The Last American Virgin starts out as a moronic Porky’s rip-off (that is, even more moronic than the original) and about an hour in gets very real.
Adaptation would qualify. For most of the film, we see a sensitive screenwriter trying to piece together a beautiful narrative without twists and turns; he just wants to adapt a beautiful story about orchids. In the final reel, that all goes to hell. On with the chase scenes and drug dealers!
A Study In Scarlet.
In the first half of the book Sherlock Holmes solves a murder, in London. When you flip to the next page, you’re suddenly in the middle of Utah desert, dying of thirst until you are saved by Brigham Young and a bunch of other Mormons who take you (well, the character) in as one of their own.
The second part of this book was labeled as Part II and the chapters started at ‘1’ again. Between that and the fact that Sherlock had already solved the mystery (though leaving out some oddly important details IMO) I truly thought I was reading a different book. I just assumed that A Study In Scarlet was bundled with another book and I finished the first and was starting in on the next. In fact, when I started to realize I was still in the same book I did some Googling to make sure that I didn’t miss something.
Ha! I read it when I was a kid, in the late '70s or early '80s. There was no Google to give me cheat codes. I just kept reading until I figured it out on my own.
How about Feist’s Magician? It starts off as grim-and-gritty Low Fantasy, then switches to Epic High Fantasy.
What’s low and what’s high, again?
I just come here and ask about it.
Midnight in Paris starts off like any Woody Allen movie, populated with monied, attractive, hyper-articulate characters yammering on about this and that,
…and then the limo pulls up.
It seemed to me that AI with Joel Haley Osmont (his second starring role?) and Jeff Bridges had a rather disappointing part III of 3. The first two-thirds were a modernized cyber-Pinnochio fairy tale. Then, rather than end the story as a tragedy, Spielberg tacked on an exceedingly long sci-fi epilogue for a deus ex machina happy ending that wasn’t really all that happy.
We rented it and watched it, in English without subtitles, with my cousine from Japan. Overall it seemed like kind of a mess and I still wonder how much she understood.
—G?!
A Beautiful Mind is seemingly only about a brilliant mathematician and his new job working for the government, but it does an abrupt about-face when it’s revealed
almost everything in his life except his marriage and the math genius part is all a figment of his schizophrenic mind. The rest of the movie is mostly about his battle with mental illness.
I’m forgetting the name at the moment but the classic example in my experience was an Italian movie my old neighbor loaned me. This guy had somehow come to posess a bunch of motion picture equipment during WW2. Now after the war he’s travelling through the Italian countryside filming “screen tests” that he’s allegedly going to take to the big studios. It’s a scam, he’s charging people for the screen tests but not planning to actually do anything with them. The first 3/4 is pretty light hearted, not comedy but more like amusing character studies of the people he films and thier stories. Then it all catches up with him and the movie turns violent and tragic. Ah, just remembered the title The Star Maker.
I was lucky enough to see this on opening day, before the plot twist had been spoiled. It was a fantastic movie, with quite a sucker punch.
Mr Death: A documentary about a guy who fixes electric chairs, but is then called to build gas chambers (IIRC)…then it switches gears when he travels to Auschwitz and denies that the Holocaust happened.
I went into this movie expecting a documentary only about a guy who fixes/creates capital punishment devices. It got really bizarre at the end. I’m not even sure if I made it all the way through. If I wanted to learn about what Holocaust deniers have to say, I bet I could come up with something more authoritative then some guy saying "See this rock, I got it from Germany, promise, and I had it tested, really I did, and it doesn’t have any poison gas residue in it (50 years later). Therefor there was no Holocaust. "
John Sayles’ character driven story about a small Alaskan town and its inhabitants that are struggling to make ends meet…then other things happen.
Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson starts out with the disappearance of all modern life in Europe, replaced by strange, dangerous lifeforms; the book starts out being about the exploration of this new land, then gets weird…
What about Fight Club - seemingly about the stresses of the workaday world, then it turns weird.
He uses exactly the same trick in The Valley Of Fear - not Utah, but a remote valley somewhere in America.
How about a song?
This starts out like most folk-songs with a young man walking out on a summer morning. Usually (in traditional song anyway) he meets a young woman and penis ensues.
But this song changes mood and direction as the listener slowly becomes aware of who the young man is and what he is walking towards…
Hancock starts out as a very funny comedy, but then halfway through forgets it ever was a comedy and tries to be some sort of mythological romance/tragedy thing.
Kind of obscure, but the Brazilian film The Man Who Copied (O Homem Que Copiava) shifts from a quirky character-driven romantic comedy to a much darker heist flick. I didn’t have time to watch the DVD all the way through at once, and with the stopping point I chose it wound up being almost like I watched two different movies that happened to have the same characters.
I think this movie did push the changing tones/genres thing a bit too far, though. After the crime plot works out, the main character wins the lottery (!) and he and his friends buy themselves everything they want. There’s then yet another twist at the very end, which by that point just felt gratuitous.