I was extremely happy when, in My Best Friend’s Wedding, the wedding that was originally planned was the one that actually ended up taking place, and that Julia Roberts didn’t end up “getting her guy/soulmate” after all. which runs against the “romantic comedy” genre convention that character A figures out that character B is his/her true love/soulmate despite said character’s impending marriage to a person who was a perfectly fine potential spouse, but for a flight of “romantic whimsy.” Ref: Sleepless in Seattle, Serendipity, etc.
I liked Mimic, if only for the scene where the cute wisecracking kids explore the subway system.
They get gruesomely killed and eaten. Ha! I’d always wished one of those annoying “cute” kids would actually see some consequences for their stupid actions.
Errr… Skammer, no one has to be very brilliant to suspect what’s inside the spoiler box… Everyone: can’t we be more careful with this? What you said outside may drive you to deduce the inside… am I right or am I right? 
I was thinking that too.
I was rather shocked in Sleepy Hollow in one little scene: The headless horseman comes into a house consisting of a father, mother, and small child (probably about six). As the father fights, the mother hides the child in the floorboards. The father gets killed, then the mother, and the horseman starts to leave. As he gets to the door, he suddenly turns around, walks over to where the kid is and starts hacking at the floor boards, grabs the kid, and pulls him out. It cuts to a scene of someone hearing the kid screaming, and the person runs over to the cottage just in time to see the horseman walking out the door, stuffing the little kid’s head into a bag. First time I’d seen a little kid get killed in a movie like that in a very long time
I love the sideways slam at product placement in Repo Man.
A character says, “I’m gonna go buy a brewski,” and you see them picking a can off a shelf that’s pure white with ‘Brewski’ as the label. And the shelf is full of cans and boxes of ‘Beer,’ ‘Soap,’ ‘Soda,’ and so on.
One of the westerns Clint Eastwood did had him and a bunch of other men on the wrong end of a sniper shooting. And the thuds of the bullets into flesh came seconds before the sound of the gunshot. They NEVER get that right in movies, but they did there.
Maybe someday there’ll be a distant explosion in a movie where the sound comes when it should.
That reminds me. 2001: A Space Oddessy (sp?) had spaceship flybys and an explosive hatch, not to mention a man screaming his last in space, and Kubrick kept the sound out of the film. Only music was on the soundtrack. Sometimes, not even music. Hooray for that!
Fargo! The main character is pregnant. And the pregnancy has no relevance to the plot. Usually, a woman is only pregnant if it is going to turn out to be part of the plot–like if she goes into premature labor and has to give birth right as her husband is fighting the bad guys (like in Fortress) In Fargo, the pregnancy was part of the characterization of Margie, but wasn’t played for drama or action.
I quite liked it in the Italian Job (originally one, i haven’t seen the remake), right at the end.
I remember the first time i watched it, as the lorry hangs half over the cliff, with the gold on the cliff end of the lorry, really tense moment… Michael Caine says “hold on lads, i got an idea…” And the credits roll. Almost made me cry out in frustration…
Does the remake of the Italian Job end like that?
Two that immediately come to my mind are
Reservoir Dogs, a heist film where you never see the heist.and
Limbo, a “marooned on a island film” where you never find out if the protagonists are rescued.
I’ll note, however, that some people don’t “applaud” those films for breaking the rules, but rather feel cheated by them. On the other hand, who could object tokilling off Steven Segal within the first half-hourin the movie Executive Decision?
Welp, too many other good ones have already been mentioned, and since I have to mention something in order to be included in the cool crowd, I’ll put in my two cents for Contact. It’s the one where Jodie Foster discovers an alien transmission to Earth that gives mankind the means to build a ship to contact the aliens.
Foster never gets to meet the aliens exactly. They communicate with her through an image of her father. Then when she returns, her voyage is discredited by the government, and nothing new is actually learned in the process. It wasn’t the perceived happy ending, where humanity finally solves the riddle of the existence of extraterrestrial life, or one where humans and aliens have a big fight and there’s lots of explosions.
I don’t know if it’s an original idea when it came out, but I always loved Sunset Boulevard
The story starts off with a dead body floating in the water, talking about “Isn’t it always funny how polite people are to you when you’re dead?” The story is then told as a flashback by the dead guy, goes up to his death, and finished a couple of hours afterwards. Really interesting and unique.
Also, I really, really, REALLY like Lake Placid. No need for a spoiler here, what’s great about it is, it’s a movie about a giant crocodile, yet the croc gets very little play. The movie is mainly a focus on the main characters, who are all bitter/angry/fed up sarcastic people. The entire script is nothing but one cut down remark after another. The croc just kinda shows up here and there.
I’d have to say Broadcast News violated movie conventions, to the point where I think a lot of people enjoyed the movie until the end, but left disoriented because of:
[SPOILER] Holly Hunter lusts after William Hurt, while Albert Brooks is desperately in love with Holly Hunter. Movie convention would have Albert Brooks and Holly Hunter finally realizing they're right for each other. Instead, no one gets anyone -- eventually they go their separate ways, recapitulated in bittersweet epilogue. A HUGE violation of movie convention, but that's the way it works in real life. The audience felt cheated because they really *liked* the characters and wanted them to be happy. The movie still did good business, though. [/SPOILER]
The Great Waldo Pepper’s plot hinges around a major violation of movie conventions. A female wingwalker is frozen in terror on the wing of a biplane. Robert Redford and his buddy fly alongside in another plane, and Redford creeps out on the wing, boards the other airplane, slowly crosses over, grabs the woman’s hand…and then she falls. The whole tone of the movie changes at that point. (In an essay, William Goldman, the screenwriter, admits that this is when they lost the audience. People were expecting a light-hearted romp and got something else.)
The Purple Rose of Cairo
The ending is decidedly anti-Hollywood and in fact is the only way the movie could end. Mia Farrow’s character wants desperately for her life to be more like the movies and then she thinks she has the chance when the handsome actor comes to take her away. But that would be too Hollywood an ending and what really happens is she is more or less duped and left to stay in her dreary life.
In Attack of the Clones, Jango Fett’s seismic charges go off about 1 second before you hear the resulting PANG!!! noise. A very cool effect until about .0000001 seconds later when you realize you shouldn’t have heard it at all, physics be damned.
Actually, it was more like 5-15 minutes before the end, but it was still pretty shocking. The film also gets some credit with me for showing two or three people taking shotgun blasts to the head, not because that’s something I reeeaaally dig, but just because that is NOT done.
Ah, that’s right. And still not right.
Still, it’s a move in the right direction.
I kinda liked the ending of Hope Floats, where Sandra Bullock remains unmarried and taking it slow with Harry Connick Jr. The typical ending would have them getting married at the end in some swarmy ceremony. It was nice to see a REAL ending for a change, but not one that was a total bummer.
That’s not really a slam; Alex Cox tried to get product placement money, only using the generic cans when nobody would give him any.
A couple of the later Hallowe’en movies get marks for effort; the writers of either 4 or 5 (I forget which) said they deliberately set out to avoid having the characters do reasonably sane things instead of the whole “I’ll just go investigate that noise in the cellar” bit, and in Hallowe’en: Resurrection a character beats the shit out of the masked slasher instead of running away.
Gah - that’s what I get for rearranging my sentences. I meant to say that the writers set out to have their characters do reasonably sane things instead of go investigate the noise in the cellar.
You could really figure out that Jackson turns out to be one of the sharks in a clever disguise, just from my setup?
Sorry, I’ll try to be more careful. It wasn’t a very good movie anyway…