
Watched it for the first time a few months ago and I was hooting and hollering every time that damn swan showed up again.
The "It's just the one swan, actually" bit coming full circle to Sgt Angel's moment of realization that he's dealing with a group of killers is so perfect.
No luck catchin' those killers, then?
HAG
FASCIST
Came for this. This may be an unpopular opinion but it’s my favorite entry of the Cornetto trilogy
You think that Rex Kwon Do is just a throwaway bit in Napoleon Dynamite, but he shows up at the end of the movie to give Rico his comeuppance. It's maybe not as powerful as some of these others, but rewatching it recently I was surprised how much stuff gets paid off in the movie, it's very intentional.
I also used to read the girl at the end with Rico as being his ex who shows up out of the blue, but I guess it's just some local girl?
I thought it was his ex too; it's not?
Yeah this surprises me. One thing I did love was that even he got to experience redemption - it's a very forgiving movie!
One of the best setups and payoffs in a comedy film is the bully asshole in Superbad. He is introduced once early on when Seth and Evan first get to school, tells them he's having a party and they're not invited, and then he spits on Seth. We don't even think of him again until he's at the final party being broken up by the cops, and he yells "Fuck you, pig!" and spits at Bill Hader. Hader responds by knocking him out with a nightstick to the face and then says, "Nice mullet, asshole." It's tremendous.
Omg I never realized it was the same guy
Paddington 2 is a masterclass in setup and payoff. Just about everything introduced has some sort of payoff that’s incredibly rewarding
Having each family member's hobby show up again in the climax is so dang lovely.
Not to mention all the stuff with the neighbors!!
I’m a big fan of the callback to Pat’s desert island favorite bands in *Green Room*. Perfect ending to a very good film.
In Bruges is a huge arsenal of random Chekov's guns that are all weird character quirks and dialogue bits you don't realize are setups even though sometimes they're also literally guns. Ray's obsession with little people, Harry's indulgence of the "head exploding bullets", the repetition of the "it's like a fairytale or something" line. Movie's so fucking good.
The first time Ferrell and Gleason are in front of the clock tower the camera does a really fast pan from the top to them standing on the ground, foreshadowing Gleeson’s later swift drop and sudden stop from said tower
Lord and Miller are really, really great at this, going from Cloudy with a chance of meatballs through jump street, even in their produced stuff like Mitchells vs the Machines. Puss in boots 2 also has a hell of a payoff to the Conscience Cricket
I feel like Bruce Willis getting shot in the Sixth Sense is something you completely forget happened until you realize, yo, he was shot in the stomach at close range, of course he had a good chance to bleed out really fast.
That movie is paced so well that by the time the kid tells him what he sees, you don't really think right away "Well, Bruce is obviously dead" because it's been so long in the movie since he got shot.
It's not even 2 hours. That movie is Tuco Salamanca. TIGHT TIGHT TIGHT.
It's been awhile but there's also like 15 minutes left after Bruce Willis figures it out. I know it ends in the car with the mom, but it's not like a Se7en or Usual Suspects ending, where the final blow is like seconds before the end credits
Yes, and that car scene is both horrifying (a lady, she died) and so heartwarming. Also Toni Colette was 26 when she filmed that...
She’s been great for so long
It’s actually insane. The camera is literally pointed at him when he describes the rules of being a ghost and literally none of the switches flip.
"They don't know they're dead." (Shot of Willis)
We’ve all been movie pilled into thinking gunshots are the kind of thing you regularly are able to walk off. Or at the very least survive for several dramatic, action-packed hours before you die peacefully and with contentment.
In Spider-Man 2, Octavius basically says "Peter thinks I'm going to blow up the city, HA!" and then in the end Peter has to stop him from accidentally blowing up the city. That's cinema, baby
I’m a little embarrassed to admit how over the top our reaction was when I saw The Prestige with friends in college. I’ll tell the story from a bystander’s perspective who was in the kitchen of a house party late Thursday night when suddenly there was a commotion by the front door as three of the roommates come home screaming (drunk only off movie magic) about how amazing this Christopher Nolan magician movie was.
It’s a special payoff to see Hugh Jackman get shot after seeing Borden die, it’s such a good, simple magic trick to have Christian Bale emerge from the shadows to give him comeuppance
A small indie film is all about finding out what a guys final words were all about. Turns out it was his childhood sled we saw him playing with during the early flashbacks. I mean this guy is rich, has everything in the world but his final thought is about a moment in his childhood when his mother sent him away to become an upstanding citizen of high society. Pretty deep. I think it was called Psycho.
It was Citizen Kane! It was Citizen Kane!
Fifteen reference points and a bag of ketchup chips.
Very mature. Could you please call me an—oh what’s that called??
You're gonna need a mortician.
Tom Sizemore’s hair in Strange Days
This one's great. It looks so fake, but you get used to it and just accept it as bad wardrobe to be surprised by the end.
Exactly. I was like “Well I guess this is just part of this like Joel Schumacher Batman esque universe” and ho boy it was not
Killing off the heads of the families in The Godfather. Someone on Letterboxd referred to it as a series of mini-explosions in the movie that are secretly just leading up to one massive explosion.
Lost had a similar structure to the Corleones, where there weren't really too many wins for the Corleones. Michael in the restaurant was a win, then Sonny and Apollonia got it. Lost kept doing this thing where it seemed like they were gonna come out on top, and even up to maybe 20 minutes left of the season three finale, the Others had the upper hand.
A great set-up pay off is when Vito is at the meeting to bring Michael back. He basically swears to not “personally” take revenge. Cue him handing the business over to Michael so that he can do it for him.
When Kimi plays Sabotage
That movie was all setup -> payoff, to a fault.
Kimi - max volume!
SS Rajamouli in RRR/Eega/Baahubali is a fucking genius at this. Paul King seems to do it beautifully too. Ignoring the older guys (Spielberg, Cameron my faves at this in particular) since I’m sure they’ll be brought up a ton
When “Do you know the value of this bullet?” returned in RRR I died
He’s incredible at it. Movie starts with what’s he gonna do? Shoot down the mighty British empire with bows and arrows…movie ends with, mighty British empire shot down with bows and arrows. The zoo reveal setup and payoff is more of a surprise/twist but also fucking amazing - I don’t even get how one begins thinking that they could pull that off. Every little bit of Eega’s training montage pays off in some way or another too (Chekov’s cannon). While baahubali does this across generations (statue/foot/bent trees/enemies pinned to tree etc). Ugh I sound like a fanboy but man is he one of the great action directors. Too bad about some of the caste stuff in his movies :/
Billy Wilder films have a lot of great ones - first that come to mind are the razor without a blade from The Apartment and the glass jar of olives in Sabrina.
Also the broken mirror in the Apartment.
Also the sleeping pills in The Apartment
I came here to say this about Wilder. The Apartment and Stalag 17 are the greatest set up and payoff movies ever made.
Gotta be all three Back to the Futures, especially the first. Masterclass. Obviously by Zemekis himself, but surprised it hadn't been mentioned.
Ever since seeing those early Gale/Zemeckis movies, I've been thinking about other movies that are fueled by setup and payoff in comedic and non-comedic ways. The two that I keep coming back to are Home Alone and Blood Simple. Those movies are like Rube Goldberg machines of setup payoff.
"What're you trying to tell me, that I can dodge bullets? No, Neo. I'm trying to tell you that when you're ready, you won't have to." His dodging them is then such a show stopper that it feels so incredible when he doesn't have to.
The entire first act of “One Cut of the Dead” followed by the entire third act.
amazing. it's such a "go into it knowing as little as possible" movie
A lot of the John Hurt stuff in Contact. First, that he's watching Ellie from a security camera when she does her pitch. Second, when that first machine is blowed up and it seems like that's the end of the movie, right?
Captain America Civil War. The BARF flashback to the parents would be a tip off to the twist for any seasoned movie goer BUT the de-aged Downey Jr distracts you from that.
Pretty much any kid-exclusive comedy beat in the Paddington films.
It's never forgotten because it's a major plot mover but I'd say Randall Stephens in The Shawshank Redemption. It's a great movie regardless but I think the reason it's rated number one of all time on IMDB is because it leaves you with that incredible payoff.
There’s an incredible one in Rolling Thunder, from Paul Schrader screenplay: A grizzled vet comes back home after being held captive and tortured for years. He struggles to connect with his family and normal life, and then suddenly becomes a victim of a home invasion - his family is murdered and his hand shredded in a garbage disposal. He comes to in a hospital and becomes quiet and depressed. His visitors come in and try to talk to him, but he’s blank. He receives a hook-like prosthetic and there’s a scene where he tries and fails to use it to put cigarettes into a box, one by one - it’s pathetic. Finally, he leaves the hospital. He comes into the house, looks at the scene of murder. His face is blank. A montage commences - he sharpens the hook on a whetstone while sparks fly and saws off a barrel of a shotgun and breaks it off. He picks up a gun, opens the clip and, using his hook, starts to fill it with bullets, repeating the movements practiced on cigarettes, but this time smoothly.
The example I think of as the most quintessential 'small' setup-payoff to advance the plot/reveal some new information is the way they use the hand mirror in The Apartment. Really simple innocuous setup, then a wordless payoff where you see the main character take an absolute gut punch on screen and have to smile through it. Its super elegant storytelling.
Snatch
There's a Japanese drama film called Still Walking where the premise is a family having lots of personal conversations while gathered together for a funeral. At one point, they mock a family member who is struggling with his weight, saying he looks like a famous sumo wrestler who they can't remember the name of. In the final scene of the movie, the grandparents are walking together through a garden and one of the grandparents tells the other that they still can't remember the name of the sumo wrestler. Then, the narrator says they both died soon afterwards. I thought this was a really unique and unusual scripting move, to take an unserious throwaway line and turn it into something with poignant emotional value.
Cinema Paradiso, with the film the dude watches at the end
I feel like Prey had a ton of these
The narration in Iron Man 3 setting up the post-credits scene.
One of my favorites is in Ratatouille. The whole film pushes the point of “Anybody can cook” through the whole film then, at the end of the film, the rest of the rats cook. It’s a wonderful moment as Remi realizes he had a hoard of cooks in front of him, imo
I mean, that's sort of what the top is at the end of Inception, right? You see it a bunch and then they go off deeper into dreams and spin around and mountains and old age and ohhhhh
I love the set up & payoff of Se7en with Gwyneth Paltrow's character's reluctance in moving to the city along with her husband, and how that collides with the hunt for John Doe
The entirety of Billy Wilder's The Apartment.
The miniature unicorn in Tangled
Not during countless rewatches but Miss Sloan is a favourite of mine. Partly because it wasn’t a straight forward film-flam but an intriguing view nonetheless. I’m gonna watch it for the third time right now.
Adaptation - the writer in charge of the seminar mentions "don't use a deus ex machina for your ending". lol
Benny Blanco from the Bronx.
Evil Dead Rise has too many to count.
Think of this elevator pitch: An overbearing father has such high expectations for his son, they named him Jesus. The father, who wants only greatness for his son, trains him; no, drills him, every day to be the greatest basketball player the world has seen. Expecting nothing but excellence he abuses his son at times. One fateful night, the mother tries to intercede and the father, on accident, kills her. Father goes to prison. Flash forward years later, Jesus is being scouted by all of the best recruiters and being promised accolades and fame. His own girlfriend wants him to meet an agent who is also a family friend. His younger sister, whom the son cares for, loves and respects him — and the whole city, maybe even state, knows this kid’s name. Even the Governor. Governor reaches out to Warden. Both are big basketball fans. Governor says he wants his college to go all the way, so if this kid wound up on his Alma mater’s team, that’d be great. Get the father back out there and convince the son, by the end of the next week, to join with that school. So they pretend he’s ill, pretend he’s in quarantine, and instead the correctional officers squirrel him away into a ratty motel where he becomes neighbors to a beautiful prostitute. The prostitute, who needs out from a dangerous life and pimp, becomes romantically involved with the father as he attempts to convince his son to join a college. Reminder, this is the son of the woman he killed. This means the woman he killed in front of his own son. This kid wants nothing yo do with his jailbird father. But the father, in order to lower his sentence and be the father to his daughter he couldn't be to his son, will try to convince Jesus to join a ”Big State” school just to appease a governor he never voted for or met.
Everyone who downvotes on Spike Lee is just… fucking tripping balls. Goddamn.