…these threads infuriate and amuse me far too much.
I actually like the Alien-Mecha ending of AI much more than the bottom of the sea ending…but you ahve to turn it off right after they say “From him we will lean about humanity.” THAT’S such a EFFED up idea.
With Monty Python/Grail, the absurdist, 4th-wall ending arguably has an even more subversive kick to it because of the founding-national-myth-like source material. I bet some English viewers were thinking throughout, “how did they dare do this?” even as they were laughing.
And I liked the downer ending to The Mist, too.
The French slasher flick Haut Tension (High Tension) was satisfyingly gritty until the incredibly dishonest “twist” ending – about which, Roger Ebert wrote [paraphrasing here], “it had a plot hole so huge you could drive a truck through it – which they did, literally”. The DVD extra features made clear that the asinine filmmakers couldn’t have been more smugly pleased with their story, BTW, including its ridiculous plotting. I couldn’t tell if they were being blithely dishonest about their film’s flaws or if they were truly that clueless.
I’ll confess to seeing that as being almost the point. The universe gives a man who praises the idea of never forming bonds (the entire backpack deal) exactly what he’s been asking for: Freedom to roam, but not to settle down. I liked the Flying Dutchman ending.
I like the movie My Cousin Vinnie a lot, but I thought the ending was way too deus ex machina: they just happen to find the car that Mona Lisa described, it happens to have the murder weapon and two guys who look like the defendants, etc… On the commentary the director said he wasn’t happy with it either and didn’t want to include it, but the powers-that-be wanted a permanently closed case because even if you proved the innocent of “the two utes” it felt there was no resolution if the real killers weren’t caught.
I thought Godfather 3’s ending with Michael falling over, presumably dead but maybe just sleepy, was unintentionally funny. Apparently so did Chris Elliot who did a send up of it on his show at the time, Get a Life.
No it gave him the idea in his head that he was wrong, life isn’t about being alone and completely independent because he was falling in love with the other female traveler…just to have it brutally taken away from him, make him realize that you should cast off everyone you have ever known and be by yourself and give everyone in the audience a big “fuck you”.
It was way fun if you overlook the implausibility. To the extent that they could sell it, I think they did.
I always wondered about the sickening scene at beginning with the trucker in the field… I guess that was just part of her fantasy…
The Truman Show, because a) Christof straight tries to murder Truman on TV, which was a big WTF?; and 2) the effect of the real world on Truman would have been a vital continuation. It ended too soon.
The movies with a badly thought final twist reeeeally infuriate me. You know, the ones that, if you back trace the plot, mean that the twist is impossible.
Two prime examples of that: Machstick Men. Sure, a nice enough movie up until the end, but
for it to make sense, Sam Rockwell had to be some sort of God able to determine every single move Cage was supposed to make. Had Nic Cage just decided to contact the mother of his alleged daughter by himself, the whole plan would have been shot to hell. In fact, I spent the whole movie thinking “well, its a movie about con men, so the whole thing has to be a big con… but no, none of this could be possible planned beforehand”
I had a similar problem with "Angels and Demons" since
[SPOILER]Come on! Seriously? Ewan MacGregor planned all that with absurdly accurate timing? Had Tom Hanks just taken a minute to tie up his shoe or something and Ewan would have just been vaporized with the rest of the Vatican!
It could have made some sense if Ayelet Zurer had been working with him, and lied about the timing or started the bomb herself or whatever, but since that didn’t turned out to be the case, the only possibility is that Ewan actually had God on his side. Well done, Tom, you went against the creator’s wishes. Enjoy your eternity in Hell.[/SPOILER]
Gangster Octopus:
But isn’t that sort of the meta-point of the ending? Truman gets to live his life no longer an object of other people’s entertainment - including us.
I don’t like the ending to Matrix Reloaded because of the way Matrix Revolutions started.
At the end of Reloaded,
Neo finds out he can control squiddies in the “real world.” This set up a huge final movie where we find out that the “real world,” as we know it, is actually just another part of the matrix, which also explains how the smith program was able to take over the personality and mind of a “human.” All the clues fit together so perfectly, we all assumed that the final movie would be a series of major revelations.
However, at the beginning of Revolutions, Neo gets stuck in the Subway of Boredom for half an hour while all sorts of random crap happens in both worlds. Then they go visit the french guy again, which didn’t really make sense since he didn’t help them the first time. It became clearer and clearer that they had written themselves into a hole and were scrambling furiously to figure out a satisfying ending to it on the fly.
Therefore, I nominate Reloaded as having a terrible ending, because it was not only misleading, but promised a much better finale than Revolutions gave.
Yeah, but since that particular type of ending is such the cliche, the “surprise” could have been that he actually prevented the plague. They still could have done the thing about his childhood visions were of himself, to “surprise” those viewers who were new to time travel. But then having him actually change the future by stopping the bad guy would “surprise” the rest.
I guess part of why the ending so terribly disappointed me was my expectations. I didn’t see it until years after it came out, and I’d always heard how great a movie it was. So then, seeing the totally expected, trite, pat, stupid, cliched ending was a huge let down.
Except that he’d be a media sensation ever afterward, and could only ever have a life of his own by becoming a recluse.
Yeah, I also think that having them find the other car and other guys made vinnie’s brilliant defense kinda pointless. I mean, ultimately all the stuff he did about tearing holes in every witness’s alibi, and even noticing the tire tracks in the picture (well, ok, except for causing him to ask the sheriff to look for the other car), didn’t matter. Just finding a matching car and matching guys (with the right kind of gun, no less) would have caused the jury to acquit.
And the silly thing is that they could have had it both ways. They could have had the trial end with Lisa’s testimony (or I guess with the prosecution’s expert being forced to agree that Lisa was right), then show the jury acquitting, and then just before Vinnie and Lisa leave, the sheriff (acting on his own initiative, not because Vinnie asked him to) says that they found the other car and guys with the gun.
Akira: I can handle totally incomprehensible metaphysical endings if the movies themselves are sort of meta-physical (2001, Donnie Darko), but Akira was a plot driven action movie leading to the hopeful final discovery of the mystry of the title title character. When they find him it instantly devolves into a confusing mishmash of weird visuals and cryptic sayings that lead nowhere.
Wizards (1977): It’s been over 20 years since I saw this, but I remember being very disappointed by the ending. I might have a better opinion if I saw it again.
The whole movie is a battle between magic (good) and technology (bad). At the end the good wizard pulls out a gun and kills the bad wizard/technician. totally dismissing all the duality that went before.
The ending of “My Fair Lady” always bugged me. Eliza would Not be fetching the Professor’s slippers.
I also though Blair Witch was “meh”, but I like the last scene. When we were told early on that little kids stood in the corner pretty much waiting to be slaughtered, that seemed totally reasonable to me. A little kid will obey and do what the scary man says, hoping that good little boys aren’t punished. But an adult? No way.
That’s what made the scene work for me. I tells ya, if I was 20 and some evil, scary dude had me in a basement and told me to stand in the corner and I knew I was going to die — no way would I just stand there. I’d go down kicking punching, biting and clawing. So if that 20-year-old guy was scared so bad that he was obediently standing in the corner like a good little boy, how f**king scary was that evil??? :eek:
You can’t actually film it. It’s like turning on the light so you can see if there’s a monster in the closet. It’s only really scary if you don’t know for sure if there is or is not a monster. And if you know there’s something in the closet, it’s also scarier if you aren’t sure if the monster is an ordinary alligator or a supernatural zombie-dragon.
If it’s a beyond your comprehension and/or can’t be defined, it’s way scarier.
I also didn’t care for the ending of The Mist. I think had they not had the military come through immediately afterward, making his actions a big tragic ‘oopsie’, it would have been better. Yeah, I know what they were going for with that, but I just didn’t care for it. Either leave his fate ambiguous with the others dead, or have the military come through to find all of them dead. Had there not been so much agonizing over “5 of us, only 4 bullets” or however it was, it might not have been so bad. But the way they did it just didn’t work for me.
Another terrible ending (granted it was a terrible movie): The Game. It was so atrocious I’m not going to defend my accusations. If you haven’t seen the movie, congratulations. If you have, I’m sorry.
The Quiet Earth (1984) And don’t think you’re going to get any answers from the *scarce-as-hen’s-teeth book that it was based on. As one reviewer put it, they took a few set pieces from the book and just did their own script.
*A copy of which I own:cool:
Plain spinster (or Hollywood’s idea of one, anyway) Joan Fontaine ignores all family advice and marries handsome cad Cary Grant. Then he starts lying to her and spending all her money. Then she starts finding a trail of evidence that he’s planning to kill her for her life insurance money but she’s too ashamed to raise her concerns.
The studio imposed ending…
…that it’s all just a big misunderstanding on her part and instead he was going to kill himself out of guilt for getting her into debt was utterly unconvincing. Retrospectively gives the film a bit of a ‘Well, so what, then?’ quality.
I liked the ending too, but had a different take on it. To me, one of the running threads through BWP was how infantalized these college kids were. The scene where one of the characters keeps chanting “No one’s going to help you!” drove that home for me. These kids aren’t prepared to function as adults. They’ve lived their whole lives being bailed out whenever there was a problem, and now there’s no one and they don’t have a clue what to do. When we see the last guy standing with his face pointed towards the wall, that’s the final nail. These kids, and by extension their generation, aren’t prepared to survive in the scary woods of the world. They’re screwed.