I’ve stated this here before, but this one really angered me: **Friday Night Lights **
Leave before the ending card. You’ll then realize you watched the wrong underdog movie.
The next year, the team WINS the State Title. This is more remarkable as they’re replacing all the stars on offense and defense from the previous year. Think the 49ers winning it all the year after Montana, Rice, and Lott suddenly retired.
Actually, the ending of Bakshi;'s Lord of the Rings was recut after its initial release. The version I saw shortly after its opening in New York City was NOT the same as the version I saw later in the local cinema (Yes, I saw it more than once). The original ending didn’t occur at that point, or, I suspect, where it does on the video releases (although i haven’t seen those). It looks as if the existing ending is the result of a studio recut.
I can’t find anything about this on Wikipedia or the iMDB, but, believe me, they changed the order and cutting of scenes at the end.
Obviously his years of drug use totally rotted out his brain, because (at least in my opinion) the novella ending is so much better than the big ol’ Fuck You we got in the theater.
Don’t forget the lovely view of the New York Mountains we get in the background of that scene…
The S-Mart one is better, it’s the one I saw first (at the cinema).
The other one is better for a sequel but it was pretty clear there was never going to be one, and it was a downer ending with no action.
Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke intentionally made the ending of 2001 confusing. They were even quoted as saying something to the effect of “If you didn’t leave the theater saying WTF, then we didn’t do our job.” I’m too lazy at the moment to go to imdb to find the exact quote.
I asked Bruce Campbell which ending he preferred, and he said that he thought the post-apocalyptic ending was better.
Or the skyscrapers of Washington, D.C. Or:
Austin Powers: “You know, it’s amazing how the English countryside looks in no way like Southern California.” Scene of deserts and such.
I’ve heard that children’s movies prefer falling deaths because you can imply the death without actually showing it. Pixar’s Up uses the same trope.
Yes. My understanding is that the LotR ran out of money (which also means they ran out of studio support) and they wrapped up the production as best they could.
It has its own trope and everything.
WARNING: TVTropes link.
About the first half dozen times I watched the movie I couldn’t even remember the ending because it feels like it has nothing to do with the rest of the movie. It’s an anticlimax and not very interesting. Ending a crazy comedy like that is very hard. Few of the Marx Brothers’ movies have satisfying endings either. They just sort of stop.
Almost.
That was the whole point! A huge bureaucracy wasting gazillions of dollars that has no idea what a genuine threat is as opposed to nonsense, spending half its time covering its own ass, and even afterward having no idea if what it did was for the better or not. I loved that movie! It was the blackest of black comedies.
For those who don’t like the endings of Holy Grail, Blazing Saddles, Burn After Reading, and the like, I strongly recommend you never read Tristam Shandy. And probably avoid its recent movie adaptation, A Cock and Bull Story.
I liked the ending for that exact reason. The problem was that the rest of the movie wasn’t any good. Despite the fact that the case is over-the-top great, a plot summary of the movie is better and funnier than the movie actually is.
Which movie was this again?
Burn After Reading.
Thanks, I’d lost track. 
Burn After Reading was an exquisitely good movie from beginning to end, and I believe it was Brad Pitt’s absolute best performance right next to 12 Monkeys.
The ending was just the icing on the cake.
You are being sarcastic right? You have to be.
In the days before the concept of sequels, they were planning to do ‘Monty Pythons various medieval sketches Part II’?
Right.
Let me tell you about the 1994 Robert “T2” Patrick vehicle Zero Tolerance.
Now, I watched it on the telly a few years back and I can barely remember any of the plot, but it had one of the most hilariously retarded endings of all time.
In the movie, Patrick spends lots of bullets killing off members of a drug cartel who murdered his family, except the leader. He captures the leader and brings him to DEA headquarters or whatever, and gives the old clichéd “I’m not killing you because that would make me you” line, and then, wait for it, then the drug lord grabs a gun from one of the cops, tries to shoot Patrick, and Patrick, I kid you not, roundhouse kicks him through an improbably placed window sending him to his death.
My God, it was like a deleted scene from The Naked Gun but completely straight faced.
This one’s a bit different, because it’s a documentary, and it’s old (1970): Gimme Shelter, about the Rolling Stones tour and the anti-Woodstock disastrous concert in Altamont, California.
In an otherwise positive review from the time of the original release, the reviewer mentioned that the last scene in the film shows people walking along highways TO the concert. He wondered if the directors (the Maysles brothers) intended to imply that we’re all doomed to revisit the hell of Altamont over and over – and if so, this would invalidate what was good about the film.
I thought this was an interesting observation, but after hearing the DVD director’s commentary (that particular scene isn’t discussed), I think it was simply just because people went to the concert in the daylight, so that was the only footage like that they had (the commentary DOES discuss how, in general, available lighting limited what they could film and how on numerous occasions.)