Irene In Time – It’s great up until the end. I’m not going to ruin by saying what happened but I just have to forget the ending and remember that I really loved the rest of that movie.
The House of the Devil. I was ready to call it one of my favorite films of 2009, but then the last 15 minutes came on and the movie turned into a really poor, rushed and amateurish rip-off of Rosemary’s Baby.
Also, since we’re on the subject of horror films with satanic overtones, the original ending to The Exorcist is one of the best ever, but the Casablanca homage happy ending on the new cut is simply atrocious. It doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie and completely ruins the mood.
Spoilers ahead.
L.I.E – A great film with a more than disappointing ending.
Alice, Sweet Alice – Imo the film would have worked much better if Alice would have been the killer
instead of the old woman. Alice was such a sweet lil brat, they robbed us of what could have been one of the most iconic killers in slasher history.
Baise-moi – Ok, maybe not exactly a great film but for a movie that tried to come over as anarchic as possible; the ending was way to generic. (one dies the other get’s caught). I know it’s based on a book, but that does not make the ending any better. I think an open ending would have worked much better.
Another one I just thought of.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
I didn’t get what they were going for with the ending until I saw actual Monty Python sketches where they made fun of ‘Cop-out’ endings. So now I think, they were going for an ironically bad ending, and just came up with a bad ending.
The other thing that ruins that movie is having watched it ten thousand times as a teenager.
I love the Monty Python ending, but whatever.
But the latest awful ending I saw was Please Give. It’s a pretty good film, until the godawful final scene:
SPOILER ALERT
So essentially, Catherine Keener’s daughter is an entitled bitch who refuses to let her mother give to the homeless, and yet, in the final scene, Keener and Oliver Platt buy the stuck-up piece of shit daughter…$200 jeans. Yup
I also think that Monty Python & The Holy Grail ending was just masterful. Yes it was daring… but that’s the beauty of it.
I kinda thoiught the ending to WHAT THEY DONE TO SOLANGE? was kinda sudden and deus-ex-machina…. I suppose it solved the mystery but it really didn’t achieve a certain “balance” to the rest of the frenetic film…
I recall watching Breaking the Waves for the first time and being just so moved, and so into it… then enduring the film’s final of shot of freaking “bells in heaven.” I immediately, and thankfully early in my career, learned that Von Trier is a filmmaker who is capable of mastery but is prone to madness.
I thought Fat Girl was very penetrating and candid and lovely… then that car window gets smashed, and suddenly the film is written off to sensationalism…
I agree with Gabriel that the end of HOLY MOUNTAIN is weak compared to an incredibly strong and exhilarating first 95 minutes.
I also hated the end of ORDET (much in the same way I was irked by BREAKING THE WAVES), but, hey…I suppose I can’t expect the miraculous to come across as logical.
That’s kind of an odd take on the characters of Please Give.
SPOILERS
I saw that ending as “She realizes she’s channeling her goodwill to strangers who don’t really need her help when she should be channeling it to the one person who does need her”. I took the scene with the handicapped people as her realizing the hypocrisy of her ‘guilt of the privileged’. She looked down on them as being totally incapable, but when she got there, there was nothing she could do to help them, and they tried to reach out and help her. Sure, it does smack of entitlement, but come on, she’s a teenager. All teenagers in the middle class feel entitled. When she becomes an adult she’ll gain a broader view of the world, but if she grows up with a bad self image she won’t be well adjusted.
The ending of Holy Grail reminded me of the random non-sequitors that dominated the fourth season of Flying Circus.
LA CONFIDENTIAL has always bugged me. I would have loved it if it had ended right after the shootout with alll the police cars rolling in.
altered states
I definitely feel this way about Gus Van Sant’s ELEPHANT. To me It was a film that really defined its time period because it seemed like a generational reaction to the John Hughes concept of what it meant to exist as a high school student in America. That said, by the end of the film I felt like it traded in a lot of it’s poignancy for shock value.
MILLION DOLLAR BABY
SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
Shawshank Redemption? Not only do I like the ending well enough, but one can’t really comment on the ending of the film considering it is the ending of the short story… not really any control over that without making a terribly untrue adaptation.
“…considering it is the ending of the short story…”
Which ends differently.
The bad-guys don’t meet with nearly as much punishment in the story, yes? Conversely, the film’s climax is a pornography of comeuppance compared to the original, yes? Is that what you were getting at, Vic, or do you just dislike the ending in general?
The climax wasn’t even mentioned. As far as the ending is concerned, I was referring to the Andy escapes, hides box, Red finds box, they meet/speak of meeting…. which is virtually the same from story to film.
Who exactly are you referring to as the ‘bad guys’…?
SUNSHINE
@ JOE: AGREED! What a shame, right?
@LONA: The ending in which the pure evil warden commits suicide and the pure evil guard gets arrested for his pure evilness, neither of which occurs in the short, if I remember correctly. The King original lets them get off scott-free, I think, and therefore has a morally grayer tone overall, though I personally find great satisfaction in the movie’s alternate ending. In fact, am I remembering correctly that in the novella, Andy doesn’t even bring the warden’s corruption to light? Vic, is it this pat Hollywood wrap-up that you dislike?
No, it’s not that at all, I found his escape completely implausible. I just didn’t buy it for a second that he could have pulled it off. Given his position in the warden’s office, they would have searched his cell regularly with great scrutiny and found…what they would have found. The film started out as a relatively realistic prison drama about a man who makes the best of a bad situation by beefing up the prison library, lobbying for increased funding, making it a real service for the other inmates, etc., but then it turned into a fantasy with that big reveal at the two-hour mark. It probably played better on paper as a short story with a fable-like quality. But as a two-and-a-half-hour film, they needed to make it more believable. Plus, it’s highly doubtful the newspaper would have printed the story. The publisher would be buddies with the members of the parole board and they would have quietly corrected the situation, putting out a story that the warden resigned to pursue other interests or something. Like I said, a fantasy.
Ben, I understand what you’re saying.
I assumed Vic was talking about well… what he was talking about (his escaping, primarily)… so I stand by my statement.
That someone doesn’ like the last shot of “Breaking the Waves” blows my mind. It’s the point of the movie! Doesn’t have to be literal.
LA CONFIDENTIAL has always bugged me. I would have loved it if it had ended right after the shootout with alll the police cars rolling in.
This.
William Wyler’s THE COLLECTOR, the last shot totally changes the meaning of the (great) film!
the end of europa almost ruined it for me.
the part where herr kessler goes off the handle and starts shooting in the train with the guards machine gun. it just seemed like a completely unrealistic reaction for his character and for the up to that point very serious film
thankfully, how von trier took the film after that dopey scene made up for it
LA NIÑA SANTA (The Holy Girl, 2004)
Drama can never end with the unveiling of an irrelevant gossip.
Dracula (1931) …i expected a struggle before the killing of Dracula
Body Double – I still don’t understand what that frickin’ movie is about!
I agree with Wages of Fear, I just don’t get that ending at all it just doesn’t fit at all, not that it ruined it or anything. I do get angry when directors don’t seem to understand how to finish films so just chuck some vague happily ever after in there, like in Moodysson’s Together (which I adored) the end where they’re all happily playing football and the mother kisses her husband she had left, there is nothing really redeeming in this husbands character at all within the film world, he’s recklessly irresponsible, uncaring and beat his wife around and we are supposed to cheer that she is back together with him, which I think absolutely contradicts the film, the idea that she should be with him as she is the mother of his children is just fucking grotesque. I watched Shane Meadows’s A Room for Romeo Brass the other week which ended in a similarly absurd way, though that didn’t ruin the film – other stuff in the film ruined it. Taxi Drivers ending really irritates me too, I feel he needed to die in the end.
And of course I agree; Return of the King’s ending is absolutely absurd, I don’t like the LoTRs films very much anyway so I don’t think it ruined it I think most of the films were ruined before the ending hahaha but bloody hell that film made me more angry than any other I can think of in relation to endings, Peter Jackson I want that fucking half an hour back! It makes me absolutely furious when I have to watch a film slavishly taking all it’s cues from the books they are based on, if we wanted that we’d just read the bastard books and not watch the films I hate it when filmmakers copy and paste literature onto the big screen, it’s lazy and disrespectful to film as an art form, argh!
I don’t understand why so many people dislike the endings of There will be blood and No Country, I personally adore them and Holy Mountain’s ending is fucking brilliant as is Holy Grails
Just watched The Station Agent last night and was expecting…something more (don’t know what) before the credits rolled.
Joks
The ending for Wages of Fear is a bit oif a letdown i think.