Good movies with bad endings.

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by metal134, Mar 20, 2017.

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  1. knob twirler

    knob twirler Senior Member

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    Cleveland, Ohio
    Curious...what 'factions' were being appeased?
     
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  2. 2001 the film and book were written independently of each other. Kubrick and Clarke came up with the outline and each went back and wrote the screenplay (Kubrick) and the novel (Clarke). The only difference that I recall is the Starchild explodes the nuclear devices. So it wasn't an adaption.
     
  3. Really? I think the endings for both are perfect and prefigured in the film.
     
  4. The Matrix... hear me out please. The first movie was pretty good in its entirety, the sequels were totaly unneccessary and ruined the franchise. The only saving grace was Monica Bellucci. Yummy. So as a standalone movie its great but the sequels put a damper on its legacy.
     
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  5. Halloween Jack

    Halloween Jack Forum Resident

    The thing with Signs is that, the aliens, are actually demons. That's why the radio broadcast talked about an ANCIENT way of attacking them (started in the middle east). It's talking about exorcism and holy water.

    Remember, Mel Gibson is a priest having trouble with faith and he talked about an "angelic" quality of her little daughter. She blessed the water!
     
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  6. Halloween Jack

    Halloween Jack Forum Resident

    I nominate "Consumed". A fascinating mystery about genetically modified food. The ending seemed weak but I guess that's what you get when you investigate big corporations...
     
  7. Nice Marmot

    Nice Marmot Nothin’ feels right but doin’ wrong anymore

    Location:
    Tryon NC
    The House Of The Devil - this atmospheric horror flick about devil worshippers is ruined by a lets not be too harsh ending. I really liked the movie until the end.
     
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  8. How would you have ended "Vertigo"?
     
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  9. Lightworker

    Lightworker Forum Resident

    Location:
    Deep Texas
    In less of a rushed, deus ex machina fashion. Especially after the great build-up in the earlier parts of the film.
     
  10. Lightworker

    Lightworker Forum Resident

    Location:
    Deep Texas
    Both out-of-control law enforcement and Hollywood lock-steppers I guess.
     
  11. Commander Lucius Emery

    Commander Lucius Emery Forum Resident

    "As Far as My Feet Will Carry Me". German POW escapes from a Russian POW camp in Siberia and spends several years walking towards freedom, chased by the Camp's commandant. When he gets to the bridge that leads him to freedom in Iran, the commandant is there, who lets him pass saying that he has won. Anyone think that a real POW camp commandant like Colonel Klink would let that happen? Movie also has obligatory scene of meeting beautiful woman in primitive tribe who sleeps with him.
     
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  12. head_unit

    head_unit Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles CA USA
    Wow, I did not know that. I assumed the book came first, from the...short story? Novella? Parts of the movie were very cool, parts dated due to the trying-WAY-too-hard-"futuristic" look (in stark contrast to 2010, which seemed quite plausibly what 26 years in the future would really look like). And then, the so-vaunted special effects, which to me very obviously looked like big mountains shot through a funny lens, and I just never understood the fuss because they did not look special to me at all.

    Back to the thread, I simply cannot believe that I can't think of a movie ending I don't like. I know there are a bunch, but I can't think of them.

    Well, OK, The Omen-I just hated how at the SPOILER ALERT father doesn't kill the evil son. Perhaps that's the fault of the author but I still hated it.

    Someday we will have technology to impose our own endings, and he'll kill the child. And Sylvester will eat Tweety and Wile E. Coyote will fricassee the Roadrunner and eat it all up, to come up with two other endings I hate.
     
  13. Archtop

    Archtop Soft Dead Crimson Cow

    Location:
    Greater Boston, MA
    A Clockwork Orange; perhaps my favorite film. The Kubrick ending used the US version of the book (one short chapter short of the UK book), and while it made for an effectively dramatic ending to a film, it left out the UK version of the book ending wherein Alex actually becomes a useful member of society outside of and in overcoming the government-imposed "treatment" that was such a major portion of the film and book. The whole point of the original book wasn't to make the removal of choice the message, it was to make the removal of choice a key cog into how we, as humans, can get immersed in such a fiasco and then still emerge as human, not because of treatment, but because we are human. The movie missed this point entirely. But I've still watched it over 100 times.
     
  14. I think that even then they were looking for sequels to their more popular films. This was after "Jaws" and Fox had managed to turn the "Planet of the Apes" saga into a successful series of (increasingly cheaper) films that, while each made less at the box office than their predecessors, it was the first effective franchise in years. As to "2001" Kubrick found Clarke's short story "The Sentinel" pretty fascinating and it has the basic premise of the film covering the section involving the discover of the Monolith. I haven't read it years though but originally, as I recall, the thing uncovered was a beacon sending a message to another planet.

    The footage with the various filters applied never really impressed me all that much but they were supposed to be the canyons of an alien world as I recall. The slit scan effect that Doug Trumbull came up with was pretty cool and revolutionary at the time as he goes through the Stargate.

    I still thought that, in retrospect, "2001" looked at what we thought would occur IF we had continued the space program beyond the Apollo missions at the rate we were going at the time. It was based on projections that NASA kind of had for their future missions. "2010" I think had the advantage of being a little closer to the time frame it was made in but, interestingly, the technology from the first film is, not surprisingly, kept intact.

    I do love the bit where they have the picture of Kubrick on the newspaper--it was a clever tip of the hat to Kubrick. "2010" may have been more literal in narrative structure and story but I think that it's probably one of Peter Hyams best films (I also enjoy "Outland" quite a bit although I was disappointed with the whole "High Noon" in space approach. I had hoped for something more but, hey, it got the film made.
     
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  15. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    In Peter Benchley's Jaws novel, the shark is swimming for Sheriff Brody, who is hanging on to a life preserver, and then the shark suddenly dies because it's been shot and harpooned several times. It just took like 10-15 minutes to die, and it died at just the right time. It's far more interesting to have Brody shoot a rifle and blow up a metal Scuba tank in its mouth -- and Spielberg did have somebody mention they had to be careful with the pressurized tanks in an earlier scene.
     
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  16. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    The original ending of Vertigo that was scripted went from the shot of Jimmy Stewart standing on the ledge of the church tower, then dissolved to a shot of a radio. We hear a newscaster doing a story about how police had just caught the rich guy who was responsible for murdering his wife (and substituting Kim Novak in order to fool Stewart), and the camera pulls out and we see Jimmy Stewart and Barbara Bel Geddes as they toast their champagne glasses and we fade to black. That was the happy ending -- and I like to think that's how the story ended. The movie leaves the story in a much more perilous state, and you could make a good case that Stewart was about to fling himself off the edge.

    Exactly. And the ending made the case that the demon that controlled Jack didn't quite understand the significance of the boiler, since that was part of Jack's brain. Only when Danny (the little boy with The Shining) reminded him did Jack regain consciousness enough to run back to the boiler to turn it down, only it was too late. I thought it worked fine, made sense, wasn't stupid, and was (literally) an explosive finale.

    Don't forget they also killed off Scatman Crothers' character, too, which was also not in the book. And Scatman was not happy with that on set.
     
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  17. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Yeah, basically the first Monolith gave intelligence to primitive man -- intelligence that helped him to understand how to use tools to get food (or in the case shown in the movie, to kill an enemy). The second Monolith was placed on the moon as a beacon, kind of an alarm to tell the aliens, "OK, now the people on this planet have developed space travel, so they've made it to the next level." I thought this was pretty obvious, even back in 1968. "The Sentinel" (from 1951) is not quite the same story, and it's fair to say that 2001 was a lot more complex and better thought out.
     
  18. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!"

    Location:
    Canada
    In the book Hooper was screwing Chief Brody's wife as well, so I think Benchley sorta conceived the Hooper character as not being a very likeable guy (certainly not like the amiable Richard Dreyfuss character in the movie). I remember not being too sad when Hooper bites it in the book.
    The book is sort of the same. It starts off like yer typical Stephen King book, but about halfway through in certain parts it's like he's doing a parody of a Tom Clancy novel on acid or something.
    To be fair, when Woodward and Bernstein wrote the book Watergate still wasn't over (i.e. Nixon hadn't resigned etc). I believe they did make a TV-movie version of the book's sequel, The Final Days, though.

    Even though it's not necessarily a "good" movie per se, my number one nomination for "bad ending" will always be Earthquake. Charlton Heston's character sacrifices himself to try and save his bitchy, suicidal wife he was planning on leaving anyway leaving his mistress Geneveive Bujold looking down at them watching it happen? WTF?! I know, the ending was Chuck's idea and all, but still...I thought it was a dumb ending the first time I saw the movie when I was about eight and still think so thirty two years later!
     
  19. MonkeyLizard

    MonkeyLizard Forum Resident

    Location:
    Philadelphia
    Cheech & Chong's Next Movie.

    I think this one contains some of their best gags and jokes, but that ending..
     
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  20. aussievinyl

    aussievinyl Appreciator Of Creative Expression

    I know what you mean, but I see the ending, although shocking, as a nice bit of karmic payback for Jimmy's character. He put someone else though a lot of psychological BS to get what he wanted - Jimmy manipulated a person, not knowing someone else was getting revenge on him. Perhaps the ending was Hitchcock noting that 'we're not letting this guy off the hook'. In a way, it's irrelevant to me whether he gets over his fear of heights. After all, he has nowhere to go but down after what happened, so the last shot is both cinematically and psychologically appropriate, one might say.
     
  21. Don't forget Tom eating Jerry. The other two never bugged me - especially not Wile E Coyote's mishaps, since he was so often the victim of his own hubris - but Jerry was just so damn smug about outfoxing Tom, that for over 40 years now I've wanted to see him get throttled. :)
     
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  22. daglesj

    daglesj Forum Resident

    Location:
    Norfolk, UK
    The end of Iron Man 1. A really great movie but I always felt the ending was just a little flat, just needed a little something to punch up the excitement. I can't say what exactly. It might just be the that the film ends...
     
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  23. Freedom Rider

    Freedom Rider Senior Member

    Location:
    Russia
  24. daglesj

    daglesj Forum Resident

    Location:
    Norfolk, UK
    As for Vertigo...total s**t throughout not just the ending. His worst movie.
     
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  25. Freedom Rider

    Freedom Rider Senior Member

    Location:
    Russia
    :) Wow, that's harsh, and I certainly disagree. I think it's definitely up there among his best.
     
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