That wasn’t bad. Just extremely harsh.
Better than the book ending anyway.
Time Bandits had an ending that was just, I dunno, uncalled for? Mean-spirited? Just plain bizarre?
Dirty Mary Crazy Larrytook a twist on the ultimate ending for any story. Instead of ‘They all got run over by a truck*’ they all got run over by a train.
*In England ‘They all got run over by a lorry’.
Queeg was broken. He couldn’t be fixed. If there’s a fire in the engine room, you turn off the fuel. You don’t just keep pumping it in, as if all was normal.
Robot Arm is right: the officers of the Caine tried being loyal and supportive. Queeg wouldn’t have it. He was a coward, through and through.
They should have gone forward with their earlier plan to report his failures and crimes to higher command. In the movie, they started to do this, then chickened out. That was where they really went wrong: there was a legitimate path to having Queeg investigated.
Wolf, starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfieffer, is a well-made homage to the old Henry Hull and Lon Chaney movies. Most of the gore is offstage. It relies more on atmosphere and Acting than on special effects.
Then comes the final scene, a shot of a wolf howling at the moon. A wolf that is very, very obviously an animatronic puppet. It broke the spell for me.
That’s an interesting perspective; thanks. I think it’s somewhat at odds with the sequence of events in the movie. As I remember it, Queeg did start with the support of the officers and crew, and progressively lost it through his actions. I’ll watch for that the next time I see it, though.
I don’t know that cowardice was Queeg’s problem. Greenwald is right in that Queeg had put in years and was more to be pitied than ridiculed. I do wonder about what might have happened had Maryk taken his concerns about Queeg up the chain of command, but I suppose the story is deliberately crafted to make Queeg’s deficiencies obvious to the audience but difficult to prove or document until it’s too late.
There are numerous conflicting stories about how*** Monty Python and the Holy Grail*** was “supposed to” end, but one story I heard from Terry Jones was that there was SUPPOSED to be a huge, epic battle, after which Arthur was going to find the Holy Grail at Harrod’s department store.
But they ran out of money, and couldn’t film the ending they wanted. Eventually, George Harrison and David Gilmour bailed them out financially, and they came up with an impromptu ending.
I liked a lot of things about the movie, hated many others. It is, by turns, brilliant and stupid, much like their TV series. But I actually LIKED the ending they came up with.
An earlier thread on some of the info in the novel “The Caine Mutiny.”
I’m sure there will be some who disagree, but I didn’t care for the ending of No Country For Old Men. The derailment at the end - getting hit by some random car after two hours of plot buildup - felt like a cheap shot and the strange denouement with the retired Tommy Lee drinking coffee in his kitchen did not come close to providing anything like ‘closure’ for me.
How about Tin Cup? Kevin Costner’s character, Roy, is an unheralded golfer playing in the U.S. Open. For the first three rounds he’s tried to hit his second shot (on the 18th hole) over the water and onto the green, and come up short each time. Now it’s the final round and he just needs a birdie to win. He goes for it again, hits the ball over the water, but on the green it rolls backwards into the water. Instead of walking up and dropping a new ball where he could easily hit it to the green, he drops it at the original spot. He hits it into the water again. And again. And again. Down to his last chance, he hits it over the water and into the hole; Roy is thrilled, the crowd cheers, he gets the girl.
What the fuck? He plays like an idiot, throws a tantrum, and is hailed as a hero. Plus, there’s the physics of the shot. That green must be sloped like the north face of the Eiger if a low, hard shot from a three wood winds up rolling backwards from where it landed.
The original Superman with Christopher Reeve.
Was that the end? Not Michelle Pfieffer say, “I can smell it from here” from fifty feet away?
The ending for James Bond’s Skyfall is pretty divisive depending on who you talk to but I’ve seen enough people rag on it to make me believe it’s not just me who think it’s a terrible ending for a great movie. I love everything up to that point but then you hit that climax and it drags out for 40 minutes when it really should have been a tight 15 minute final battle. A cornered James Bond being forced to rely solely on his wits to survive an approaching massive deadly force is a great idea but in execution it’s incredibly meh, Kevin McAllister put more planning and forethought into his siege preparations, and there’s so much time eaten up by watching people run around in the darkness and then the big bad gets killed in a very unsatisfying way. It makes sense though when you read that wasn’t actually the planned ending to the film and they had to massively rewrite the ending on short notice, but the actual original ending sounded amazing.
Basically the original ending was supposedly going to involve Skyfall actually being a retirement home/safe house for former 00 agents (which is why Bond acts incredibly angry when the psychologist at the start says Skyfall in his word association test that he takes to see if he can keep being an agent, since the natural association with the word is “Retire”) The old man caretaker character was to be Sean Connery playing an unnamed former 00 Agent, while both Timothy Dalton and George Lazenby would have played the cavalry at the end. Sean Connery was apparently on set and ready to film but his ill-health due to his advanced age (he was already 82 by then) made shooting the scenes impossible so they had to scrap the entire ending. They should have just picked the (somewhat) younger Bonds to fill in, Pierce Brosnan and Timothy Dalton are still relatively spry and still would have made a much better ending that we got. Imagine if Silva got shot by all three Bonds at once and they each made their own quip!
Interesting, but much too jokey for my taste. I like the new, grittier Bond, and I’m glad they didn’t go to all that trouble for a couple of quips.
Although I’m not a huge fan of Skyfall to begin with. The problem is not the ending (or not just the ending, anyway). The movie is too complicated. Silva’s plan to kill M is way, way, way too complicated. And Bond passes up perfectly good opportunities to Just Kill Him.
The Wages of Fear (1953). Anus-clenching French thriller wherein Yves Montand skillfully drives a shitty old truck loaded with nitroglycerin over horrible South American mountains roads and succeeds in not blowing himself up.
After earning double pay (all his fellow drivers blew up), he drives back to party in town in a nice little convertible, crashes through a guardrail over a cliff, and dies.
Good one, I’d forgotten about that.
We had a thread about movie coincidences once, I think; makes me notice them now. Montand also crashes through a guardrail and dies at the end of Grand Prix.
Emphasis mine.
Wasn’t that sort of the point? Or did I miss something?
Danger: Diabolik (1968) - The adventures of a super-criminal (woodblock John-Phillip Law) and his super-hot girlfriend (Marisa Mell) make for a cinematic masterwork of l’amour fou. They do crimes, have sex on a bed full of cash and manipulate the mob and cops with ease. Inventive direction and brilliant production design make this one of the coolest and best comic book-based movies ever made. But the ending… what a piece of shit! I believe a sequel was planned, but never produced.
Also, don’t forget his girlfriend collapses and dies of an apparent heart attack. I know they were going for a downbeat ending but the way the “ironic” tragedies pile up in the last few minutes just makes it laughable.
Tin Cup is who he is. He CAN’T play it safe, even when he knows he should. He blew his chance to be a rich successful champ for decades, and it would be out of character for him to change at his age.
The ending he got was the best he could hope for.