Exactly. People have always complained about that scene in War of the Roses, when killing the dog would’ve been an even bigger cop-out. The whole point of the movie was that they couldn’t live together and just hated each other to the point of destroying each other – there was no one clear “winner.” That’s a lot more dismal than killing a pet for shock value.
I also disagree with the War of the Worlds comment earlier, because without it, the movie would have been completely bleak and pointless.
It would’ve been better from a logical standpoint if they’d explained exactly how the son had survived and gotten back to Boston before them, but that would’ve dragged the movie out even longer. But having him survive at all isn’t a cop-out; it was just enough to keep the story from being totally hopless, to say that you’re not punished for wanting to fight back against insurmountable odds, that you can survive and it is worth fighting for. Otherwise, the only survivor of the whole ordeal would’ve been the deadbeat dad.
Don’t know why I didn’t think of this right off – The Devil’s Advocate. There are a lot of things to like in the movie: Al Pacino’s performance, good direction, some excellent visuals, and let’s just say that when Connie Nielsen says “Look at me”, I will damn well look. But right at the end:Keanu Reeve’s character, Kevin Lomax, learns that his employer, John Milton (no kidding) is both Satan and Kevin’s father. Satan’s plan is his two children, Kevin and Christabella (Connie Nielsen) to conceive a child together and rule the world. Kevin foils the plan in the only way he can, by killing himself. We see Satan raging and destroying his daughter, but then – suddenly everything gets “reset” to the beginning of the movie, when Kevin faced a moral choice in the courtroom, the choice that started him on the road to damnation. This time he makes a different choice. What the hell were they thinking about? When Kevin puts a bullet through his own head, it’s as close to a “happy” ending as the premise of the movie allows; the additional ending makes no sense at all.
The cartoon version of Animal Farm had the farm animals revolting against the humans and pigs at the end. And the live action TV-version from a few years ago had a happy ending, too.
IIRC, it wasn’t so much a cut, but the opening of the chest cavity, perhaps even a specific (alien) organ. Not the kind of thing that would happen in everyday activity. Not even the sort of thing that would preclude most basic medical care. In fact, the parents seemed shocked that such a thing was even medically possible, so it may be that such a procedure was only possibly in recent times.
So that’s what that movie was called. I remember seeing it when I was in the first grade, but never knew what it was called.
It makes sense because after he talks to the reporter, having the reporter says he’ll be big because he was a lawyer who was moral and such, the reporter turns towards the camera and says something like, “Pride, my favorite sin.” This shows that yes, Kevin made a different choice, but he’s still so prideful that it will still bring him down, the devil will have to just use another way, but it’s not over. I think it was a fitting ending because after all that happened, Kevin never changed deep down. When I saw that, I said outloud to my friends, “Well, that’s just mean.”
In The Pacifier Vin Diesel is a Navy SEAL who’s assigned to (essentially) babysit for the family of a murdered army scientist, and under that cover, seek out the scientist’s project. The kids are having a real hard time dealing with their father’s demise, especially a teenaged boy who was pressured by Dad into joining the wrestling team, which is run by an overly macho jerk that constantly puts him down.
While performing father-figure duty, Vin is called into the principal’s office, and is presented with a Nazi armband that the teenaged boy had in his pocket.
So, it seems like the kid feels some major alienation and needs some serious help, right?
Nope…it turns out he’s been acting on the sly and has a role as Rolf in a production of the Sound of Music. He just doesn’t think his dad would have approved of his being in the drama club.
Quite frankly, I would have liked to see this have been a real struggle to get the kid away from a really bad crowd rather than the kid be essentially innocent and easy to deal with.
I suppose. It just always seemed to me that Turner’s character wasn’t convinced that Douglas’s killing of her cat was accidental, and that turn-about then would have been fair play. Further, we never see the dog again. It seems like at the end, if he was in the house, he would have been under the chandelier, or, if he was outside, he would have been following Danny DeVito and the German maid. Dogs are always where the action is. Finally, the scene just looks inserted.
I will concede that I’m usually slow on the uptake and have to have things spelled out for me.
Will I get things thrown at me for nit-pickingly noting that all deus ex machina are mechanical? The original machina was a crane with which the god was lowered onto the stage to arrange the satisfying resolution.
Well, but to be honest, it was the unhappy ending in the book that irritated me:
C’mon! Even if he couldn’t face the idea that his son would rat him out, he HAD to know they’d be watching him. He had to know that was the last place he should go. And what was he really goingto do there other than pat him on the head and say goodbye? Better to take what he’d been working for the whole book and hope he can go back and get his son when the government was toppled than…what? he wasnt that stupid. I thought in that case the unhappy ending was contrived.
The Superflu caused so much pain, oh!
And with evil a raging volcano
Flagg’s triumph seemed certain
Until King drew the curtain
By pulling a deus ex ano! :rolleyes:
at the end, while her mother is laid up in the hospital following a failed suicide attempt, sociopathic little Rhoda is out at the dock, at night in the rain, fishing for a swimming medal she killed a boy to get; a bolt of lightning hits a tree and a bough falls down, killing her. Classic dem. Now, I’ve never read the book or seen the play. But I’d be willing to bet 10 Anh-Morpork dollars against 100 million Slobbovian rasbuckniks that in both of them, (1) the mother dies and (2) the daughter lives, to inflict her evil on an unsuspecting world. But Hollywood just didn’t have that kind of guts.
That was my take on it, too. When the father is talking about the taboo for the first time, he compares it to the slaughtering of herd animals, which would include gutting and skinning them. I think they believed that the sould was held in the thorassic cavity, and being a bunch of pre-technological nomadic herders, there usually wouldn’t be a way to save someone with a wound like that. I also wonder if there wasn’t an unknown biological component, like thier particular species goes psychotic when wounds turn gangrenous, or something, that would be interpreted by primitives as being possessed by a demon. So most of their people who get stabbed in the torso die, and those that survive almost always turn violently insane: obvious conclusion is that the soul lives somewhere in the torso, and escapes when the torso is cut open, sometimes allowing something else to get in.
I also wonder if Dr. Franklin had just said, in an offhand manner, “Oh, we’ve developed a special force field that will retain the soul in the chest cavity while we complete the operation,” if the parents would have gone a long with it. From their point of view, that must be no less outrageous and impossible a feat as flying between the stars.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I perceive that this story is being discussed in this thread only for the sake of providing contrast. The plot of that particular B5 episode scrupulously avoided any kind of a cop-out. (And off the top of my head, I can’t think of any obvious cop-outs in the whole series. That’s one of the things that made it really great, as space operas go.)
Not to hijack the thread, but that reminds me of the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine novel, “The Seige.” The main plot’s about a murderer on the station, but the backstory has the whole
sick alien kid who can’t be treated due to religious beliefs, and the doctor trying to thwart conventions
