Carry On! You’re doing a fine job!
This is one of my all-time favorite movies, but I have to agree that was a dumb move by an overeager rookie who should probably have not even been at that house without a more seasoned agent along.
Eh, true, but she did have her boss just say to her that they have found the serial killer and were closing in on him asap. Being trainee-new, and having your boss not only say it’s over but also thank you for your contribution to this newly-solved case, I forgive her for having her guard down. And hearing Catherine obviously threw Clarice off her game.
I think it works both in context of the characters, and plotwise, given the scene between Jack/Clarice right before it.
I rather enjoyed Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed. It wasn’t amazing, but coasting on nostalgic charm can get you pretty far if you play it right. Then, at the very end, they had this dance-off featuring Ruben Studdard, and it really broke the spell. There are fun cameos, and there are bullshit cameos, and this was most certainly the latter.
Umm no, Popeye smacks his really hard, then Bluto runs away.
The ending of Shultze gets the Blues was good, but a downer.
FBI agents, especially new agents, never, ever go investigating on their own.
This will ruin many plots and scenes in many films and TV scenes of course where the lone cop/agent (nearly always female) gets captured.
If I remember correctly, Clarice goes to that house looking for Mrs. Lipman to get some information about the first victim. She finds a guy instead, and over the course of their conversation she figures out that he is Buffalo Bill. She tries to arrest him, but he gets away and goes down to the basement. That’s the moment Clarice becomes an idiot. She has found the most notorious serial killer in the country, and she’s the only person who knows who he is. She has to tell somebody. Call Crawford, call the local sheriff, call her roommate at the FBI Academy, but call somebody! Get some backup and keep him contained. Instead she follows him into the basement. I think she even sees Catherine Martin (the senator’s daughter being held captive) and doesn’t take her to safety. If Starling gets herself killed then Buffalo Bill kills Catherine, flees, and the whole investigation has to start all over.
It may be unrealistic that a trainee would go on an investigation like that on her own. But what she does after she figures out his identity is stupid.
Two come to mind though I’m sure I could think of more.
Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture a Duckling) is a pretty fascinating 70s giallo that breaks with the form in that it’s set in a rural area rather than the typical city setting. The mystery plays out as entertainingly as most of them do in that genre, but then at the end (spoiler, I guess), when one character plummets off a cliff, the dummy effects are hilariously bad, like 100X worse than you’ll see in any other movie of that vintage. What was a pretty decent sleazy Italian thriller becomes a ridiculous comedy in the last few minutes.
As well, I thought Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz was beautiful and endlessly wise about the collapse of a relationship…until the last reel when everything went sailing off the rails. All credibility I’d invested in the characters just crumbled. Rarely have I been so mad at a movie I loved so much for most of the running time.
You raise a good point, but part of Jaws’ fascination in my opinion was that fact that this one shark seemed to go after this one guy, just as much as he was going after the shark. Maybe that’s from a ten year old’s point of view, but the relentless pursuit seems to me went both ways. In any event, the relentless pursuit motif was certainly there in both films.
There are three separate questions:
(1) Were the actions that Clarice took stupid?
(2) Were the actions that Clarice took out of character?
(3) To what extent do your answers to the above questions “ruin” the movie for you?
I think the answer to (1) is pretty unequivocally YES.
The answer to (2) is pretty debatable
The answer to (3) is, of course, up to each individual person.
I definitely think the movie would have been better with a bit more motivation for her to be that reckless, maybe she tried to call first (remember, this was before cell phones), maybe she had some additional reason to think that if he got away they’d never find him again, etc, etc. That said… it certainly doesn’t ruin the movie for me, either the preceding 9/10 of the movie or the remainder of the climax. Knocks it down a peg in quality, arguably, but compared to some endings being discussed in this thread it’s small potatoes.
Nightmare Alley (1947) is a terrific film noir adaptation of a great novel, but the tacked-on happy ending (in which Tyrone Power’s character is rescued from a rock-bottom-hitting carnival geek job by his love interest) has always left an unpleasant aftertaste.
A new version directed by Guillermo del Toro is due out in December, and I’m hoping it ends in the same bleak, nihilistic way as the novel.
It’s been quite a while since I read the book, but IIRC Clarice’s personality was examined in detail and she was acting as we were led to expect.’
I think the movie conveyed a sense of urgency to her actions in the typical manner of a movie where you never wait for backup because it would interrupt the flow of the movie.
Well, some people (like me) loved that ending, and it was alluded to all the way through if you had actually been paying attention. It was clear that Tyler and the Narrator were going through extravagant actions to avoid being in the same room as Marla Singer at the same time. Something strange was obviously going on.
Fight club is one of those movies which people weirdly keep getting wrong. They think it’s about fighting. They get horrified by the cancer tourism satire at the start (I know a few people who hate it for this and never watched past that point). I’ve watched long videos baffled as to what they are going on about and at the end realise that they think some people think the Narrator or Tyler are the heroes or role models to be worshipped. This is not in any way the film I watched and wonder how anyone can take it that way. It was clearly a satire of modern toxic masculinity and consumerism and you’d have to be asleep most of the movie to miss this. Only one person comes out of this movie as a sympathetic human to me, and it was Marla Singer.
Ha! I think that would’ve been hysterical!..
Duel is also a precursor to films like Halloween. The killer just is. There is no explanation, no why.
The fact that there’s no reason for it makes the events of the film more horrifying. Which is, of course, the main goal of horror films - to horrify the audience.
Granted, Duel is more a thriller than a horror film.
It’s like the ending of Dead Poet’s Society. The inspirational hero falls, but his movement goes on larger than ever as his followers take up the cause. That’s the payoff!
Agreed. The Abyss is one of my favorite movies in spite of the ending.
That’s a good point. Even in the movie, it’s called “The Silence of the Lambs” for a reason. There’s a story behind the title, one which we are told explicitly in the course of the film, and it speaks to Clarice’s motives.
I think the movie conveyed a sense of urgency to her actions in the typical manner of a movie where you never wait for backup because it would interrupt the flow of the movie.
She might also have been concerned that if she did not pursue Bill immediately, he would flee with Catherine or kill her as he fled (if she was alive, keeping in mind Clarice did not know the precise conditions of Catherine’s captivity until she found her). Clarice wasn’t going to be able to secure the whole house herself, from the inside or the outside, and it would have been several minutes at least before even local police could arrive.
So… Clarice may have made a calculated risk decision in an uncertain situation involving a potential hostage. Or she may have been driven to stop those lambs from screaming. Or both. Maybe the elements of her psychology we have been exposed to weighed in the face of the uncertainty to push her one way over another.
Unbreakable. We had a perfectly good movie about a guy discovering that he has superpowers, and it’s ruined at the end by a screen freeze and a tacked-on graphic explaining what happens next.
Prometheus. While watching it, it felt like it was going to be a well-thought-out prequel which explained the origin of the xenomorphs and why they were on that moon in the first place. Everything seemed to be lining up in that direction, but then things went sideways so that there could be a gruesome engineer vs. xenomorph scene and a big showy spaceship crash.
Well, it’s still gorgeous to look at and Michael Fassbender was terrific.