The way it was explained to me is that the hooker was supposed to look like his daughter, only grown-up and strung-out. It makes a little bit of sense given the drug addiction subplot, but still definitely a WTF…
OMG, yes. I spent the whole movie wondering when the plot would start moving along in some direction - any direction - and then the movie just…ended.
Spoiler alert for Vanilla Sky.
I mean, what the hell? It was mostly a dream? Cameron Crowe, you asshole.
Tom Cruise is an entitled douchebag who gets his face smashed in a car accident. Tom Cruise is great at playing an entitled douchebag by the way, you might say it is a role he was born to play. Then he gets in an accident and mopes about it, as people with disfiguring injuries tend to do. Then, halfway into the movie he has a breakdown. And according to the movie, everything else is just a dream.
What the hell? What’s the point? Every movie is fiction. These are actors pretending to be people doing things that didn’t actually happen. And this is fine. But what is the point of saying that the story in the movie never “really” happened? If you want to tell a metaphorical story you don’t have to literalize the metaphor at the end of the story by telling us this was a story that the character imagined. We know it is a story a person imagined, because it is a movie (or book), not real life.
Or I can understand a movie that operates according to dream logic, like moves by Davids Lynch and Croenenburg. It’s all dream and insane troll logic, but it doesn’t end with a middle aged accountant waking up, taking two aspirin and going back to sleep. If you want to show a dream, show the dream, fine with me. The part I hate is “It was all a dream!” Of course it’s all a dream, you fuck! It’s a movie! It’s fiction! It didn’t happen!
So tell the fictional story of a fictional douchebag who gets his face smashed in, and then keep telling how he either deals with this or doesn’t deal with it, and keep telling how he either gets his face fixed or doesn’t, and how he deals with people around him who either can or can’t accept the new him, and how he deals with the person who caused the accident who is either alive or dead now. The point of telling the story is to tell the story and illuminate the human condition. Telling the story but insisting that the story wasn’t really the story doesn’t MAKE ANY FUCKING SENSE. From an artistic point of view, I mean. The story doesn’t have to make sense, it can be insane troll logic, that’s fine, but the movie is supposed to make the viewer feel or think something, anything. Saying near the end, “Yeah, the characters and actions you’ve been watching are just pretend and don’t mean anything, so just put your coats on and go home because this movie was just a guy dreaming about shit and doesn’t mean shit.”
I kill you filthy, Cameron Crowe.
I actually like Cameron Crowe’s movies. Except this goddam Vanilla Sky, which just annoyed the crap out of me.
From the Wikipedia write-up (which corroborates my memory):
I’m pretty sure he’s dead after that. But YMMMV.
The whole movie was WTF. “Let’s set up a situation where someone with very specific beliefs has only one possible choice that violates all those beliefs, and see what happens.”
That reminds me of a movie I saw a couple years back where most of it was nothing but this young female suicide bomber trying to get the nerve up to blow herself up in Manhatten. I had to really take a leak and couldnt wait any longer. When I came back the credits were rolling. Never did find out what happened nor what the movie was called.
The DVD release contained a diagram that partially explained it. I don’t have it anymore and can’t find a picture of it on Google Images, but I recall that it was essentially a “Back to the Future Part II” timeline. I thought it was funny that this diagram was provided, because it was a tacit acknowledgement that the ending as presented was obtuse.
My theory is that after Leo (Mark Wahlberg) departed, Thade escaped and got hold of Leo’s crashed pod. He flew this into the time warp and ended up in Earth’s past, where he did something that resulted in apes supplanting humans.
CalMeacham is correct that the staging of the ending is straight from Boulle’s novel. I liked that, because it was a nice little reward for people who read the book.
There’s an old thread about it here.
Citizen Kane. Rosebud is a fucking sled? Really? The whole movie we are looking for a damn sled? I thought it would be something shocking, like in real life where “rosebud” was Hearst’s pet name for Marion Davies’ cooter.
Here it is. I agree, pretty WTF. However, as a completely out-of-context clip, it’s hilarious.
My contribution is Color Of Night. I was utterly astonished that the filmmakers thought the audience was not supposed to know that Jane March was pretending to be other people…and treated it like a dramatic revealing moment, with swelling music and everything.
It was more or less the way the book ended, though (except with the Eiffel Tower).
And that the astronauts in the book were chimps, and that most of the action on the “Monkey Planet” was from a message in a [space] bottle that they were reading.
Well, you do have some parallels. Citizen Kane and a child rose one “Rosebud,” and Hearst in real life rode another. 
Emmanuelle. I sat through 95 minutes of tedious boring crap, waiting for something to happen. When the music played and the lights in the cinema came up, I said “That’s it? That’s the flick? Nothing happened!”*
I felt the same about Gone with the Wind, except that was more like four hours of pure boredom. “‘Tomorrow’s another day’?!? That’s the best they could come up with?!?”
*And no, not even Sylvia Kristel in the nude could redeem this movie!
Since we’re on a Coen Brothers kick, Inside Llewyn Davis
Is the fact that the last scene is the same as the first scene supposed to mean that Llewyn’s life in stuck in a rut?
Blow Out.
I wasn’t expecting the death at the end, nor the crushing aftermath afterwards
That was Day Night Day Night.
[spoiler]It ends with her still wandering the streets…
wondering if her backpack bomb will…
OR
hoping it won’t…
blow up.[/spoiler]
This movie was the first one I thought of. I totally didn’t see that coming! I saw it at a theatre when I was 14.
The most recent would be The Place Beyond the Pines. Pointless tragedy, might as well watch the news.
In days gone by there was Zabriskie Point. If you haven’t seen it yet, don’t bother.
Thanks to the Dope, I recently brushed up on my SF-classics.
Videodrome : who was behind that church of the flesh ? When exactly did the hallucinations start ?
*Primer *: can’t piece it together either. They lost me at the third intersecting timeline.
Well, sure, that Smith was dead. But the *other *one was okay. There were two of them, remember? One from the future, who had turned into a spider-thing, and one from the present, who had been infected by the creatures from the derelict spaceship, but hadn’t started mutating yet. In the climax, the future Smith is killed, but the present-day Smith escapes with the rest of the family on their spaceship.
The fact that the current-day Smith is still infected was, presumably, meant to be addressed in the sequel that was never made.
(I bought my first DVD player back when the format was new, and they used to give out stacks of free DVDs when you bought one. It tells you something about the quality of those free movies when I say that, out of the eight or so they gave me, Lost in Space was easily the best of them.)