Well sometimes I pray for characters to die so that there will be fewer plot elements to navigate and then the film can end sooner. And sometimes, yes, your thing too.
I must admit that your threads are slowly getting better, and as long as you don´t spam or bump it might people respond seriously. My personal vote goes to the priest in "Fanny and Alexander, especially after he mistreats the young boy with his despotic methods. But Bergman is way too brilliant in order to make the viewer feel satisfaction when it becomes true.
Nurse Mildred Ratched. I imagine her unexpectedly slipping on a labotomy patient’s drool, cracking open her skull, and the soft jellied bile of moral hypocrisy leaking onto a newly polished section of asylum floor.
Heidi
La Teni in Irreversible. I wished for Alex to rise up against her attacker, grab the knife, and kill him with it, or for the fire extinguisher to have found its intended victim, or for him to have overdosed, or anything else to have happened to keep him from walking down that red corridor at the same moment she does.
When I saw that John Leguizamo was in The Happening, it made an inauspicious movie even worse. He started that teeth gritting thing – you know, when he’s VERY SERIOUS – and I began to wish that he would die. Well, sure enough: he wandered off and killed himself fairly early in the movie!
(Just to be clear: I will always love JL’s one-man shows, I think he’s a remarkable writer/performer. Like Whoopi Goldberg, his monologue performances reveal something remarkable you don’t see in his mostly-lousy films. But for me he’s mostly unbearable, as a film actor.)
Apursansar-Thanks for the compliment. I’m realizing I should start better threads, instead of just random ones. I’m looking back, and the only threads I really thought through were this one, and also the death-hilarious one. (Well, I did like my death thread, but now I can’t find it anywhere.) I guess the only good ones were the death ones! Anyway, I’m gonna try to be a better poster now. This is actually my first forum.
Another film I felt like this was actually ‘’the Pursuit of Happyness’’ It could of been a much less stupid movie if Will Smith’s kid died at the end, and they worked with that. I think it could have been a good movie then. At the end, I kept chanting “I hope the kid dies!!” Which is kinda sick, but ah well.
“Do you ever want a character to die in a film? Not because you hate them, but because You feel that it would make the film more powerful?”
No, just the director, and that is Michael Bay.
Yeah, if Michael Bay was dead, his films would be so much better…
I agree with T. (no comment)
E.T. XD
seriously?
Dory—Finding Nemo
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio on Titanic. What a horrendously lame story and boring characters. And about Michael Bay … I don’t wish the man any harm but definitely he should retire.
I’m just playing devil’s advocate here, but how much of Nurse Ratchet is pure evil, and how much of it is her just not being capable to do her job correctly?
I know most people respond to OFOtCN with pure hatred towards her, but I just felt like she could not handle the situation.
Drew I hear you. Its not that so much that I think she’s utterly evil (that’s ascribing too much purity to her, and she’s been created as a muddied portrait of human failing) … I think she’s just a perfect example of blinkered, willful ignorance, putting a supposed value system in the face of suffering and calling it order/civilisation/normalisation. And I despise that, generally. So for me, its less a reaction of hatred and more a desire to see some kind of poetic justice. She represents the callous stupidity of institution, and needs a sharp thwack to the back of the head.
I disagree with the Nurse Ratched analysis. She is a character who embodies sadism in its truest sense – she enjoys her power and relishes in it. Her character, imo, is tended to paint a bigger picture of institutional oppression, and how when some people are given a certain amount of power, especially over such vulnerable people, they tend to exploit it, and often abuse that power, to the extreme. She comes off as a fascist, and we see how many patients treat her as such, calling her an “angel of mercy” or begging for her mercy, as we saw with Billy at the end of the film. And to end it one has to kill it – cut the cancer from the body, as Nicholson’s character attempted, unsuccessfully, to do. So the evil lives on. A metaphor?
What about characters that you don’t wish never died?
(SPOILER:)
Bonnie & Clyde :(
Your right Eli. She is great character who adds greatly to the film but you have to admit, if you met her at a party would you want to talk to her?
Paul should have died in Yellow Submarine so that “Paul Is Dead” conspiracy theorists could have some proof.
Come to think of it, Paul might as well die in Magical Mystery Tour, Help, and A Hard Days Night also.
The boy in The Housemaid. The second most annoying kid in film history behind the brat from Fulci’s House By the Cemetary & Manhattan Baby.
Laika, I really need to sit through the Beatles film canon again & see if they hid any more hints about that for me. His grandfather probably got really lonely, unless fake Paul kept him company.
re: Ratched…. (see above)
“when some people are given a certain amount of power, especially over such vulnerable people, they tend to exploit it, and often abuse that power, to the extreme.”
OK, I agree with this. It is true of course. But can an argument not be made that the people working within these institutions are also dehumanised by the systems they are employed to uphold? I imagine a young Ratched, fresh from nursing school with good, hopeful values: and then by the time we see her onscreen, years later, she is worn down, cold, and has taken her own disappointment and frustration with the world and projected it out through her tiny zone of power, abusing those around her.
It doesnt excuse anything. But it adds further dimension to understanding what the film is about (institutions, control mechanisms, brainwashing). Her fear of the patients, what they represent to her, is palpable throughout (it’s an amazing performance I think). This is why I dont call her evil. The evil is in the system that grinds down on the human spirit, and can make people this dead and cruel.
On the other hand, she may just be a born sadist who took up the work in the first place to give freedom to her secret desires, the thrill of control. This clinical bedlam is still at the root therefore: because it exists in the first place and provides a structure for her twisted compulsions.
I still stand by my initial description of her demise, either way.
quentin
Okay, I’ve thought this thread through, and hope it will be beneficial to everyone on this forum.
Do you ever want a character to die in a film? Not because you hate them, but because You feel that it would make the film more powerful. I felt this way during ‘The Truman Show’.
If you do sometimes feel this way, during what movies?
If you don’t, do you think it is wrong to feel this way? Why?