Jacob’s Ladder pretty much had a wtf ending. Jacob hallucinates that he goes home and has hallucinations caused by the Army experimenting using drugs on soldiers, and after he dies we find out that what he happened to be hallucinating about happened to be the truth, but of course there is no way he would have known that? WTF?
Check this out:
http://www.joblo.com/arrow/index.php?id=4899
http://www.joblo.com/arrow/index.php?id=4900
You’ve not seen Dr. Strangelove, then?
I’m pretty sure you just invented a new word, one that doesn’t exist on the intertubes yet even. Good job.
The funny thing about Suspicion is while Cary G. is not the killer you think he might be, he’s still a totally self-centered bastard througout the movie, and this is all forgotten just because he’s not a murderer? Among other things, he sold some of his wifes furniture for pocket money, without telling her?
Primer has a WTF beginning, middle and end, but I still strangely loved it.
(The ending is probably the least WTF-worthy of the three, actually.)
I like when they pit two criminals against each other, but one is so EEVIL that the other is a “hero”?!? I’m looking at you, Heist.
I hate movies like that. I guess I’m just not a huge fan of anti-heroes.
You’re talking about Kubrick’s version of the film, right?
If you look at the picture it’s full of people from the past. Most of them are the ghosts (for lack of a better term) that Jack Torrance interacted with and saw all around him once he started drinking. And if you look closely, Jack is now in the picture - the hotel has claimed his soul for itself, and has made him one of the spirits to haunt the next person (something that couldn’t have happened in the book, because the Overlook is blown up.)
Exactly the movie I was going to say. That ending was teh suck in so many ways.
Hands down, Fear X. A decent enough movie, until it stops. Not “ends”…it doesn’t have an ending. It just…stops.
Which leads me to this brilliant quote by director Nicolas Winding “I’m a fucking pretentious asshat” Refn: “…and of course that pisses off a lot of people because they’re not used to a film without an ending. But what the fuck is an ending, you know?”
Mr. Refn, fuck completely off. You stole an hour and a half from my life. You took what might’ve been a good, solid thriller and made it a complete and utter waste of time because you’re incapable of putting together a good ending. Trying to make it sound like this was a smart move in an attempt to sound like you’re some kind of cutting-edge filmmaker just makes you sound pathetic.
Your first question was my interpretation of the point of the movie.
Nobody would want that chip, and nobody ever volunteered for it either. They were implanted at birth; it was the parents who decided to get them for their kids. (Also, the viewnerals or whatever they called them were 90 minutes long, not 5, about the length of a feature film. Suspension of disbelief is supposed to cover the super-AI computer that sifts through the decades of memories.)
I greatly enjoyed the movie, though I agree the plot could have used some punching up. But the very concept of having a chip in your brain that records all your memories your entire life that other people would eventually be able to see? That’s a truly horrific thought. I loved the throwaway line about how some teenagers tended to kill themselves when they found out they had an implant. (I guess they were afraid of tattoo needles?)
Anyway, I interpreted the basic premise as a cynical view of the selfishness of loved ones; your life is not your own, but rather a mere vehicle for closure for your loved ones after you die.
It’s been a while since I’ve seen this, but my take was that most of the movie, the post-war life was all the hallucination - he was still in Vietnam during the entire time and hallucinated his entire future beyond the war. The army was experimenting on him with the drugs, and those drugs caused him to hallucinate this whole future life.
(don’t ask how the drugs caused him to hallucinate the people that reveal that the army is/had experimented on him)
You’re close. Here’s what happened:
Jacob Singer is in the Army in Vietnam, there’s an attack, and he’s seriously injured in the attack. At this point, his mind flashes between reality and fantasy. The fantasy life takes place in the future, after he comes home from 'Nam. If you pay close attention to events, you can quickly spot how Jacob’s mind begins to merge the real world and the fantasy world together. Remember the scene where he wakes up in bed with his wife and tells her about being divorced and banging Elizabeth Peña? He worked with Elizabeth Peña at the post office, so that’s how he knew her character. As for the “chemist,” that was one that escaped me the first few times I saw the film. He’s actually the medic on the chopper. Jacob’s mind made up the whole thing about the drug experiments on soldiers (which was a common rumor during that time, so it’s entirely possible that he would have heard such a thing) and pulled the medic in and made him the chemist.
Now, was Jacob bayonetted by a member of his own platoon? And was that soldier hopped up on some kind of experimental drug? Who knows? That’s not the point of the film. The point (and admittedly the screenwriter has a strange obsession with the subject) is that we shouldn’t fear death. If you enjoyed the film, the published screenplay is worth reading as it has several different versions of the script and detailed explainations of what went on during the filmmaking.
Tobe Hooper’s Night Terrors. WTF?!
The whole movie? Last Year At Marienbad.
The ending of Videodrome always perplexed me, but, then, so did the beginning and middle.
The ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey makes complete and perfect sense – if and only if you have read Clarke’s book, which, IIRC, was published after the movie was released. (Actually, the main objection to both the book and the movie is that an unrelated and irrelevant and gratuitous and disgusting and morally objectionable and utterly criminal subplot about a malfunctioning AI was grafted into the middle and completely overwhelmed the important cosmic theme of the beginning and end.)
Gummo Actually the entire movie is WTF.
I read 2001 a long time ago, so if the following is the result of bad memory, then my apologies.
But I don’t see the HAL subplot as unrelated, irrelevant, or gratuitous. (I am interested in hearing from you about why it is disgusting and morally objectionable.)
The HAL subplot, to my recollection, is the only thing keeping the reader reading through most of the book. In fact, it’s almost strange to call it a “subplot,” it kind of is the plot of much of the book. I kept reading because I wanted to find out what HAL was going to do next, and how Dave was going to deal with it. I was alos hoping to see what the relationship between the HAL problem and the Monolith mystery was going to be. It turns out there is no relation in terms of plot, which I think is part of what bothered you, but I think of it as sort of a giant, far-reaching “McGuffin” device. Take out the HAL plot, and you’ve got a guy trying to figure out what the Monoliths are about, and then having an encounter with Alien forces which apparently initiaties some kind of profound transformation. Well… okay… but that’s not much of a story. We need a story. Any story will do, as long as we have a story upon which to hang the more philosophical “main point” of the work. The HAL subplot seems to me as good a story as any to accomplish this with.
In the above, I’ve granted that the HAL plot is somehow unrelated to the Monolith plot. But I actually don’t think that’s the case. There are thematic unities. For example, HAL is a mind, or a nascent mind, created by Humanity. And this mind has, apparently, gone wrong. Well, it seems Humanity’s mind has been created, or at least strongly shaped, by the influences of the Monoliths and their creators. Perhaps the creators are testing Dave, and perhaps they are doing so in order to find out whether Humanity’s mind has gone wrong or not. Perhaps Hal is to Dave as the Human Race is to the Creators.
Furthermore, the Hal story evokes, throughout most of the book, a brooding, eerie uneasiness and uncertainty. HAL is supposed to be Dave’s caretaker. And it’s not like HAL just became a raving monster. He continued to talk in the same tone, expressing the same concerns as before he started to go crazy. This makes his going bad not simply threatening, but lends the atmosphere a note of the uncanny and eerie. HAL’s intentions toward Dave are not clear. Indeed, HAL himself doesn’t seem to understand what he wants to do to Dave. This uncertainty continues as Dave comes to encounter the Alien forces of the monolith. He can not tell whether they are caretakers, or threats, or whether they even think of him as an entity worth consideration at all. The have made things seem familiar for him, but behind the familiarity everything is exposed as utterly artificial and unfamiliar. (For ex. the material he finds inside the milk carton.) Not only this, however–the reader can not shake the feeling that in this encounter with Alien forces, Dave (and his human nature) is under the possibility of serious threat. Why would the reader feel this way? In part, it is because of what has gone on before. The encounter with alien forces recalls much that was important about Dave’s life with Hal over the last several days (or was it weeks?) of his journey: Dave’s understanding of Hal had become an understanding of something familiar and comforting which had apparently been exposed as utterly artificial, unfamiliar, and threatening.
So–we need a story, and the monolith encounter does not provide enough of one. We need something more. A bad strategy would be to just have a completely unrelated story inserted between the two halves of the Monolith story. That seems to be what you’re accusing 2001 of doing. But I better strategy would be to have the monolith story embedded in a plot which itself recalls the themes of the monolith story, illustrating them, and which itself contributes to the atmosphere of the monolith story, thereby informing our reading of it. (And there are other good strategies besides, of course.) I think this is the strategy taken in the book 2001, and I quite liked it, to my recollection.
You characterized the main theme of the book as “cosmic.” I agree, but with a qualification. The book portrays the encounter of the (merely?) human with the cosmic. The monolith story, all by itself, does not do much to present the human side of this equation. Sure, there’s a human being named Dave involved, but his humanity is not particularly effectively illustrated by the events in the directly-Monolithic portions of the book. What illustrates his humanity is our seeing how he acts in the situations presented to us in the HAL plot. Here we recognize his humanity–in his actions. And the cosmic theme is not just contained in the Monolith-Encounter parts of the book. Rather, as I hope I’ve illustrated, the cosmic theme has its echoes in the HAL plot, and the HAL plot informs the cosmic theme even after it’s over and we’re just reading about the monoliths.
I should go over all the above and revise it, but I really need to go to bed now. I hope it makes some sense as is.
-FrL-
Thanks !!! I’ll have to see this movie again (and again, and again it sounds like). I had thought Jacob had been bayonetted by one of his platoon (on the experimental drugs), but I guess that falls into the real/hallucinated grey area as well.