Wow, I forgot about Harold and Maude. You’re right! Another one that came to mind is Almost Famous. I love it everytime I see Russell Hammond when he realizes that he’s in William’s house. What a way to finish out a great movie!
I actually saw Harold and Maude once, in high school. My sociology or psychology teacher assigned it for a project. Can’t understand what the hell it had to do with either subject…pretty boring movie too, IMHO.
Anyway, it’s about this teenage boy in the post-WW2 era (don’t remember his exact age). He’s been pretty aimless throughout his entire life, and he’s got one of the weirdest hobbies, fake suicides. He’s done dozens of them, and they seem to get weirder and wilder by the week. Somewhere along the way, he meets Maude, an old woman with an incredible wild streak. They hit it off right away.
One thing leads to another (I said this was boirng!), until the not-so-thrilling finale…
Maude finally has an exploit go too far, and she dies. (There’s a scene at the hospital and everything.) Harold is absolutely crushed. So much so, in fact, that he drives his car into a canyon. Cut to Harold standing, unharmed, at the edge of the canyon…yep, it was just another fake suicide. After pausing a moment to confirm the wreckage, he turns around and walks away. And life, weird as it is, goes on…
Man, this spoiler feature is so cool! Wonder why it took so long for the message boards to pick up on it?
I loved the end to *Primal Fear[/]. When I first saw that movie, I had no idea it was coming, and WOW!!! I’m not even going to spoil it here. Go rent the movie if you want to see what happened.
Star Wars
When Han came back to rescue Luke in the Death Star trench. Gives me goosebumps every time I see it
DKW, I think your evaluation of *Harod and Maude[i/] is a little off. She doesn’t have an “exploit that goes too far.” She decided long ago that she wanted to die at 80, in order to avoid ultimately succumbing to disease and loss of faculties. Harold doesn’t believe that she’ll really do this and is grief-stricken when she carries out her promise to herself. His last “suicide attempt” is the only real one. The twist is that he decides at the last minute to embrace life instead. It’s a tribute to Maude, who had a long, full life in spite of all odds. (Did you catch the fact that she was a holocaust survivor. It isn’t mentioned, but you see the tatoo on her arm, briefly.)
The remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which I guess is a pretty cheezy movie but I have a place in my heart for it:
[spoiler]Donald Sutherland is one of the last surviving non-Pod Person in San Francisco, and he meets with Veronica Cartwright, who he thinks is a friend but who turns out to be a Pod Person after all. She screams at him in that special Body Snatcher way, and as he yells “NOooooooo” the camera zooms on his open mouth, black inside, roll credits.
The original movie version had a happy ending. Yuk. (But so did the book.)[/spoiler]
Whee, the spoiler tag is fun. Those who don’t care about spoilage, you know to just select-All and you can still scroll the page, right?
Oops. Let me just correct that spoiler:
Duh. It was Veronica who was the non-Pod Person, and Sutherland had gone over. He screams at her, she screams back, and the credits do roll inside Sutherland’s mouth. Sorry for the confusion.
In Titanic after Rose tells her story, tosses the diamond back in the ocean, and she dies in bed, to return to the place and person who changed her life forever.
Damn. I’m tearing up just thinking about it. 
I was thinking of Primal Fear, too, when I opened this thread. I had no idea.
cher 3 - C’mon, I’m citing a movie I saw once, 13 years ago, from memory! Cut me some slack, will ya?
Oh, and second Thelma and Louise. “Let’s just keep going.” And they do. Heart-wrenching and stunning at the same time.
And who could ever forget South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. From practically the first episode, viewers…myself included, I must confess…have been speculating as to what he looked like under the hood, which he was never seen without. Anyway, in the movie’s climactic moment, Kenny McCormick wishes to undo an absolutely horrific sequence of events which ultimately led to a war against Canada. Oh, and he bit it beforehand, which means that he’ll die, something he freely accepts. Just before leaving the world again…
Completely out of the blue, he removes his hood right in front of everybody! (Turns out he’s a pretty ordinary-looking kid.) Next to the identity of Eric’s dad, this was probably the #1 most closely guarded secret of the show, and for Kenny to just settle the issue right then and there…
…well, I was impressed. That’s all I can say, really.
(Of course, it’d be a while before his “permanently dead” status would actually become official, but that’s another story.)
How can you forget Vera Lyn’s haunting “We’ll Meet Again” over the mushroom clouds in Dr. Strangelove? That ending certainly stuck with me.
It requires a good deal of suspension of disbelief, but I remember the first time I saw the end of The Game with Michael Douglas. The way it twists around is great. I wish I could watch it again for the first time.
Well, I mainly just want an excuse to use the “spoiler” tag, but just the other day I saw one of my favorite films, and I sat through the whole thing to see the ending, so I guess I love the ending. (No. Really?)
It’s “Enemy Mine” with Dennis Quaid and Louis Gosset Jr. Quaid is a space cowboy type, out fighting the “Dracs”, a reptilian race that they consider their enemies. Gosset is a Drac. These two races are bitter enemies. But, Quaud and Gosset end up getting stranded on an asteroid (or planet, I forget) together, and befriend each other, because they need to survive. OK, so the spoiler ending is: Gosset has a “baby” (Dracs don’t need to mate to get pregnant) and he/she dies in childbirth. Quaid has to raise the Drac kid, who calls him “Uncle”. He loves that kid. The kid gets kidnapped by some scummy human scavenger-types that are on the other side of the asteroid - they use Dracs as slaves. Quaid rescues the kid (goes through hell or high water) and helps rescue all the other enslaved Dracs on the asteroid too. Some sort of peace is forged between humans and Dracs, and the last scene has Quaid back on the Drac home planet, where he is allowed to “step in” as the kid’s parent, in an important Drac ceremony. His name is also listed in the kid’s “lineage” (another important thing to Dracs.) Man, I choke up each time I see the ending. It’s corny, I don’t care.
And just like that … He was gone - Usual Suspects
Dr Stranglelove
To the sound of Vera Lynn singing “We’ll meet again” we see the world ending in the forms of several nuclear explosions. Tres jolie
That should be Dr. Strangelove.
Me, too!
“And in the fullness of time, when Zahmees bore his own young one, the name of Willis E. Davidge was added to the Line of Jerriba!”
Sniff, sniff
How about Steve Martin’s LA Story?
In which he learns the mystery of the ages, gets the girl, and is serenaded by a freeway sign that plays a most excellent bagpipe rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
Nothing wrong with The Full Monty either. Good mix of music and umm…“action.”
Another favorite is Empire of the Sun
Jim stands there in the orphanage, utterly traumatized from his experiences during the war. As his mother puts her arms around him, there’s a moment where it seems like he doesn’t even recognize her. And then he does. sniff!
I gotta go lie down…
Oh! How about Arlington Road? Such a depressing ending, but then when you think about it, it is sort of cool.
I’m surprised to be the first one to mention The Sixth Sense. A commonly cited neat-ending movie, I guess, but it was a GREAT ending to a great movie.