In Alfred’s Hitchcock’s Suspicion, there’s a massive cop out at the end.
The only way Cary Grant can get out his situation is to kill his wife for the insurance money. We know he has access to a totally untraceable poison. We see him carry the obviously doctored glass of milk to his wife. Wife drinks milk.
Cut to final scene
Millk was just a decoy. Cary Grant 'fesses up to previuos crimes and wanders happily off to prison.
They reportedly refilmed this ending two or three times, in two
John Q did this.
[Spoiler]His boy needs a transplant, but his insurance won’t pay for it, and to ensure that he gets it, Denzel Washington is going to shoot himself in the head to save his son. But wait! Oh, there’s been a car crash and here’s a perfect match from the lady who was killed, who happened to be an organ donor.
Yeah, the lady’s accident was foreshadowed in the beginning of the film, but I was really hoping that Hollywood would have the guts to allow Denzel to go through with it. Better would be to have Denzel go through with it, and have the donor appear several minutes too late. That would’ve made great cinema. But no, and the ending sucked appropriately.[/spoiler]
re: King’s The Stand — definitely a cop-out, but not so much because of the stupid hand in Las Vegas. The World As We Knew It is gone, down the tubes, and there’s going to be a Once and Finally For All confrontation between good and evil, between the Colorado contingent headed up by Abigail and the Las Vegas faction led by Flagg. But King doesn’t know how to develop any “good” that’s any significant improvement over what we had before the flu hit, so he has Abigail go off on her own muttering about “pride”, and the town develops a thoroughly mundane and dismally everyday Town Council, and when Abigail finally totters back she has no leadership or important message. So the confrontation ends up being between evil and ordinary living. And all that build-up that took place during the slow death of civilization just kind of bleeds away and the book wanders out in the middle of the desert, gets lost, and dehydrates to death.
He did the same kind of thing with It. Lots of nice build-up, gradual teasers unveiling the ways in which the Evil is not just bubbling up in the town’s kitchen sinks but made manifest in the everyday see-no-evil, maybe-do-some-evil behavior of the adults. Then we go underground and it’s just a stupid spiderclown after all.
Danny Brown gets my nomination for The Da Vinci Code. Lays major plot-trajectory groundwork, very high-stakes stuff fueling the fast-moving cliffhanger pace: that there had been a second Messiah, that she had been female, that the Church itself had killed the second Messiah itself, and either this was going to come out or the secret would be successfully swiped and destroyed by the Church. How will Christianity be different? Will the Church split in major schisms? And if there can be two Messiahs, how about three, or four? Will there be righteous condemnation of the Church as God-killers by whatever New Church forms, just as the Old Church once condemned the Jews? Will it all resolve into a message about religions that become more enamored of their own orthodoxies than of God and God’s truths? Naaah, we’re not even gonna go there, we don’t get to see the world change or even get mildly upset. Now is not the time. This cop-out has been brought to you by the Guild of Authors who can Only Write Fast-paced Action Scenes.
All right. Have it your way…septics 
.
Not that I’m in the middle of reading that book or anything. Dammit.
Septics is at least a coherent insult (septic tank=Cockney slang for “Yank.”). The other one is a lame reach…and there are not too many people who even know that a merkin is a pubic rug, so it’s also a particularly futile insult.
I don’t think that the pubic wig is the intended connotation, just an odd coincidence. I always heard it as a broad parody of an American accent.
Ayup.
La-la-la-la-la-la-I-can’t-hear-you!
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Classic closing line, and so incredibly prescient. No filmmaker would dare leave out the proper ending.
Although everybody else seemed to be thrilled by it, I was manifestly underwhelmed by Minority Report, which failed to deal with many of the ethical and moral issues, not to mention causality violations and plotholes big enough to fly a jetpod through. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial was also a copout, even before Spielberg re-imagined it. Indeed, just about everything in Spielberg’s oeurve, save for Raiders is a gimmie. This includes Schindler’s List and especially Saving Private Ryan. And the button-pushing Spielberg-esque [url=http://imdb.com/title/tt0325710/]The Last Samurai was just wrong, wrong, wrong.
Stranger
I’ve always heard it was intended to invoke the meaning of merkin as pubic wig. YMMV.
Sorta’ reminds me of a segue sequence from 1st season Family Guy…
[Stephen King] Okay, in my next book, this couple is attacked by a… <looks around frantically, sees a desk lamp> a LAMP MONSTER, GRRR! RRRR!!
[Publisher] <sigh> you’re just not trying anymore, are you?
[S.K.] Grrr!! RRRR, Grrr!
[Pub.] <sigh> when can i have it?
the “Happy ending/brat-freindly ending” of The Iron Giant was also groaningly predictable…
[spoiler]Giant spies nuke heading towards Rockwell Center (his current position), Giant (who had just previously transformed back from his Transformer Mega-Death-Machine mode) decides to “fix” the problem and save the townspeople, launches himself on an intercept course with the nuke, cue swelling of dramatic music and Hogarth voiceover quote of “You are who you choose to be”, Giant happily says “Suuuuperman!” and smiles as he impacts the missle, detonating it, sacrificing his life to save the townspeople
cut to the town square as the fireball from the detonation is seen in the sky, sad music rolls as the main characters know that they’ve lost a truly gentle, giving soul, and walk away in sadness
open in on a scene where Dean has constructed a memorial statue for the Giant, Hogarth is handed a small box containing the Giant’s jaw-bolt, only piece recovered, Gen. Rogard sent it to Hogarth as he feels he should have it, Hogarth states simply and sadly, “I miss him”
the movie fades to black, the credits roll, driving home the signifigance of the Giant’s sacrifice
i refuse to acknowledge any further progression of the movie, there is no happy ending where the Giant activates his reconstruction mode in an obvious ploy for a sequel or to make the kiddies feel better that the Giant isn’t really dead, he’s just resting, pining for the Fijords if you will…, no, the Giant was consumed in the Nuclear conflagiration, a sad ending, but a deep and powerful one…[/spoiler]
Amen, MacTech, I can’t believe that slipped my mind. They just had to go with the happy sappy crap and it pissed me off because it was an otherwise brilliant movie. The ideal ending, as you describe, would have given so much more meaning and poignancy to the whole thing, but noooo…
His bits rolled off to rebuild themselves at the end of the book, too.
I suppose you might call it a cop-out, but if it was it was Ted Hughes’, not Brad Bird’s.
Sphere
At the end, the characters realize that they can will the sphere to go back into space and forget about everything that happened to them.
This sounds like a rip-off of an early-90s SNL sketch. Phil Hartman (IIRC) played Stephen King and had him manically concocting bizarre supernatural plot ideas while going about an everyday routine:
(King puts milk out for the cat)
“I’ve got it! A book about a cat…THAT IS A HELLCAT FROM HELL!”
(King resets a clock)
“A clock…POSSESSED BY A DEMON FROM BEYOND!”
etc, etc.
Anyway, I’ve often heard that the film Fatal Attraction as released in theatres had a tacked-on remade ending (in which Anne Archer shoots Glenn Close, thus ending all problems.) Originally, in the scene after Douglas breaks into Close’s apartment, threatens her with a knife, then leaves, Close’s character initially killed herself with the knife. But, since Douglas’s fingerprints were on the blade of the knife, and a mountain of extenuating circumstances, he ends up going to jail for her murder. Thus, the original ending had the evil bitch triumphing even in death. The released ending showed Douglas, Archer (and by extension the Rockellian nuclear family) walking away from it all. Awwww.
I wish they’d had the guts to release the original ending to this.
Ohhhhh yeah. I wish I had that ability after seeing it.
As much as it pains me to say it, don’t get me started on Luke falling to his death in Empire Strikes Back…except he’s saved b/c he falls into a slightly angled tube, which cushioned the fall in such a way that…actually I’m not sure why it didn’t kill him.
And let’s not forget Contact.
L.A. Confidential ranks as one of my all time favorite films, but I’ve always felt that Russell Crowes’ character should have died in the hotel shoot out. In fact I would have ended the film whith Guy Peirce walking towards the oncoming police cars holding up his badge.
Well, that makes all kinds of sense. See, “merkins” are well-known for their tendency to genital baldness resulting from malnutrition or genetic defect, while “furriners” take pride in their carefully cultivated and luxuriously furry pubic mats. Everybody knows that 99% of all merkins ever used have been sold within the contintental United States.
How silly of me to have thought that they were both ironic lampoons of a regional accent often associated with a peculiar nationalism that borders on religiosity. 