What’s the worst supposedly “happy” ending you’ve ever seen or read in a book, TV show, movie, fairy tale, or whatever?
I nominate the movie Georgy Girl. Yeah, okay, she seems thrilled to adopt her callous roommate’s abandoned baby, but the rich guy she marries is the creepy old letch that her father tried to sell her to in the beginning of the film. I mean, there isn’t an ewwwwww long enough to cover that!
How 'bout some others?
On more than one occasion here I’ve complained about the endings of the various Professor Layton games.
The first one is definitely the worst: a young girl is basically given as a prize to a strange man for solving a bunch of puzzles while the man who has faithfully looked after her and the village all his life out of love and devotion is left to sit in the rubble of his workshop and spend what little is left of his life continuing to repair robots, even though the girl they were built for has left the village. In the third one we are asked to feel sympathy for a young boy whose parents were killed in an accident; this same young boy had just likely murdered tens of thousands of Londoners. The second one isn’t too bad, although we’re asked to believe that two people had the exact same hallucination for days on end.
I gave up after three. I enjoyed the puzzles but the plots were too stupid.
The ending of “Speed” has always bugged me. Literally hours after his partner has been blown up by the mad bomber (with a bunch of other cops, presumably friends), Keanu and Sandra are locking lips in the smoldering wreckage of a derailed subway train. Yeah, sure you killed the bad guy, but you caused millions and millions of dollars of property damage and your best friend is dead. How is this a happy ending?
The Kill Bill movies.
Sure, the heroine kills the guy that ruined her life and gets her daughter back… but her daughter has now just lost the only parent she ever knew and has to live with the stranger who killed him.
Sleepless in Seattle. Now she gets to spend her whole life wondering if she measures up to his dead wife.
One that grates at me in (undeserved) memories is an episode of 7th Heaven. A pair of middle-school kids have to make a report on Washington and Lincoln for President’s Day. They have the idea to address the question of what would be said about Washington and Lincoln if they had faced modern (late-90s, early-00s) negative campaigning where you tear down your opponent instead of build up yourself, so they created “attack ads” against Washington and Lincoln. This caused an uproar amongst school administration. So the parents teach the kids how horrible they were for showing disrespect for the Founding Fathers and the kids admit that they are wrong and produce a bland report praising them just like everyone else. So the “happy ending” is that the kids learned that producing a creative and clever project was a mistake and they should just regurgitate the same crap as everyone else (and to never say anything bad about Important Historical Figures.)
“It’s A Wonderful Life”: Mr. Potter not only steals the money and gets away with it, but he gets paid again after Jimmy Stewart’s character holds a fundraising campaign…which pretty much depletes the available cash the townspeople have and sets them up for a probable shortfall the next time it’s time to pay off Potter.
Well, I happened to see a pretty bad “happy ending” last night when I watched the Denzel Washington movie, **“Man on Fire”. **
Denzel’s character is a former CIA assassin who is very disillusioned with life and unhappy to the point of being an alcoholic with suicidal thoughts. In fact, he attempts suicide, but the bullet misfires. A friend of his gets him a job in Mexico being the bodyguard of a little girl (Dakota Fanning) that he ends up loving as much as anyone could possibly love even their own child. The girl is kidnapped and seemingly murdered, and he goes on a crusade to find and kill each and every person involved in her death.
As he uncovers the truth, he finds out that the girl is in fact still alive. In the end, he has to sacrifice his own life to save hers. It’s a “happy ending” in that the child is alive and is reunited with her mother, but a tragedy in that he dies and she will be devastated by his death.
Spider-Man 2 - the part where Mary Jane left her future husband at the alter to be with Peter. I mean, sure, twue wuv and all that, but the film never depicts her fiance - a freaking astronaut - as anyting other than a nice, decent guy who genuinely loved her. Running off without having the basic decency to break up with him in person is a MAJOR dick move. If Spidey were smart he’d have dumped the bitch on the spot. Saved him some future grief.
(Also, the guy was an astronaut. He got his superpowers the hard way, by working for them. He wasn’t bitten by a radioactive Buzz Aldrin or something. With all due respect for Spidey, he wan’t an upgrade).
Twilight Zone’s “Mute” - a telepathic little girl is being cared for by non-telepathic adults after a tragic fire kills her (telepathic) parents. Because one of the adult deliberately prevents other telepathic adults (who worked with the little girl’s parents) from finding her, the little girl eventually learns to speak and forgets her native telepathic language - and the adult who kept the girl away from the people who could have communicated with her gets to adopt the little girl, too.
“The Graduate” - on the bus Ben and Elaine come to the realization of how much they’ve just messed up their lives and what an uncertain future awaits them.
“Does anyone have change for a button?” – Mr. Burns
IIRC, the ending of, “Jabberwocky,” was a pill: The “hero” (inadvertently) kills the monster and gets shuffled off to an arranged marriage with the princess he doesn’t like. They ride off into a cheerful cartoon sunset.
Jeff Goldblum’s, “The Fly.” Fly dead, old boyfriend badly maimed and the heroine emotionally traumatized for having to shotgun the father of her unborn maggot. My kinda film.
Pretty in Pink is a crowd favorite wrong ending. Andie is clearly supposed to end up with Duckie. They filmed that ending. Test audiences didn’t like it. (Test audiences are idiots.) Reshot it so she ended up with the horrible, dumped-her-once-already, preppie snob. Thus negating most of the movie’s plot.
This is a happy ending???
Similar movie: “The Heartbreak Kid” from 1972. For some reason, Cybill Shepherd marries this nobody, Charles Grodin, who is obsessed with her, for the simple reason he just pursues her single-mindedly and will. not. be. stopped. Her father tries to scare him off, buy him off, and he politely but firmly will not be deterred. She, with every privilege and the world hers for the taking, marries him! And at the end he is sitting there alone at the wedding reception, humming to himself, staring off into space. Wonder how THAT marriage is going to work out.
This movie is one of my favorites, but it maddens me, to this day. I always wonder what happened with them.
Another one: “Dirty Dancing” - one of those fairy tale happily-ever-after endings. Everyone applauding like MAD watching them dance and prance around. Why? I assume they broke up and ‘Baby’ today is fat and 50 and living in Forest Hills, and her beau never heard from again. But watching the ending of the movie, it’s like Snow White is going to ride off with Prince Charming and the whole village is out lining the streets, cheering. Huzzah!..Why?
I am still irritated by the ending of “Friends.” The failure of Ross to grow, and Rachel’s acquiesence to his immaturity, just never fails to exasperate me. What were they thinking?
I hated Scott Pilgrim VS. the World. Part of that is that my memory is that the ending was terrible.
I think he doesn’t end up with the right girl. He ends up with the cool girl(Winstead) instead of the regular girl(Wong). This was insanely badly plotted.
A Raisin in the Sun. A classic play, but the ending is not really happy.
[spoiler]The plot lines hang on a plan for the family to move to a new house in an all-white neighborhood. In the final confrontation, the neighbors send a representative to convince them not to move – buying them off, if necessary. The family refuses and tells the guy off (side note, the original cast used John Fiedler in the role, best known as Mr. Peterson in The Bob Newhart Show and who made a career of playing mousy and timid little men). Then they triumphantly get ready for the final move.
It seems unlikely in the extreme that the neighbors are through trying to discourage them, maybe using some strong arm methods.
Clybourne Park actually continues the scene, where the representative goes to the people selling the house immediately afterward. Again, the issue of how the neighbors might react is limited to him trying to convince them not to sell.[/spoiler]
True Romance. Clarence’s shenanigans get a lot of people killed, including his own father, and neither he nor Alabama seem to give a good goddamn. They get away from the climactic massacre and spend the rest of their days lounging on the beach in Mexico with the cocaine money.
In re Georgy Girl, keep in mind that her “benefactor” was played by the same actor (James Mason) who did Humbert Humbert in Kubrick’s version of Lolita.