Has there ever been a movie made where the ending purposefully didn’t fit? Like a light hearted comedy that out of nowhere turns gritty, realistic, and shockingly violent in the last 15 minutes. I think I would like a movie with the balls to try that.
Something Wild comes to mind.
Adaptation has a deliberately mismatched third-act. But to relate anything about it would not only give away an ingenius twist, but be waaaaaayyyyy too complicated to explain in a mere post. It’s worth the rental anyway, IMO.
Psycho leads you to believe at the start that the movie is about a young office worker who steals from her boss. But in the end, the movie is not about that girl, that boss or the theft at all.
Zev Steinhardt
Not the ending, exactly, but From Dusk Til Dawn is an example of a movie that takes a sharp right turn halfway through the movie and completely changes genre.
And, again, not the last few minutes, but The Great Waldo Pepper starts out as a light-hearted frolic and then
there's a scene where a woman is wing-walking and freezes in terror. The hero stages a daring rescue (I think actually boards from another plane) edges across the wing, grabs her hand.... and she falls. William Goldman, the screenwriter, freely admits that they completely lost the audience at that point. They were just not expecting tragedy, and the movie bombed.
And, of course, there’s the * hideously * cliched horror movie ending where virtue triumphs, the hero and heroine smooch, and then the camera flicks back to the defeated {monster, horde of insects, evil scientist, supernatural eldritch horror from the beyond} and we see it twitch or subdivide or reanimate.
It can hardly be described as “mismatched” since that would imply that other aspects of the movie actually matched, but the abruptness of the ending to Blazing Saddles with that funky dance number and Dom DeLuise was like icing on a funny cake.
I found Shaun of the Dead to have a rather mismatched ending. For a movie that is for the most part incredibly hilarious and not too serious about the whole zombie situation, it get’s amazingly depressing and downbeat once they get to the pub.
Do tacked on happy endings count, or is that fodder for another thread?
Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
The movie Little Black Book with Brittany Murphy was your basic formulaic romantic comedy, until the ending, which had a rather dark little twist.
When I saw those words, I thought you were about to cite Mulholland Drive.
Last American Virgin - you think, typical teen movie, surely it will have a happy ending? The ending really elevates this movie.
I would also include the rather surprising clog dance with “jazz hands” at the end of Zatoichi the Blind Swordsman.
Pennies from heaven both the TV series and the movie version. A harrowing tale, at the end the tragic hero is hanged for a murder he didn’t commit, his lover is just about to throw herself off a bridge when tragic hero turns up and says something to the effect of "they had to give us a happy ending, didn’t they, " Happy, happy, happy, dance off into the sunrise, credits roll.
“Well, what did you expect in an opera…?”
Oh, Bwoomhilda, you’re so wuvvwy…
The Charles Bronson, Jill Ireland Western “From Noon Til Three” came to mind for me. It starts as something of a romantic romp and takes a definite turn at the end.
Catherine Breillat’s Fat Girl. It’s a slow (i.e. French) pseudo-coming-of-age drama about two sisters: the 15-year-old is sultry and slutty, and the 13 or 14-year old is morose and kind of dumpy and very unhappy as she watches her older sibling catting around while they’re on a family vacation. Then, at the end of the movie, as the family (minus the father) is driving back from the holiday resort…
Major spoilers (don’t read this if you have any intention of seeing the movie, which I recommend to strong-minded and adventurous viewers):The mother pulls their car off into a rest area for the night. Everybody sleeps in the car. A psychotic stranger appears in the middle of the night, breaks into the car, kills the mother and the older sister with a hatchet, and drags the younger sister off into the woods. When the police arrive on the scene the following morning, the younger sister’s reaction to having been violated is… interesting. In an extremely disturbing way.)Basically, the movie turns unexpectedly from a nearly microscopic examination of a relationship between two sisters into something else entirely in the last six or seven minutes. The audience I saw the movie with was basically staggering out through the lobby, suffering emotional whiplash.
Oh, and as long as we’re on the subject of French films:
Haute Tension. After an hour and change of a very effective if small-scale and exploitatively grimy serial-killer thriller, the movie suddenly turns intocomplete and total shit.
I cannot to this day listen to Tannhäuser without singing along. Yet another way to embarrass the children (as if having Wagner CDs in the car isn’t bad enough {if they complain too much about my classical, I put in some Flatt and Scruggs…}).
And now back to the continuing and on-track discussion.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Clerks if it had kept the original ending
The Ladykillers got creepy at the end.