It's kind of sad when you think about it. POSSIBLE SPOILERS

Cafe Society
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The Professor Layton games all seem to have horrible endings. To borrow a post I wrote in a previous thread on the subject, at the end of the first game:[spoiler]The Professor and Luke “rescue” Flora from the Tower (which she could leave at any time, mind you). The Professor becomes her guardian, and she elects to leave her fortune behind so that the “people” of the village can continue to go on as before with their (artificial) lives.

Or, to put it another way:

A young girl has been given away to a strange man as a prize for solving a bunch of puzzles. I’m fairly sure that’s illegal in most Western countries.

Bruno, the only other actual human in the village, who has been keeping up all the robots out of devotion to Flora and her late father, is now condemned to stay in the village on his own and continue to repair the robots (which appear to break down frequently, judging by the number of “disappearances” mentioned earlier in the game).

Bruno will have to do this without his workshops, which were in the Tower, which is now a pile of rubble.

And that’s assuming Bruno got out of the collapsing Tower (which he probably did - Luke escaped from a point much further from the exit, and the drawbridge crank turned up at the end which Bruno had). [/spoiler]

The second game (Pandora’s/Diabolical Box) is marginally better, except that you discoverthe entire second half of the game was a hallucination. A hallucination that everyone shared. Thus making all the wandering around collecting clues and making goddamn tea for everyone entirely pointless. I half expected to see Bobby Ewing coming out of the shower.

But the third one (Lost/Stolen Future) takes the biscuit. We are asked to [spoiler]feel sorry for Clive, who lost his parents in a tragic accident caused by the Prime Minister’s meddling. Except that Clive has just killed thousands by ripping a hole in the center of one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and stomping on other parts of it with his giant robot. And a goodly portion of the city is also likely to subsequently fall into the now-unstable hole. How many vengeful orphans is that going to create?

Meanwhile, after being presented with evidence that the PM had caused the death of several people through his actions the police punish him by giving him a stern look. Justice done, I guess.[/spoiler]

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Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory would end with Charlie fighting off lawsuits from the other 4 kids for the next twenty years, all of whom were too young to legally enter into a contract like the one they signed. They came there being explicitly promised before millions of witnesses a lifetime of free chocolate and instead they had their lives endangered and left with nothing. Best case scenario is that Charlie would probably at least get a decent settlement but it’s doubtful he’d ever get the chocolate factory as Wonka is clearly out of his mind and the contract is easily invalidated, but even if he does get the factory a boy and a semi-invalid old man are going to be completely unable to contend with the Labor Board/Immigration/Health/etc. (or whatever the corresponding agencies are in Wonka’s country) all swarming in like Visigoths when reports of Wonka’s practices and the Oompa Loompahs emerge.

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What I read into that ending was that the teachers personality perhaps moved onto the body of the solider in that reality, and in a few weeks or day would have their turn to move on… He was (like everyone else on that train) dead anyway… So it was a second chance for him, after death, like the soldier had…

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Spielberg said in a recent interview that that was his biggest regret about the movie, which he made before he had a wife and kids of his own. At least he hasn’t tried to change it since, a la substituting walkie talkies for guns in E.T., or making Greedo shoot first.

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Consider the implications of Woody’s message to Sid. I thought there was some sort of metaphysical force which made the toys inanimate whenever there was a human around. But it turns out that’s not the case. Woody is able to talk to Sid. Clearly, they can be sentient beings when there is a human about, but they choose not to. What assholes! You think Andy would rather have a real, thinking friend he can interact and converse with, or a floppy-limbed cowboy whose repartee never rises above “there’s a snake in my boot”? This is the silent treatment on an epic scale. The toys are basically torturing children.

Little plastic bastards deserve it.

While buzzards pick over the remains of Count Basie and his orchestra. Seriously, anybody think they could survive out in the desert?

Maybe that was Wonka’s plan all along. He knew there were legal problems down the road, but was such a recluse there was no way he’d be able to avoid the legal liabilities. The whole Golden Ticket thing was a scam to install patsy Charlie at the head of the company before the shit hit the fan. Meanwhile Wonka has cashed out a bunch of gold eggs (getting a head start on Easter, yeah, right.) and flown off to an island in the tropics with no extradition where he can exploit the natives to carry out his every whim.

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It’s not just that; it seems pretty likely that Lenny (Grodin) will tire of Kelly (Shepard) and leave her eventually, as he did with his first wife. Their relationship was really based on nothing but a brief infatuation. And if they do wind up staying together, they will in all likelihood be miserable with each other.

Len Cantrow, as portrayed by Charles Grodin, is a thoroughly unlikable character, and also seems mentally subnormal in some way - his style of speech almost sounds like Rocky Balboa’s punch-drunk mumbling. He also displays strong sociopathic tendencies.

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The sequel, Prince Caspian, addressed this near the beginning. The older kids, especially Peter, were having trouble adjusting to life as ordinary teenagers again.

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Oh it was a fine time. I was learning all sorts of things. How to operate a star ship, how to use a ray gun.

Then one day it happened.

The alien captain came up to me and said “We am not the original space faring aliens. My race was picked up just like you were. In fact, the original race has been retired and living on Omicron Perseid 8 for over 3 million years.”

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Probably one of the reasons Susan decided it was easier just to repress it all.

And talk about depressing, now she has to live with the trauma of having her entire family die on her.

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In How to Train Your Dragon, it seems pretty obvious the big gigantic dragon is the “queen”, analogous to an ant or bee queen. Which left me thinking if rather then making peace with the dragons, the Vikings didn’t doom them, or at least that particular nest of them, to extinction by removing their one member that can reproduce.

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If you have not seen “Let the Right One In” don’t click the spoiler box, and watch the movie.

That said

Eli is inside the crate on the train, tapping “I love you” in morse code with Oskar, which he taps back. For a moment, you think everything is going to be ok, until you realize that in 30 years, Oskar will have replaced the man who was originally supplying Eli with blood at the beginning of the movie. She can’t ever love him the way he loves her. She was grooming him, all this time. He’s inescapably doomed.

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If it matters to you at all, we do get to see what happened to Sid during a brief 11-second cameo in “Toy Story 3.” While his choice of vocation does suggest a lack of formalized schooling, we can still extrapolate that he doesn’t appear to be any worse for the wear. And he did manage to keep that spiffy skull shirt all these years. :slight_smile:

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I honestly thought Beatty’s character had accepted and moved on… but Natalie Wood… always going to be batshit crazy obsessed with him.

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Especially when the movie leaves Cage alive. What an awful future universe.

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The photo fade/reappearance was compelling on a few levels, but the one thing I always found interesting, especially given how much Marty’s family had changed, was that they were all wearing the same clothes after they faded back in. You’d think that they wouldn’t have dressed so badly if the parents were more hip or had more money.

Of course, living in the same house was also a strange thing. But not as strange as his brother still living at home while he’s working in an office somewhere.

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I guess the Pixar people wanted to make fun of Sid, and audiences going “That nasty kid ended up with the crummy job he deserved.”

However, in this economy, most of the audience’s reaction would be “Lucky jerk! He’s got a steady job!”
Speaking of the Dread Pirate Roberts and The Princess bride, it always bothered me that for years, and I mean, YEARS, Wesley was a pirate who basically murdered or ordered the death of every single person whose ship he assaulted. Women, children, babies, everybody. Dread Pirate Roberts explicitly left no survivors. I don’t think that’s something you can just shrug off and go back to the farm.

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Well, as Westley explains to Buttercup in the movie, the whole point for taking on the “Dread Pirate Roberts” persona was for “inspiring the necessary fear” in people so that they would surrender immediately, adding that “no one would surrender to the dread pirate Westley.”

I think that the whole “never leaving any survivors” was just part of the schtick. It’s never explicitly stated whether or not anybody was ever actually killed by Westley or any of his predecessors, or if they were simply rumored to have done so. Seeing Westley’s personality and interactions with people in the film, it seems quite unlikely that he made a habit of routinely killing people.

What’s not explained is why people would ever surrender in the first place when it was supposedly commonly known that the Dread Pirate Roberts never left any survivors. If so, why surrender?

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I can think of the inverse - in Titanic, there’s a happy ending. Rose dies and gets to dance with Jack again (hence the dream/dead sequence at the end).

<shrug> I thought it rather sweet.

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Although I’m speaking from memory, it was implied that his predecessor killed everyone in his ship sparing only him, that he, the predecessor, wasn’t the original Roberts either and that whoever took over from him would have to do the same. I don’t know, maybe Roberts only massacred those ships who didn’t surrender. That’d still leave a lot of innocent blood in his hands.

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Wrong for LWAW book - while they were growing up in Narnia as kings and queens, their memories of Earth faded (so they didn’t suffer from homesickness or miss their parents) : proof in the last chapter, when they happen onto the Lantern in the Forest, they’ve forgotten what it is.

And as they slowly return into the wardrobe, the magic that compresses time and removes their royal clothes also apparently alters their memories. Proof: in the next book, Prince Caspian, when the children return, it takes some time for them to remember and relearn their old memories and skills.

In the later books, it’s also explained that while some magic - wardrobes, rings, horn calls, doorways - are necessary to travel between worlds, also Aslan is necessary to allow it and to gently influence who comes when and how. It would make sense for Aslan to gently fade the memories to spare the children problems.

In addition, growing up in a fairy-tale-like court with talking animals, Dwarves, Satyrs etc as companions and advisors and having exciting adventures is quite different from growing up in post-WWII London/ England, so that I don’t think too much confusion from overlap should result.

As for Jumanjii, things were reset when the game was finished - Alan did shrink from 30+ year old man to boy. I suppose that he remembered only the accident of the later two children’s parent’s to make for a full happy ending.

In addition, human memories in general are flexible and imprecise, not like videos you can rewatch. 30 years living in the jungle being hunted by animals and a crazy guy might be harrowing at first, but after one week of being re-united with his father and family, things will fade quickly. Likewise, memories of fighting wars with giants and of mermaids singing will quickly fade over the new memories of getting used to a new school or finding your family after the bombing.