The #1 Cracked Gist

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What is the Cracked Gist?

The focus of each Cheat Sheet is called The Gist. Think of the concise humor of the Craptions section crossed with our Pop Culture articles. Your goal here is to summarize everything anyone needs to know about the subject of your cheat sheet in one hilarious paragraph (500 character limit).

A few things to keep in mind:

  1. Don’t feel the need to rip every movie that you write a gist for. It’s perfectly fine to have a positive, passionate opinion about a film. OR: You don't have to love the movie, but you don't have to hate it either. Being negative does not mean you are being funny. We are never dismissive in our pop-culture articles.
  2. Focus on contributing to movies you have seen, and thought about.
  3. Avoid using the first joke that pops into your head. We're not looking for you to summarize the jokes other people would make. We're looking for you to make interesting and unique observations about the subject you're summarizing.
  4. Try to keep swearing to a minimum. Sometimes, well-placed profanity can help a joke land. Most of the time, a swear word makes your joke feel forced.
  5. There's no one correct way to write a Gist. If you can summarize everything we need to know about the movie in 10 words, that can be funny. It can also come off as glib. If you're having a tough time figuring out how to strike that balance, go to the movie section of Cracked, and study up.

Here are some samples that should give you a good idea of the wide variety of Gists that can work:
The Dark Knight
Independence Day

  • +1

An American woman inherits a remote farmhouse in Russia. Rather than sticking the godforsaken heap on eBay, she visits it in search of clues about her long-dead parents. Unfortunately, the whole thing's a ruse by her father (yep, the long-dead one) to bring her back into the family fold by killing her, after narrowly failing to drown her and feed her to wild pigs when she was a newborn -- all because he takes the radical view that a really tight family is one where everyone's a shuffling ghoul.

grahamrix
Add Your Gist

The Abandoned (2007)

Source: TMBDb.org

Information Not Available
Information Not Available
Overview
  • Rating:
    R (USA)
  • Theatrical Release:
    February 23, 2007
  • Budget:
    Not Available
  • Box Office:
    Not Available
  • Runtime:
    1 hrs 34 min
  • Produced by:
  • Screenplay by:
    Richard Stanley
Director
Cast
Karel Roden
Freebase CC-BY
Source: The Abandoned on Freebase, licensed under CC-BY
Cracked Gists
500 characters left
  1. An American woman inherits a remote farmhouse in Russia. Rather than sticking the godforsaken heap on eBay, she visits it in search of clues about her long-dead parents. Unfortunately, the whole thing's a ruse by her father (yep, the long-dead one) to bring her back into the family fold by killing her, after narrowly failing to drown her and feed her to wild pigs when she was a newborn -- all because he takes the radical view that a really tight family is one where everyone's a shuffling ghoul.

    grahamrix
    • +1

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