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I cant help but thinking that Mr McKee is dead wrong this time concerning the value of the sixth sense climax. it surely doesnt come "out of the blue". and there is some further character insight following it up.
everything else delivers fantastic knowledge though...

Hmm....so is the Inception ending a 'cheap trick' ending?

When I first began seeing movies through Story's prism, "The Bad Seed" coincided with the time I was learning about subtext. Even though a newb, I thought it's use of subtext was thrilling. 

Patty McCormack nailed her psychopathic character.  Sugar and spice and everything nice became the midnight monster under my bed.

Dont´t you think that in the film Anticrhist  is more the way to show, the grandiloquence taste,  than the cheap trick ?
Thank you.

I wish Bob had given an opinion on William Friedkin's remake of the French film, called Sorcerer.

Can't we look at the frog rain in Magnolia as something rather meagninful, which goes back to its introduction, where we see a number of "factual" happenings (the scuba diver in the forest and the guy who tries to comit suicide) in which one can agree that coincindence and absurdity is part of our life? I don't think PT Anderson was trying to make a cheap trick in that case, since coincidence is a fact that he explicitly introduces in the universe of this moive. In Short Cuts the same thing happens with an earthquake, and in both cases I don't feel fooled by a bad writing. Is it only me?

This brilliantly insightful - that kind of, "I knew that, but now I know that I knew that".

RE: The "mindfuck vs twist" point; when I first attending the Story seminar, and you brought up this point, I chuckled. The reason was this; there was an argument amongst my friends over which was the better twist; FIGHT CLUB or THE SIXTH SENSE. So when you pointed out that THE SIXTH SENSE is a mindfuck, but FIGHT CLUB was not, I chuckled at the irony, and spent a year trying to really get what you meant. I couldn't, and at the next seminar I attended, I asked and you kindly explained it succinctly (this would've been in '04).

You explain it very well here, but every time I've explained the difference to people, they defend THE SIXTH SENSE, and I have a small theory as to why this may be the case - first of all, there is a very small sliver of insight; the kid knew that the psychologist was dead all along. That inverts the relationship somewhat, in that it's not just about the psychologist saving the kid, but the kid saving the psychologist. So there is that. But I think the main reason is that if you stand THE SIXTH SENSE next to FIGHT CLUB, one sees that FIGHT CLUB creates a much deeper insight. I think the comparison helps to illuminate the point, as I've found out when I also use THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (as you do in your book) to showcase the point.

I think it may be worth, to really carry this point home, to stack mindfucks up against true-twists so as to show the clear difference between the two, maybe in a follow-up to this lesson, or perhaps, as a topic in the storylogue forums which could easily be linked to here.