Am I the only one…
Fight Club? A compelling watch that dissolves into flat-out silliness at he end.
j
(Hell In The Pacific)
In case you don’t already know, the MGM Special Edition DVD includes both the original ending as a special feature, and complete subtitles including English translations for Captain Kuroda.
Popeye delighted me with its odd cast of characters and strange songs, but the whole movie is building up to the epic battle between Popeye and Bluto, and then Bluto just runs (okay, swims) away. It was a letdown.
I liked Alec Baldwin’s outing as The Shadow, until the final fight for which — well, let me quote IMDB: “An earthquake destroyed the set, and the filmmakers, out of time and money, were unable to complete the scene as originally envisioned.” And so our hero instead — suddenly breaks out a new super-power, and it looks kinda goofy, I guess?
My biggest gripe about The Shadow movie was that, in the radio show and the pulps, his origin story is shrouded in mystery and only revealed in little bits along the way, and in the movie they just went with a Tibetan temple trope.
Up in the Air
This was the movie that made me stop watching Oscar movies.
The entire movie is basically George Clooney travelling his whole life and not forming any real connections to anyone. Then he meets what’s-her-face and realizes there is more to life than just his work and flies to Chicago (I think?) to say he wants to be with her more than he wants to be with work only to find out she has a family and has been cheating on them with him. He get’s sad and goes back to work. It was the perfect opportunity to show character growth and they made it a sad ending because Oscars I guess. I know the argument is that he DOES learn something because he gives his miles away, but even that felt like it was tacked on.
I’ll also do a vote for Gone Baby Gone. I’ll spoiler this one just in case. There is a point in the movie where Casey Affleck finds the missing kid but realizes they’re in a better situation and he has a crisis of faith as to what to do. I desperately wanted the movie to fade to black there and leave it to the audience to decide if he actually turned in kidnappers or not. But alas, the movie kept going and had a sad ending (in an Oscar movie? Shocker!)
The Abyss
Hoo boy, that ending.
A Mighty Wind. Imperfect but generally sincere and honest and sweet and funny all the way to the end, and then, the epilogue showing the Folksmen playing Vegas (why? a PBS special gets you no such gig) with Harry Shearer, still bald and bearded and baritone, wearing a dress. No reason, nothing in the previous 90 minutes to give his character the slightest foreshadowing of this development, not even the hint of a joke beyond a man in a dress, which was a gag Milton Berle failed to make funny 60 years earlier. This is the best example of a movie I went from loving to disliking in one final scene, and I still kind of resent it.
Agreed. Still not a bad movie overall. Orson Scott Card did an adaptation novel (my recollection was it was written during movie production) that was pretty good and had a better but not all that different ending. Just way more explicable.
Fury An incredibly well written and realistic war film, up until the final battle where it suddenly becomes a Rambo movie complete with suddenly incompetent Nazis and hundreds of people dead in a single shootout.
Isn’t it in the nature of π as an irrational number that at some point, something like a perfect circle at whatever paging/line spacing would have to occur?
Valid criticisms. But really, they should have cut the last 30 seconds off the movie (the amount of static on the tape) and left the viewers wondering, is she crazy or did it really or did it really happen?
I’m not a fan of “absolute proof” in the book either.
Irrational doesn’t mean that all possible sequences occur. For instance, the number 1.211211121111211111211111121111111211111111… is irrational, but there are quite a few sequences that you could never find in it.
If pi is a normal number, then that would be the case, but we don’t know if it is or not, that’s still an open question.
And if it is a normal number, then while any arbitrary sequence could be found in it, that doesn’t mean that it’s not deep in there. You aren’t going to find it by printing out sheets of paper if the sequence starts 10^5000 digits in.
Frankly it sounds like the ending to Contact in the book was much worse than what they did in the film.
It’s like the aliens pranked us: spend billions on a big spinney ball thing only to be told to look at pi – something we were doing anyway – and find a pattern that some people take to be proof of god.
Wat?!
Meanwhile the movie ending seemed reasonable to me. If you want the audience to doubt their own eyes (and dismiss the fact that the spinney ball thing was successfully constructed) and question whether the whole thing was a false memory, you need to telegraph that hard. It wasn’t that kind of movie.
The 5 hours (or whatever) of static is not there to convince us, it’s to show that the prosecutor kinda knew she was telling the truth, and was just attacking her for…well, political gain, because he found it hard to accept, it’s debateable what his motivation was.
Now I’ve had my say, we can end this tangent 
Aah, yes, thanks, irrationality and normality is required, got it.
That’s a given - I wasn’t thinking of an actual printout, anyway.
That’s not my view of the ending. He’s completely crushed and when he gets notified of his 100,000 mile mark he realizes he has no ‘home’. And the last scene is him walking away from his luggage.
You’re off by a couple orders of magnitude. He actually crossed the 10 million mile mark. At my last employer we had a lot of people who regularly surpassed 100k miles.
I don’t understand why nobody else made the drop [in Contact]. I’m sure the John Glenn expy in the Senate (if he was there) would instantly volunteer and try to corroborate her experience. Was the thing using say 1.21 gigawatts of power each time, making routine trips far too expensive? Seems a complete waste to build the thing for just one trip/drop…
It was an alien design and no one knew what The Machine was supposed to do prior to first use.
The Wages of Fear. I guess the final scene was artistic or a metaphor or acknowledging the universe isn’t fair or something. But it was also made the character look really really fucking stupid. Trying to make a truck dance?