Anybody who’s read the book will understand just how totally Zemeckis blew the ending to Contact. I’ve never been more disappointed in the finale of a movie - never.
Star Wars… well, this isn’t the place to begin critiquing, so I’ll leave this 'un alone.
Personally, I have two favorite movies - 1 “serious”, 1 “fun.” The serious movie has to be the Nicholson classic Chinatown, possibly the best overall film made during the 1970’s renaissance of American Cinema (though I won’t put up too much of an argument if someone wants to nominate one of Scorcese’s 3 great films of that period.) The “fun” movie is the 1991 version of Beauty and the Beast. Wonderful animation, great songs, perfect voice-characterizations, this is a movie that makes me grin from ear to ear whenever I see it.
God, I have so many favorite movies, but I’ll just mention a few off the top of my head: A Clockwork Orange A fascinating exploration of free will, with a bravura performance by Malcolm McDowell. I’ve never been able to listen to the Ode to Joy without saying, “I was cured, all right.”
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Amazing action sequences combined with a love story that had me in tears by the end.
The Wicker Man A movie that takes the consequences of religious faith seriously.
Cabaret Hey, I’m a show tune queen!
Seven SamuraiThe action film to end all action films. Toshiro Mifune’s performance as the peasant pretending to be a samurai is a jewel.
Hellraiser Clive Barker’s exploration of the eroticism of pain
Sunset Boulevard The Women All About Eve
These movies are required viewing for every gay man
Spoiler alert! I’m going to recap both the book and the film endings and explain what went wrong with this film…
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Book: While talking to the alien made up as her father, Ellie asks him if they believe in a God, to which the alien replies “Yes, and we have found his writing etched into the fabric of the Universe, in mathematical constants such as Pi, e, etc” (but not in so many words). Ellie then gets back to Earth and nobody believes that she made the trip because the subjective time of the trip for the people on Earth was 0, all the cameras were erased, etc (just like the movie). Ellie then programs her home computer to dig deep into the numbers of Pi, analyze them for any anomalies, and then tell her. A few weeks/months later the computer finds that if you render a particular sequence of Pi into an 11X11 grid, you have a circle made up of 0’s and 1’s:
Movie: Ellie visits Pop, he says little about God and nothing about the “fabric of the Universe,” she arrives to a disbelieving Earth, gets hauled into Congress and says “Take me on faith.”
The book ending was logically, thematically, and characteristically (am I using that right?) correct, while the movie ending was an insult to Carl Sagan, an insult to the story and even more importantly, an insult to the audience. Since I like lists, I’ll just lay out my objections to the conclusion(s) of the movie:
Hollywood still thinks that we can’t handle a philosphically and intellectually challenging story (what I call “the Star Wars effect.”)
That the search for God must take on the mystical and the irrational, and that we shouldn’t even bother trying to look for scientific proofs of his/her/its existence.
That the individual, in the biggest moment of their lives, should subscribe to the norms of society even if her entire life has been devoted to challenging those same norms, and worse, even if she knows she is correct and the others are wrong. :eek:
Even though its kind of silly, I feel sorry for Eleanor Arroway (and her alter-ego, Carl Sagan). The theme of the novel is Eleanor’s quest for God, and she would have never said “take my word for it.” Never. Iirc, Carl had serious problems with the script but gave up the fight when he discovered that he had cancer and wasn’t going to live for long. I would like to think that the studio/director would’ve given in had Carl lived long enough, but the Star Wars effect and the relative non-influence the screenwriter has over the final outcome of any film meant that it was probably a losing effort.
In short, the movie was very modern in its setting but very medieval in its lessons. I like it, its a good-looking movie, but I can never watch the ending again.
There are four movies that I continue to be impressed with.
Fight Club, True Romance, Legends of the Fall, and Big Trouble in Little China.
gobear, I must have seriously missed something in CTHD because I just wasn’t that impressed with the “love” story part of it. I wasn’t very impressed with the movie at all, though Michelle Yeoh is gorgeous (in her movies…IRL she wears waaaay to much barbie-style makeup). Maybe I need to see it again, though…
The brilliant directing of David Lynch, the shockingly psychotic preformance given by Dennis Hopper, the beauty and crypticism that resounds from every scene, the innocence of Jeffrey, the pity one feels for Isabella’s character, “A candy colored clown they call the sandman”, all seem to meld together into one of the best movies of all time. I could watch this movie daily and still never get sick of it. It’s haunting, it’s gorgeous, it’s challenging, it’s the ideal cult phenomenon.
I wouldn’t really say that the movie was cut short or simplified for an incoherent audience, but that it approached the entire purpose for the story in a simple way, which is Who’s on the right path, the religious or the scientific? In the final scene where she’s being criticized for her “experience” with the transport, she really begins to understand what faith in a nigh-impossible being is really like, and how the Godly/faithful see the skeptics, like herself. Her amazing experience, like she describes it, should be compared to the experience that Palmer Joss describes when he’s lying in bed with her, much earlier in the movie: that they are both life changing experiences, and both require faith to be believed by anyone else.
I did understand the differences between the book and the movie when I read/watched them, and I didn’t have a problem with it. You just have to accept that a complicated story is going to be “edited” in certain ways, since movies can’t be nearly as descriptive as the novels they’re made from, and this is no exception. BTW, the director was Robert Zemekis.
i love star wars.
monty python and the holy grail- cracks me up, no matter how often i see it.
this is spinal tap.
i really liked ,(turning red) george of the jungle. that is one fine looking young man. once i had to stop the vcr and go get oxygen.
but my two very favorites are-
2) the secret life of walter mitty-danny kaye-nuff said
arsenic and old lace-cary grant is wonderful in this one. the whole thing is so totally outlandish. i love the teddy character.
If this question had been asked a few years ago, I would have put in another vote for Contact. Yes, I had read the book, and yes, I was initially disappointed with the ending–until I went back and re-read the book, and realized that it would have been next to impossible to do justice to the book’s ending on film.
Now, however, I would have to say that my favorite is Shakespeare in Love. The ensemble work more than makes up for the fact that there are no really stellar performances, the little gold statuettes notwithstanding. (IMHO, Geoffrey Rush is the only one who merited his–Gwyneth Paltrow was good but not great, and Judi Dench, though she did a superlative job, had a part was a bit too small.) But what really does it for me is the fact that there isn’t a wasted moment in the film: even those scenes that don’t directly advance the plot are hugely enjoyable on their own.
Of course, it helps that I studied the Bard extensively on the way to a completely useless degree in English Lit. And it helps that I spent years in the theatre, and know the personality types very well (they haven’t changed much in 400 years). And it really helps that it’s so obvious that the entire cast are having the time of their lives.
If I had to pick one movie … uhm, The Princess Bride. Action, romance, comedy, adventure, ROUSes, comedy, swordfights, suspense, comedy, and True Love™.
As for Contact, didn’t Carl Sagan’s widow publically admit that the movie’s ending was an insult to her husband’s memory? I heard that somewhere…
