Try Threads. Makes Testament look like a comedy.
Brazil had two endings… the “Happy ending” went to america… the rest of the world got the “bitter” one
FML
In the Company of Men. I felt sucker-punched at the end of this movie.
The previously-mentioned Grave of the Fireflies.
And, although this is arguable, John Sayles’ Limbo. I watched it with MrWhatsit, and after the end asked him what he thought happened to the characters. “Nothing good,” he said. I agree.
Roman Polanski’s The Tenant surely wins the prize.
I bought Harry and Tonto, but I’m afraid to watch it (don’t feel suicidal yet)- one of the IMDB reviews calls it “sad beyond tears”. So, I don’t know how it ends…
I’m not sure if Fight Club counts. It made me feel weird all over, though.
I’ll second Welcome to the Dollhouse.
Scarface, Goodfellas, Boogie Nights.
Vertigo, since Hitchcock didn’t use the post-belltower scene with Scotty and Midge listening to the radio.
Aguirre, The Wrath of God ends with an insane Kinski shouting at monkeys, adrift on a raft with his dead and dying crew.
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
The Last King of Scotland
The “love conquers all” version of Brazil (it’s not just the ending, the whole film is recut and rearranged) was never released theatrically in the US, it was intended for TV. The theatrical release was the same one seen in Europe minus around ten minutes (not affecting the story, just bit of tightening here and there to bring the film to a more manageable length).
Oh, I don’t know about that:
Dr. Nicholas Garrigan makes it onto the plane.
Great film.
Johnny Got His Gun
“For the love of God, I’m begging you…please let me die.”
“No.”
I second The Pledge. That movie is one of the few recent Hollywood releases that doesn’t even attempt to give you a crumb of hope.
“A Perfect World”
I can’t speak for Liberal’s dislike of the movie, but mine stems from the fact that, aside from how drawn out and boring the film is, it some how inexplicably beat Martin Scorsese’s best film, Raging Bull, for the Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards, starting a trend that would deny Scorsese recognition until he finally won an Oscar as a consolation prize for the mediocre The Departed.
Two words: Neil LaBute. If you don’t want pessimism and misogyny, avoid this guy.
Not quite. The American and European cuts both had the “lobotomy” ending that Gilliam intended, but the American release was shorter due to Gilliam’s attempts to cut it to the required length per studio contract. When he couldn’t, some no-talent executive shithead named Sidney Sheinberg, then president of Universal Studios (the American distributor) hacked it up and spliced in edit room waste to make his action-oriented, romance-heavy “Love Conquerors All” cut. Brazil ended up being released–twice–in very limited form in Gilliam’s American Cinematic cut in the United States, and in an essentially uncut version in Europe (where it was distributed by Fox Worldwide). The Sheinberg cut was first seen publically broadcast on ABC, and as such is sometimes known as the “network t.v. cut” although it is a substantially different film. Both the Criterion Collection Edition DVD release and the book The Battle Of Brazil detail the travails Gilliam and company (along with the Los Angeles Film Critics Society, which championed the film as being the most original and brilliant in the decade), and the DVD offers all three edits. The Wikipedia article on Brazil details the most significant differences between the versions.
What Godfather, Part III? Part II ends with Frodo getting wacked, Connie leaving her husband and moving back to the family compound, and Kay being permanently shut out of her childrens’ lives.That’s all it really needs.
Nah, it had a “happy” ending; the “starchild” (the former David Bowman) is reborn into a new evolution of the human species, which can free itself from the crude constraints of physical bodies, linear existence, and crude tools manipulated with barely modified feet. For Kubrick, at least, it’s the height of optimism.
Billy Wilder had a knack for making movies that seem to have a happy ending, but probably don’t. It’s unlikely that Sugar is really going to be happy with “Joesphine” (or the creepy old man with “Daphne”, despite his acceptance that “Nobody’s perfect,”) and I daresay that Shirley MacLaine’s elevator operator isn’t going to find the unemployed, spastic, statistic-quoting Jack Lemmon charming for long. Norma Desmond may have gotten her closeup but I don’t think butler/director/former ex-husband is going to be able to keep her isolated from reality in prison.
John Frankenheimer’s better films (The Manchurian Candidate, Seconds, Seven Days In May, Ronin) all end on sour notes of paranoia and deceit, even when the heros nominally succeed. “She will not be coming back here, will she?” We’d have to give David Mamet significant credit on the last, of course, as well as his own films, particularly the cynically satirical Spartan. (The pentultimate scene with Ed O’Neill channeling Donald Rumsfeld in a press conference where he spins some bullshit tale about “fathers and daughters” and how kidnapping is the ultimate terrorism, et cetera, seguing into Kilmer’s character, living as an underground ex-pat in London, responding to another man’s offhand comment about how it is “Time to go home,” with a cryptically weary, “Lucky man,” is shattering, particularly when you take it as a metaphor for the current Administration’s use and disposal of patriot Americans sacrificing themselves at the alter of an illusionary agendy.)
Similarly for Michael Mann movies Thief and Heat, where the protagonist, a guy who wants to make the classic big score and retire with his woman to have some fanciful, unlikely perfect family life, ends up wounded or dead, having thrown away everything to isolate himself and maintain his code.
And I’m not sure how I missed this on the first go around, but the films of Italian neo-Realist Vittorio de Seca, particularly Ladri di biciclette and Umberto D have pessimistic, unhappy endings. So does the famous (if perhaps somewhat overrated) Citizen Kane. And Carol Reed’s The Third Man (an excellent counterpoint to the tinny zealous pre-war optimism of Casablanca). In fact, pretty much everything that ever starred Orson Welles has a bad ending, paralleling his real life.
I think The War Of The Roses might have had an unhappy ending, but I was too busy laughing to notice, especially when she jerks his hand out of his as they lay dieing on the floor. Then again, DeVito advises his client to reconcile with his wife, and then calls up his own wife, indicating that he’s happily married, so perhaps it’s not really that the ending is unhappy, merely the overarching expectations of the Roses.
Anyway, there are clearly plenty of films with unhappy, pessimistic endings; just not the majority of films cracked out by the California studio money-printing machine.
Stranger
uh, there are plenty of movies that don’t have uplifting endings… most of them just aren’t American. for example, it’s quite difficult to find a Japanese movie in which everything works out happily in the end… especially with respect to the romances; god forbid any of those ever come to fruition.
the most recent movie I watched in which the ending made me wish I’d never watched it was a Korean movie called Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. I believe that literally everyone you are supposed to give a shit about is absolutely fucked in the end.
the American example that sticks out in my mind is Requiem for a Dream. damn good movie, but if it’s up to me I’ll never see it again.
Last Night—although nobody was actually miserable at the end, which is ironic, given the situation.
**The Reflecting Skin**.The Spy Who Came in From the Cold