re:Time Bandits
True, IIRC, one of the first things Gilliam says in the commentary is that he hates kid’s movies and child actors. Ending with the main character orphaned and confused is pretty par for the course in his films. Compared to some Gilliam protagonists, Kevin gets off easy.
… have sex with Arthur C. Clarke?
If I recall, Gilbert says something to Arnie like, “This way she isn’t a joke.” Turning the house into a funeral pyre might have been preferable to the spectacle of the county authorities having to knock down an exterior wall and remove their mom with a crane or something because they couldn’t get her out on a gurney through the existing doorways… I’d definitely have torched the house.
Ah, David Lynch. Every movie a mind-fuck, so I watch them for the completely engrossing atmosphere and often stellar acting. The probalem with Mulholland Drive is that it fools you into thinking that this will finally be the one Lynch movie you’ll be capable of figuring out. Then it pulls the rug out from under you and boom, you’re thinking, “What in the hell?”
I’ll also nominate Cemetery Man (Dellamorte Dellamore). I love this movie, but it never really makes much sense. Rupert Everett stars as a man who works in a cemetery where the dead keep coming back to life. The main thread of the movie is one beautiful woman who comes to mourn her husband. She dies and comes back, so he dispatches of her, but then another woman who looks exactly like her comes along… rinse and repeat in various stages. My theory is in the spoiler box below.
[spoiler]The movie opens with a shot of a snowglobe. It ends with Rupert and his mute assistant deciding to hit the road. The road ends in a sheer cliff. They get out and walk to the edge of the cliff, in a heavy snow. The formerly mute assistant says something fluent, and Rupert grunts in exactly the way the assistant used to.
SO, I think they are characters inside a snowglobe. Each time it gets shaken, everything re-sets, including the girl, Rupert and the assistant. Maybe.[/spoiler]
The Believer. The movie made sense until the surrealistic last scene where there is an explosion (a ‘real’ explosion) and the protagonist climbs (symbolic) stairs.
At least I think the explosion was real and the stair climbing symbolic.
Murder by Death - But I’d give it a pass, because I think the end to this movie was deliberately intended to be inexplicable, as a slap in the face to the whole detective genre. Mystery novels / movies usually end with very tidy explanations in which every little clue is wrapped up & explained - even if the explanation is contrived beyond all plausibility. By having -
Truman Capote unmask “himself” to be Nancy Walker-
The movie becomes a satirical jab at that convention.
Indeed. In fact, Lionell Twain (the ‘villain’) goes so far as to explain that he wanted to kill all the detectives because they always had implausible / impossible twists in their books that made no sense- clues that popped up at the last minute, things that no reader could ever be expected to figure out in advance, that sort-of thing.
I caught Primer on cable for the first time a few weeks ago. I missed the first 10 minutes or so, but quickly got sucked in. I love a good low-budget indie flick about which I know nothing going in. I missed a few minutes in the middle, just enough time to shovel dinner onto my plate and run back to the TV with it, while Mrs. WeHaveCookies sat at the table like a civilized person shaking her head at me. I knew that any dialogue missed would be bad.
Even though I didn’t “get” the ending, I still enjoyed the film. I definitely want to watch it again all the way through.
I’d also like to chime in with Le Pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf).
I thoroughly enjoyed the film untill the big reveal.
I guess it’s a sign of my strange taste in movies that I came in here to mention Invasion From Inner Earth.
The movie’s about a bunch of people stranded in the Canadian wilderness during an invasion of Earth by unknown forces (that may or may not be from inner Earth) armed with colorful smoke bombs. In the end, there a man and a woman left and they decide to trek though the snow to civilization. When they get to town, the snowy landscape around them vanishes and becomes a verdant paradise. The camera pans back to the man and woman who have been transformed into small children dressed only in underpants made of leaves and greenery (that look like lettuce.) The kids then hold hands and walk off into this beautiful new world, leaving the audience to wonder what just happened to the low-budget B-grade sci-fi film for which they paid three bucks.
I almost wasn’t going to post this, since I may be the only person who’s ever seen it, but looking at some of these movies I’ve never heard of, I don’t feel so alone.
My vote goes to Circus (Circus (2000) - IMDb) From imdb’s description:
“Bruno, a sadistic criminal, wants clever con man Leo out of the way. Leo and his equally clever wife, Lily, are up to something. So too is Julius: he hires Leo to kill Gloria, Julius’s wife. Leo does it, but then Julius shows up with the murder on tape, saying Gloria isn’t his wife - it’s blackmail. Leo’s bookie, Troy, is also closing in, wanting to be paid. Bruno and Lily as well as Bruno and Julius have their own scams running, and Leo is their target. Maybe Leo can get Troy off his back, avoid Moose (Bruno’s huge enforcer), send Gloria’s corpse out of England, turn the tables on Bruno’s murderous brother Caspar, and outfox Lily. Or is Lily his fox? It’s a three-ring circus.”
The movie ends with what might be many of the main cast getting killed, or not. And the bad guy, who is actually the good guy, except when he’s the bad guy, gets away, but he might be about to be double-crossed, by the girl who may or may not be his partner, his boss’s plant, or who the hell knows, perhaps she’s just there for sex appeal. The bookie makes a threat about halfway through, then vanishes completely from the film. Aside from a couple of cute/clever moments that were fun to watch just because they were cute/clever, this was the biggest waste of my time EVER.
I actually liked Primer, and didn’t mind the ending TOO much. I had fewer problems with the time-travel loops than I did with the two main characters and their motivations (or lack thereof). I assume that the blond guy wanted the family life that the dark-haired guy had, and the dark-haired guy wanted to be free of same life. But the actors/writing/etc. sucked the big one on that point.
Oh, and Mulholland Drive–I more hated the fact that the movie, in general, felt like it was starting out to be another Twin Peaks TV series (which it was) and ended feeling like a rehash of Lost Highway. I love both Twin Peaks and Lost Highway, but mushing the two styles together so haphazardly was dumb.
My favorite movie is Fight Club. I’ve seen it countless times. I own it. I’ve memorized it.
But the ending always baffled me a bit.
Why didn’t Ed Norton’s character die when shooting the gun off in his own mouth? Yeah, I know it exited out the side of his neck but it would seem to me that that’d still be a fatal shot. Not to mention the question why did it go out the side of his neck but on Tyler Durden, it went out the back of his head? Just never really understood that part.
Jeez, I can’t get this piece of crap out of my house. I own the film. If you give me your address I’ll mail the thing to you.
Ooo. A tiger thing. Whatever.
It was so bad to me that it makes me angry (can you tell?).
My guess on what happened is the filmmakers saw 2001 too many times and wanted to end their movie with Kubrickian mind-blower but ended up with a head-scratcher instead.
This refers back to the conversation with the funeral directors/undertakers earlier in the movie, where they say they joke around with the really ugly bodies. Gilbert didn’t want that to happen to his mother.
Hear, hear. Such a cool premise, a movie where the protagonist works by actually using his brain (Shock!), they manage to make it exciting and interesting… and then it kinda peters out. Roll credits.