Oh, crap, I forgot to spoiler that. Could a passing mod fix that, please?
(Don’t think I’ve ever said that before…)
The ending to Trees Lounge wasn’t pointless or even all that inscrutable - what it was was perfect. Remember that throughout the film we see an elderly barfly; near the end of the movie Steve Buscemi’s character (a novice barfly himself who is going nowhere fast) learns that the old guy has been taken to the hospital after keeling over at the bar. Buscemi orders a beer and a whiskey and the film ends with him just sitting there with the realization that he himself is on that same path as the oldster. (I haven’t seen the movie in awhile but I believe he actually picks up the whiskey but sits it down before drinking it.)
Well, it’s at least more ambiguous than you credit it as, considering the actual ending is the exact opposite of how you interpreted it (according to the director).
Little Witches. That’s it?! After all that buildup, the Demon just pops out of the well in the basement, the Evil Teen Witch gets sucked into Hell, and that’s it?!!
The Godfather Part III. In Part I, Carlo gets whacked at the end. Michael was reluctant to order it, but Carlo Betrayed the Family. Tragic necessity. At the end of Part II, Fredo gets whacked. He Betrayed the Family. Tragic necessity. But at the end of Part III, Mary gets whacked because . . . no reason. She just happened to get in the way. Coppola needed a tragic note to end it on and that was the best he could come up with. :rolleyes:
Mildred Pierce. The novel, not the movie. As I recall, after everything that’s gone on, the ex-husband says to Mildred, Oh, forget about Veda, let’s get drunk!Huh? That’s the ending? Where’s the comeuppance? Where’s the justice?
Metaphor, shmetaphor. We’re told that the characters we’ve been following for the past two hours are not real. If the characters aren’t real, why should we be invested? Are we supposed to care about this superfluous crazy person who only serves to bookend the story? We got basically no information on him and we’re told that the entire story exists to serve as a battleground for his sanity. Who cares!
Am I the only one who sees the irony here?
Just saw Children of Men.
The whole damn thing is pointless.
What was pointless about it? At the end, Theo (Clive Owen) redeems himself by surviving long enough to get Kee and the baby out to sea so they can get picked up by The Human Project’s boat (although I do think The Human Project was a rather obvious and heavy-handed metaphor). It would’ve been pointless if, after everything, the baby (and Kee) ended up dying.
Why, your irony detection skills are simply astounding. Well played.
I disagree The revelation isn’t that he is crazy (we know that from practically the first scene, anyone who doesn’t sleep at all for over a year is not all there), but rather why he is crazy and how he resolves it.
And unlike in Identity, The protagonist is real. Some of the people and situations he interacts with aren’t, but they’re real to him, and thus meaningful to the audience.
But the entire premise was nonsensical, even granting the science-fictiony element.
It was as though Britain turned into Nazi Germany just for the heck of it. The motivation of just about everybody is unclear.
Anyway, I’m thinking about starting a thread about this specific film, to tear it apart at length.
I’m willing to let the occaissional Das Boot like movie go, since such things, sadly, do happen in real life. Sometimes, things just suck and you die. The problem is that you only need such a movie once a decade - and it’s particularly appropriate for a war movie. Most of the time, movie writers use such endings as a copout, because it isn’t a plausible or likely ending.
I think it was more than that. In Das Boot the boat is destroyed and the Captain dies. It is pointless. Just like the bravery and sacrifice of the men was pointless since they were fighting for Hitler’s Germany. In a war that was unwinable for a government that was unworthy of their sacrifice.
That was the tacked-on crappy ending. Check out the director’s cut; the ending (and therefore the movie as a whole) is much better and very Dickian.
Say what?
They save the town of Rock Ridge and shoot the bad guy.
Then ride into the sunset.
Actually, the director’s cut snips the so-called happy ending and doesn’t replace it with anything, leaving the movie with no ending at all, which irritates me.Director’s cut - Deckard and Rachel get into elevator, door closes, the end. Where are they going?
I preferred the original version immensely because it, well, made sense and the ending isn’t even “tacked-on” in the sense that it’s totally unexpected or out of step with the rest of the film. It is, in fact, perfectly foreshadowed by an earlier conversation between Deckard and Rachel.
Frankly, it bugs me that when I periodically catch the thing on TV, they’re using the weaker, truncated director’s cut. The whole recut thing strikes me as just an ongoing effort to wring some additional dough out of fans who hope this version will be perfect, until the next version comes out which is even perfecter. Ridley Scott is just following Gerorge Lucas’s lead.
Did you miss the significance of the origami unicorn? The director’s cut contains a shot cut from the theatrical version, where Deckard plays the piano and thinks briefly about a unicorn. In the final scene, he finds the unicorn Gaff probably planted there, and remembers Gaff’s line “It’s too bad she won’t live! But then again who does?” implying that Deckard himself is a replicant. But even if he isn’t, I like this scene’s accentuation that we are all, basically, in the same boat as the replicants.
The X-Files. Turns out that Mulder’s sister was not kidnapped by aliens but was “merely” killed. All the alien stuff Mulder apparently made up because of psychological trauma.
:rolleyes: X 2^10^10^10