I’m happy with ambiguous endings that are clearly ambiguous… as in, our hero has completed a quest, then he realizes that his whole life is still before him. What will he do? Who knows?
That’s very different from endings where I’m left feeling “wtf? did I miss something? is there some point being made here that I should be getting?”, ie, The Sopranos.
Really? I thought it was pretty unambiguous, too. What part of it was ambiguous?
I agree with MaxTheVool–the Sopranos finale felt like the creators couldn’t decide on an ending that wouldn’t piss somebody off, so decided to piss lots of people off.
I think the Noodle Incident is best left up to the reader’s imagination, though. 
Yup, she did Maison Ikkoku and the Mermaid series. I don’t know much about the Mermaid series, though. There was also a number of little one-off things she did that are collected in paperback collections called Rumic World, IIRC. There’s a little story called Firewalker that is something of a forerunner to Inuyasha (highschool girl timetravels to feudal Japan, meets gruff guy, they fall in love) but is much less fantastical, and more focused on the relationship than anything else. It’s short and while I haven’t found a copy myself, I’ve heard very good things about it.
In my experience, Takahashi’s got the golden pen, and pretty much any of her stuff is a good bet. The real question is how much of a commitment are you looking for. If you like her more normal stuff, I’d say try to track down the little side-project stuff.
Urusei Yatsura’s interesting because though it has space aliens, and super-natural martial arts, it’s mostly set in the greater Tokyo area, and mostly features romantic comedy themes. That is to say, despite the backstory of many of the characters, the series generally has very little in the way of sci-fi or fantasy. I don’t really remember any fight-centric story arcs in it. As an aside, I seem to recall that it had some characters who are kind of protoforms of Ranma characters (as with Firewalker and Inuyasha).
The last sentence of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama (“The Ramans do everything in threes.”*) screams “sequels coming!” but he states flatly in the introduction to Rama II that he never intended to write a sequel, he just thought the ending he wrote was suitably open-ended. The irony, of course, is that he wound up co-writing three sequels, making the total 4 books and disproving the original tease. And if you haven’t read them, take my advice and just pretend they don’t exist.
I’m also curious as to how The Prestige could have an ambiguous ending.
Spoilers for the “Prestige” in the box:
[Spoiler]IMDb posters, mostly, are the proponents of the ambiguity theory. Remember Cutter’s last lines, over the shot of all the Angier dead bodies in the tanks? “Now you’re looking for the secret… but you won’t find it because you’re not really looking. You don’t really want to know the secret… You want to be fooled.”
A lot of people took that to mean that the cloning machine never worked. And that the shot of dead bodies isn’t real. It’s imaginary. Their explanation for how the trick worked? Angier’s clone, Root, was in on it. How that’s supposed to explain how the trick worked constantly? I have no idea. You can see some of these ideas for yourself. I don’t think there’s any basis to them. I think it’s a great movie, but not ambiguous.[/Spoiler]
I love the ending to Ghost World. It resolves everything in the movie, while simultaneously resolving nothing. It’s a Heisenberg ending.
The Third Man.
I think Anna could reach out to Holly after she stops mourning Harry.
I agree. I mean, there were some really awesome things, like
the little robots. They were cool! And the octo-things. I liked the whole new society.
But the humans fucking sucked eggs. I hated all of them except Robert and maybe Benji. And Nicole was the biggest whore on the planet. Grrr…I get angry thinking about how wonderful that series started and how much I was robbed by the end. :mad:
Clarke injects his human characters with too many flaws, to the point where they become the flaws.
I’m sorry. This isn’t even a Clarke thread! (Tho I’d love to have one.)
H3Knuckles, I will look around and let you know if I find anything good!
I don’t recall the end of that movie being ambiguous. Didn’t pretty much explain everything?
-FrL-
Well done ambigous ending - The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Poorly done ambigous ending - Lost in Translation
I think the ambiguity would come from- We and the main character are expected to believe that a character who has been shown to be untrustworthy is now suddenly telling the whole, complete truth.
What was ambigous about the ending?
Hmm… but that’s not an example of ambiguity, is it?
Ambiguity is when the resolution of something is implied to exist, but is not shown. I don’t see how that applies here.
-FrL-
What was wrong with the ambiguity at the end of LiT? (Not arguing it was well done, just interested in hearing your take on it. IMO it was a cheesey kind of ambiguity because it did not really add anything to the story or to the viewer’s takeaway from the story.)
-FrL-
“Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends.”
ETA: This is for Eternal Sunshine.
Joel and Clementine got back together but then listened to the tapes. Now they’ve realized that their relationship went sour in the past and that it might go just as badly in the future. At the end, though, they decide to take the chance. They know their relationship failed and what they ended up saying about each other, and they’re going to try in spite of all that.
‘The Usual Suspects’ left some unanswered questions for me, but I still loved it.
I love ambiguous endings when they’re done well.
The Thing: the ending is perfect.
Blade Runner: director’s cut only, please.
A.I. Artificial Intelligence: Not a great movie, but the ending is misread by almost everyone and elevates the film.
And the King Daddy of all ambiguous endings (recently, anyway):
Limbo: as the credits rolled and the audience began to mutter, I laughed out loud.
No one’s mentioned Fight Club.
Do they live, do they die? (The narrator did disarm the bomb in the basement, but everyone was telling them how “brave” they were to stay while the buildings came down.) Do they rebuild society? Does everything go to hell? Who knows?!
Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax - an ending so ambiguous I’ve never been able to figure out even one meaning to it.