Okay, let’s give it a shot
(spoiler) I thought the check for a quarter of a mil was too much. Too Hollywood happy happy. The movie should have ended with Keri winning the pie contest.
The whole point for me was that Keri gained strength to leave her abusive asshole husband and go forth.
I felt cheated as a viewer wehen she got the quarter million. I wanted her to be strong and leave her abusive husband and raise her child on a waitress salary, like many women do every day(/spoiler)
Well… You should have used ** [ ** and ** ] ** instead of “(” and “)”
I used () rather than since otherwise you would have seen a spoiler box instead of the explanation.
I detect an undertone here that movies with downer endings are, somehow, smarter or superior…or maybe that people who favor such movies are. For my part, I don’t care whether the ending is happy or sad as long as it fits the rest of the story they started to tell. Gratuitously sad endings, in an attempt to be edgey/gritty/Eurosmart, suck just as much as gratuitously happy endings.
It’s not hard to see why this would be less popular in the movie version.
For one thing, the horror of the downbeat ending is greatly intensified by the cinematography. For another thing, the movie version is also punctuated by a big, bouncy, energetic musical number that’s absent from the stage production. I submit that the energy level of this musical number makes the morbid ending a lot more disappointing.
But it often doesn’t fit and/or is at odd with the overall tone of the movie. Or betray the original material when it’s an adaptation. The need for an happy end also usually results in depicting much more black and white characters and situations.
It’s like adding sugar in all recipes, as it’s done by the food industry. Eventually, you get only bland products that all taste the same.
And indeed when you choose to get rid rid of the Hollywood conventions, you’re much more likely to end up with a superior film. Because said conventions necessarily limit a lot the director’s options and hinder creativity.
Hogwash. Movies that play within the conventions and are clever with them makes a film that is just as interesting as an indie tearjerker tragedy.
I get both Sundance and IFC as part of my cable package; so I watch a fairish number of non-Hollywood movies. I wouldn’t say, at all, that non-Hollywood = superior. I’ll probably end up taking a raft of shit over this, but IMO an awful lot of independant film is self-indulgent crap.
And by the way sorry for being uppity, but I indeed think that European are indeed on average superior.
Why? Mostly because when I go to the movie theatre to watch a French movie (apart from a family-friendly light hearted comedy) I don’t know what’s going to happen next. I don’t know what to think of the characters until they’re fully fleshed out. And I certainly don’t know how the movie will end. With the standardized Hollywood canned product, I might as well leave the theatre after the first ten minutes. I already know everything that I need to know at this point.
I’m not sure you’d make the same kind of statements you made about movies if the same was true for books, for instance. I’m pretty sure most people would have an issue if the main American editors refused to print a novel lacking an heart lifting end or a manichean plot, had the books rewritten according to the reactions of a panel of readers, etc…, resulting in 90% of the books sold in the USA being sappy romances. But, for some reason, voicing the same kind of criticism with regard to movies is equated with being a snob.
And don’t tell me that the happy end is required to reach a large public. In another thread I was just reading, someone mentioned the last version of “The last of the Mohicans”. That certainly wasn’t a movie intended for a public of elitists, Sartre-reading Eurosnobs. Does it have an happy end? Hmm…Not exactly. Almost everybody dies. Would it have been done this way if the story wasn’t already famous? Nope. Instead we would have had “The really good guy who successfully avoided being the last of the Mohicans and lived happily ever after surrounded by a wonderful tribe of little Mohicans”.
So, it doesn’t have anything to do with making popular vs elitist movies, but everything to do with risk-aversion after having conditioned the public into expecting movies to be normalized sappy crap. It’s revealing that in this thread it was mentioned, even by people who likes happy ends, that they don’t expect such a thing in books or theatre plays, and have no issue with it. So, apparently the same people who can handle a downer in other forms of arts don’t want to watch one onscreen.
Why? IMO because they go to the movies fully expecting a light form of entertainment and are disturbed when the film doesn’t fit this expectation. Once again, it’s the same as having been conditioned to assume that all novels will be light-hearted romances, and being all shocked when you open a book “after a hard work week in a time of political and social turmoil” and discover it’s actually not such a romance.
That said, you’re free to call me a snob for holding movies to the same standards almost everybody else use without a second thought for other forms of art and expression.
Just to add (I accidentally deleted the paragraph from my previous post) :
This perception I have is confirmed by the negative comments I sometimes read on sites like IMDB. Basically : poster went to the movie, thought “what a downer it was”, advise people against watching it. Why did this happen? Because the writer didn’t bother to look up what kind of movie he was going to watch. He just assumed that, since it was a movie, there would be an uplifting happy end.
Lest you get too much enamored with European high-minded artistic sensibilities, when I was in Paris several years ago the place was absolutely wallpapered with ads for “Fortress 2 - Reentry”, a movie that was straight to video here in America. One theater I passed had it playing on three screens.
ETA - and if you watch foreign films in the US or really any country other than the place they’re made in, remember that generally it’s the cream of the crop that gets exported to other places. You don’t see the other 90%.
And look how much box office that version did.
Titanic’s ending is kind of a mixed bag.
Yeah, European films are really quite something. Just this weekend, I caught this gem starring Jean Reno. How do you say “it was retarded” in French?
That’s probably because you didn’t understand the foreign nuance and stuff. They got lots of nuancey things over there in Europe.
Just felt like mentioning that one Robert Heinlen novel, Podkayne of Mars got this exact treatment from its first publisher. The version that you can buy now includes both endings and an explanation for them.
With 28 Days Later, a lot of people liked the downer ending, but the studios pushed for an upbeat one. Boyle did it in a different style (saturated, well lit) and format (film vs. DV) possibly as a protest against the pressure. I believe that two endings were shown for the US theatrical version; first the upbeat ending, then the one where Jim dies. Disaster movies often have downbeat endings. Cloverfield, for a recent example.
I had to look for a thread where this movie was mentioned, because I watched it last night and ‘Holy Shit’. Read the novella and thought it would be a bit of eye candy - but the ending was wrong. The child and the other are killed for no good reaon? WTF? Five minutes after they’re killed the mist rises? It was soooo wrong. There wasn’t any reason for this ending - there was no moral to be explored, there was no hero, there was no salvation. What a stupid pointless shocking ending. Why turn a bit of fluff movie into a struggle with a moral dilemma when the whole movie was about things from another dimension? I don’t get it.
It’s not so much a happy ending, as that the movie’s universe has to be resolved before the movie ends. The basic Hollywood narrative structure goes like this:
[ol]
[li]There is a universe[/li][li]Something happens to disrupt this universe. There are a few cycles where the disruption is almost resolved, but then new problems come up. [/li][li]In the end, the universe is put back in order[/li][/ol]
So while The Last King of Scotland did not have a happy ending, it did have one where things get put back in order (white guy goes back home, sexually transgressive woman dies, Africa pretty much stays the same…) You’ll notice in a lot of movies that the same things turn up to resolve the narrative- like it’s almost clockwork that sexually transgressive characters die.
Why is this? Part of it is the Hayes code, that determined among other things that villiains must always be punished. Another part of it probably has to do with the way we “suture” into films (identify personally with the protaganists.) This makes it uniquely uncomfortable to return to our everyday lives with loose ends hanging.
Just as an aside, I loved he hell out of that ending, as though it was sad, it did offer some resolution to the story, and could even be argued that it had a happy-undertone.
Add me to the list of people that doesn’t want to watch movies with sad endings. I go to the movies to escape. There may be a very rare movie with a semi-sad ending that I like, but it is very rare.
The worst part is, they don’t allways advertise that it is a sad ending in the ads. Jake was advertised with cute scenes of Robin Williams falling of his undersized chair. The Bridge to Terebithia was advertised as some kind of fantasy, with no indication of anything else. A little research would have told me Million Dollar Baby was not for me, but Netficks doesn’t really give you all the information you need, and what do I need to worry about a boxing film for? I don’t want to watch that shit. Life is depressing enough on its own.
I doubt it was a protest, seeing as how the upbeat ending and the downbeat ending are the same thing. The only difference is that in the downbeat ending…
Jim’s presnce is edited out. Everything else is exactly the same