My friend’s favorite book is Mists of Avalon, and she rereads it every year, at least, but she always stops at a happy spot, because the last part of the book is so damn depressing.
As teenagers, my sister and I watched Top Gun over and over and over, but we always turned it off when Goose dies. To this day, I can more or less recite all the lines word-for-word–until the point where Goose dies The whole Maverick-and-Iceman reconciliation and triumph at the end just wasn’t uplifting enough to get us through Meg Ryan bawling her eyes out and that awful buck-up speech from Tom Skerritt.
Il Postino is a great get-laid movie. Any girl that I invite over will get all warm and fuzzy by the time the postman has seduced his beloved.
But I always have to stop the movie there, because in the rest of the movie, the postman goes to a communist meeting, gets trampled underfoot during a stampede, and dies. That sort of ruins the mood.
The movie Labyrinth. I love that movie dearly, but for some reason the part where Sarah’s in the Escher-like stairs trying to find Toby annoys me so I either fast forward to when she’s back home or just say “okay, I’ve had my dose of the movie, click.”
Moulin Rouge. I stop at the grand finale; I’ve seen the ending countless times but if it’s on HBO, I just turn off the TV for that. The ending’s good, of course, it’s just really emotional.
Another Kind of Monday, a book, whose ending I found to be a big letdown. Not in sense of the quality of the book–a letdown from the plot. It makes me sad.
Aw, that reminds me of a Buffy episode. In “The Killer in Me”, Willow asks Kennedy, “Why do you like me?”, and Kennedy responds, “I dig the way you always turn off the Moulin Rouge DVD at chapter 32 so it has a happy ending.”
When I was 16, I had a huge crush on Michael Wincott for a period of about two months. During that time, I watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves almost daily. I guess I got tired of listening to Kevin Costner’s laughable impersonation of an Englishman and watching Alan Rickman’s scenery-chewing death scene. So, after awhile, I only let the tape play until right after Guy of Gisbourne (Wincott’s character) was killed. I liked watching him die and making myself all sad, but there was no point in going on with the movie without him.
Ah, the follies of youth. I now realize that Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham was a far cooler villain.
Swingers. It’s my post-bar movie. I pop it in at 2 a.m., usually end up watching it until around the “Vegas, baby. Vegas”-part, then I fall blissfully asleep. I can’t tell you how many times my roommate’s come down on a Saturday morning with me asleep in my La-Z-Boy with the Swingers menu screen up on the TV.
