You see, you’re making the mistake of thinking the insult MADE SENSE. My objection to it was that it DIDN’T.
Didn’t the original ending ALSO have a cop-out (the wife is shown going to the police at the very end with the evidence that will clear her husband, after a brief internal debate about whether he’s worth saving)?
Also, I don’t mind “cop-out” endings being called on account of overall theme or logic, but in some of these cases, it seems like you’ve got two perfectly plausible endings, and one of them is being preferred just because it’s the “depressing” one. Is that really fair? I mean, it’s like some folks think a story can’t be “deep” or “relevant” without having a tragic result, and I just don’t think that’s true.
Sorry 'bout that. I really shoulda spoilerboxed it.
On the other hand, if my revelation of the Da Vinci Copout is going to ruin the book for you, the ending of the book was also going to ruin the book for you, so you were going to get there sooner or later.
Well ok…why didn’t it? Because “ironic lampoons of a regional accent often associated with a peculiar nationalism that borders on religiosity” is pretty much what I was going for and Larry did seem to get that out of it.
Somehow, the ending of The Iron Giant didn’t bother me. I really liked the image of the Giant’s bits and pieces, perhaps scattered over half the world, gradually making their way to join his head and put themselves back together.I probably wouldn’t have written it that way, but somehow it didn’t seem like a cheat to me. At least it wasn’t logically inconsistent with what we’d been shown earlier.
I really liked the movie Tears of the Sun, but Bruce Willis’ character should have died at the end, along with the rest of his unit, all doing the best thing they’ve ever done.
Sorry to continue this hijack, but I think it’s hilarious.
RikWriter, “merkin” doesn’t make sense if you assume a connection to pubic wigs, but it makes perfect sense if you ignore that coincidence and only think about why people actually say “merkin.” If you’re getting hung up on the accidental homograph, look at all the variants:
I guess I wanna “bah Amurkin” too.
I see you Awzies have taken to using the L-word too. That good ole Amurkin kultcha, huh?
“Ah monly drivin 50 mahls pur air” (Amerkin)
This last is why it is usually rendered as “merkin” in print. It’s just the closest way to render it phonetically.
And that’s what it’s all aboot. 
Changing Lanes. The first, oh, hour and twenty-five minutes is pretty good. Not brilliant, necessarily, but pretty good: morally ambiguous, shades of gray stuff. Implausible, but even-handed and thought-provoking.And it should have ended with the scene showing Jackson in Affleck’s office, returning the document. The dialogue shows the relationship between the characters is still tense but that they mutually understand they’ve both fucked up, and there will be consequences they can no longer control. If they’d rolled credits right there, it would have hovered between three and three-and-a-half stars. But no: Affleck has such a change of heart that he goes on to fix Jackson’s life and break with his prospective in-laws. Grrr.
Eh, s’allright. I usually go read spoilers for everything anyway - I don’t tend to for books, but I can’t say it bothers me much.
Regarding The Bad Seed, my drama class did the play when I was in 9th grade (myself in the title role - he he).
the mother gives the little girl and herself some “vitamins” before going to bed that night. She even reads her daughter to “sleep.”
My mother always said I was typecast.
I have to agree about Stephen King’s novels–he just doesn’t do endings well. But, I love his short stories. They’re usually creepy and don’t pull any punches. Maybe because he doesn’t have time to get too attached to his characters to kill them off if the story needs that.
One movie that was almost good was One Hour Photo. Then it got to the end and revealed that
[spoiler]he was sexually abused as a child and that was why he did everything that he did.
It would have been a much creepier movie if there were no reason for it. No explanation is, IMO, more frightening.[/spoiler]
I don’t think that was neccesarily the meaning of the ending to the Devil’s Advocate. Realistically, there will never be an easy, simple way to get Satan to stop bothering him. There will always be new temptations to avoid.
This is the point. Evil is always waiting and won’t go away because we won once. But it also doesn’t that Satan will win; that’s up to Kevin [Keanu Reeves’ character]. In fact, the ending as given is decidedly unambiguous. But I guess it’s unambiguous in an ambiguous way, if that makes any sense.
Well, anyway, that’s what I think the meaning was intended to be, but maybe the dircertor’s just wanted the classic horror movie, “but it’s not really over!” scene at the end.
That wasn’t a copout. Luke wasn’t particularly angling to die. He just needed to get away, and fast. In theory, that tube was supposed to have strong gusts as part of the air filtration system. Besides, he’s a Jedi. They regularly fall long distances with no injury.
Anyway, I might be being to harsh on that Bablyon 5 episode, but I’m not a huge fan of certain branches of exrtemely literal Christianity, either.
I thought for sure that Luke meant to fall to his death in that scene. Hear receives the Earth shattering news, then declares “I’ll never join you!”. Plus the look on his face as he lets go is someone resolved to his fate; not someone who just wants a quick getaway.
As for the long fall, well, that’s one LUCKY Jedi, compared, to, say, the Emperor’s fall to his death.
Not even the Master can say with confidence exactly what the word means. http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_232.html
…Or Cop-Outs that worked quite well
Buffalo 66Billy’s reconsidered assasination of Scott Norwood
Funny GamesThe mindfuck rewinding of Anna’s shotgun revenge
Probably, but I can imagine most moviegoers complaining about the dangling thread if that had happened. People want explainations.
It’s already been somewhat mentioned, but I do get pissed at any movie where a a main character is killed off, only to be shortly brought back to life. Why? It’s cheating. You do it to get an emotional response from their death, but then you still want to use the character, so you bring them back in some contrived way. No. If you wanted to use them some more, you shouldn’t have killed them.
Just one of the many things I hated about Star Trek 10. It also pissed me off when they pulled it in Dungeons and Dragons(though that was a pretty bad movie anyway), Sgt. Peppers and Final Fantasy 2(Almost everyone who “died” turned out to still be alive somewhere. Makes you stop caring about their “sacrifice” after the 2nd time they pulled it).
Though I make exceptions for shows/movies/games where dying and returning to life/being replaced is part of the premise(South Park, Battlestar Galatica, Planescape: Torment). Jason Voorhees and Freddy Kruger get a pass because that’s par for the course for such movies.
Dungeons And Dragons was a pretty bad movie in the same way that the Hindenburg was a pretty big bang.
It’s been a while since I saw the movie, but I got the impression she deliberately lured him to her house to attack her so she would have the excuse of killing him in “self-defense”.
One exception to this (that I can think of; there may be others) is Sleepless in Seattle. Bill Pullman’s character was kind of annoying, but a sweet guy nonetheless.
I still haven’t seen that ending, but I read about it a year or so ago and I seem to remember that after Michael Douglas is arrested, Anne Archer finds some piece of evidence that proves he’s innocent. It ends with her heading off to the police station to turn the evidence in. I remember this because I’d heard that it ended the way you described and was kind of disappointed that, in a way, it still ended well for the protagonist.
The reason, though, that they didn’t release the original ending was that test audiences hated it. At least now, we can see it on DVD.
Well, two scenes were good, but the problem is, they had both been ripped straight from other movies.
Does LOTR get a pass?