I dunno. Seems to me the message is fine. You DON’T get a second chance. Be careful of the choices you make. Yeah, the message sucks. But that IS life.
I think all of Total Recall is a dream, but not really a cop-out in the same way as the TC intends
Thanks for giving me another chance to bash Boxing Helena. Gawd-awful piece of shit movie.
Much of the ending of Journey to the Center of the Earth, by Jules Verne turns out to be a dream, or at least a hallucination … a cheap trick unworthy of Verne. I remember being pissed off by that when I was twelve.
Not a dream exactly, but as the logic implodes in American Psycho it leaves you with the notion all or part of it might be a PSYCHOtic delusion of the main character.
Fight Club also- not a dream but not real either.
An interesting one that I just remembered would be Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, in which an un-named protagonist is stuck in his dream state. As the movie progresses, the dreamer realizes that the visions he’s seeing are dream images and he must be asleep…but he can’t wake up. He keeps dreaming and dreaming, until at least the end of the movie. The movie simply ends with him stuck in the dream. Thus, in this case, the movie is quite literally “all just a dream!”
Oz. Beecher finally gets released and lives happily ever af–
Perhaps, but I’d say not in a bad way like many examples posted here. In that movie for all practical purposes what happened in that stories real world actually happened. Its just that one persons perspective wasn’t quite right.
To add to the thread: the first 3/4 or so of David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive is a dream by the main character (though we don’t know who that is initially). After she wakes up, we’re introduced to a very different and darker reality which fueled the dream.
But I’ll echo PSXer and say that most of the films and TV shows being mentioned are not the “cop-outs” that the OP seems to be asking about. A long dream sequence is not automatically a bad plot device.
I haven’t read the book, but I have seen the BBC television adaption from the 1980’s. (In fact I just watched it again this Christmas.)
I thought the ending worked fairly well. It seemed to me that having the harrowing adventures turn out to be a dream allowed the Christmas ending to be all the more peaceful and relieving.
I also thought the TV adaption was really well done. Patrick Troughton was well cast as the Punch and Judy Man, and Robert Stephens was deliciously over the top as the villain. Plus I’m a sucker for shoestring budget BBC special effects. I’m always amazed at what they could pull off compared to how little they had to work with.
This thread is keeping me awake, even though I’m familiar with only 4 of the works (or don’t works?) so far.
I enjoyed “The Life Before Her Eyes” (Wikipedia), movie somewhat more than the book though I recommend both if you can go for poignancy more than teen comedy. But I found each to be less than a major work of art, with all due respect to the dreaminess, so you may prefer to spend your time with Henry James and his ilk.
And this thread also reminded me of the Richard Harding Davis (Wikipedia) story “In the Fog” (gutenberg.org). For those who know the story, yes it’s not a dream. But I think that it’s related enough to include here. Well worth reading, and may even help you to dream better.
:eek::eek::eek:
Since I apparantly wasn’t paying any attention at that point, does anyone recall what the general thoughts were on that kind of ending? Were people pissed?
Dang…I really should have watched the ending, apparantly. 
I tried finding a clip of the last scene of St. Elsewhere, and I got this… the final credits to the final episode of St. Elsewhere…
For those of you who don’t want to click on the link, it’s the old-time MTM production logo with the cat, Mimsy, laying on its side, hooked up to that medical machine that beeps when your heart beats. At the end of the credits… Mimsy flatlines. :eek:
The Brittas Empire, also a whole (7 series) show as a dream.
Philip K. dick used that ending for his novel A Maze of Death and it actually worked, more or less.
Peggy’s pregnancy arc on Married With Children. In the writers defence they intended it to be a real pregnancy (Katey Sagal was pregnant IRL) and have every intention of adding a new kid to the cast. Then Sagal miscrarried and the writers abandoned the plotline at the last minute because they didn’t want to force her were a pregnancy suit (though I think she offered to go through with it).
Regarding St Elswhere, somebudy put a chart linking all the spinoffs, crossovers, spinoffs of spinoffs, etc together and proving that most TV showes of the 80s & 90s all take place in that little boy’s mind.
… as linked-to in post 16. 
If my life ends that way I’m going to be very annoyed.
The Dick Van Dyke Show did several dream episodes, with two outstanding ones – the one with Kolak of Twilo and the one where Rob is bald. Both of them feature dream-within-dreams, with false endings. If not the earliest appearance of the trope, it’s the first I recall. The show dealt brilliantly with many common and abused tropes (which are still common and abused).
Am I the first to mention Time Bandits?
But wait. He had the polaroids, and they touched it and went “fhwamp”, and the fireman looked like Agamemnon… Ow my brain.
I really love that movie.