Just saw The Next Three Days and found the ending boring and predictable. But not the worst ending to a flick i’ve ever seen.
That honor goes to The Last American Virgin. What a depressing ending. I mean, Gary is a pussy who needs to wise up to the fact that Karen is a self centered adolescent cunt, but I still wonder how many teens went home and blew their brains out with their pops handgun in the nightstand drawer after seeing that. I mean, fuck! They roll the credits over Gary’s devastated face and everything!
Comment on TLAV ending and give me a worse one, if you can.
Extremities starring Farrah Fawcett, James Russo, Alfre Woodard and Diana Scarwid.
A man attacks a woman who escapes but leaves her purse behind. Alone one day in the house she shares with two other women, her attacker visits. He is obviously intent on rape. He forces her to “invite” him in, “offer” him a drink and so on.
Circumstances allow her to disarm him and and lock him in the open fireplace. He explains that if she calls the police he will say she is a liar - she invited him in, gave him coffee. He will not even be charged and he will come back again. So she plans to kill him and bury him in the garden.
The two friends return home and they join in trying to solve this moral dilemma and since the rapist has them onside with his story it’s starting to look like murder is the best solution.
Then miraculously he confesses to a series of other crimes that no doubt can be proved and he can be handed over to the police. brilliantly making the movie about nothing.
I really didn’t like the ending of No Country for Old Men. I don’t mind a downer ending now and then, but this ending was just pointless. The story essentially ended 20 minutes before, so everything afterwords was just strange, pointless crap.
“Murder by Contract” is a pretty good 1958 film noir marred by the ending of the hitman hesitating to kill his target (a woman) and the cop protecting her wakes up after being knocked out to save her. I suppose back then you couldn’t get approval to do a film with a contract killer getting away with it.
Lots of people feel that Orson Welles’s “Magnificent Ambersons” was hurt by the happier ending RKO tacked on.
AI: Artificial Intelligence had a great ending and then ruined it by tacking on a stupid ending instead. I still wonder what was the point of the aliens coming to rescue Haley Joel.
Other than being sad was was so bad about that ending. If Gary had ended up getting the girl in the end I doubt many people would even remember The Last American Virgin even existed.
they weren’t aliens. they were the legacy of Humans - robots with advanced AI come to learn more about their creators(? indirect creators? ancestral creator?) through an earlier model.
Back in ye olde days, Fritz Lang made movies like WOMAN IN THE WINDOW or YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE that were basically extremely depressing movies, where people are swallowed up by Destiny that destroys their lives to no useful purpose. Hollywood required tacked on “happy” endings.
So, for instance, WOMAN IN THE WINDOW (1944) is an absolutely brilliant noir film, amazing, but depressing as hell. Edward G Robinson as a college professor whose wife is away for the weekend, accidentally caught up in a scandal, murder, and blackmail. He’s sure that the blackmailer will name him for the murder; this will destroy him, his career, and his family. He takes an overdoes of sleeping pills, and as he’s dying the phone rings: it’s the woman telling him that the blackmailer was killed, all is well… but it’s too late. Robinson is fading out and doesn’t answer the ringing phone. which is about as depressing a movie ending as I’ve ever seen. And then it turns out to be all a dream.So, this was movie as Art, about fate and the hopelessness/helplessness of life, with an artificial tacked-on happy ending. Sigh.
On a lighter note, I made the mistake of watching PRINCE OF PERSIA, the end of which is they roll back time and none of the movie ever happened. SHeesh.
A lot of movies have some brief ‘happy moment’ tacked on at the end. Usually involving The Girl, with swelling music on the soundtrack. Blade Runner, for one.
The Lost Weekend ends with our hero who, after a hellish series of events because of his dipsomania, nonetheless seems to have hit bottom and is on the road to wellness. He has the support of his brother, the love of his girlfriend, and, offered a glass of booze, flicks his cigarette into it! No more of that! He rolls up his sleeves and sits down to his typewriter and write his book. Just like that! Maybe this ending was a bright spot in his life, where he turned his life around, but I doubt he wrote more than three pages before he was back to his old habits.
And every romantic comedy, where they are married/hooked up, and live happily ever after.
I love Steven Spielberg. I think he’ll go down in history as one of the greatest filmmakers ever. But man, he is the king of botched endings. AI, Minority Report, War of the Worlds, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, Munich. I thought every one of those movies was fantastic, but they all had problematic endings.
Also I thought The Last American Virgin had a great ending. Not some sappy bs but honest about what would happen.
Now for an ending I hated I’ll offer you Lost in Translation. Having Bill leave would have been great, but having him stop the cab and go whisper something we can’t hear is crap. This was done so the audience would project whatever they wanted him to say to her instead of making an actual artistic choice.
I suppose I’m going to get flamed for this, but I never particularly cared for the ending of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I just found it way too silly and sudden. The movie is great, but it really feels like they were running out of ideas and said: “Screw it, we’re just not going to have an end at all!”
Maybe I’m just showing a profound misunderstanding of the Pythons, but that’s what I’ve always thought.
The story ended “20 minutes before” only in the sense that the narrative of Josh Brolin’s character ends at that point. There are other crucial plot threads that don’t end then, though.
Though “Lost In Translation” was one of the most over-hyped, critically fawned over, yet thoroughly-mediocre-in-every-way films of the past decade or more, the ending (which many Sundance wannabe types seemed to view as an all-time defining moment of cinema) was even more pretentious and forced than the rest of the movie.
I can’t for the life of me understand how Lost In Translation received such high praise and adulation, when it was so void of any redeeming qualities.
(I should add that Bill Murray stars in 2 of my 10 favorite movies of all time, so I went into L.I.T. fully expecting to love it, and so maybe I set myself up for disappointment from the start)
He was talking about the fact of facing his own mortality, since he had had a dream about catching up to his deceased father. He’d also finally realized that he couldn’t stop what was coming (the evil force–the villain), and good guys don’t always win.
