Great film, dreadful ending

[Ibn Pickthall]

Or popular films, even.

My Fair Lady.
Please, someone tell me that GB Shaw didn't sanction that ending? I saw it for the first time at the weekend and restrained the urge to hurl the tv out of the window at the conclusion. The entire end sequence is out of synch with the rest of the film and the original play.

[Gangster Octopus]

Great film, dreadful ending

Whisky Galore. They don't run out of whisky in the book.

[Guest]

Great film, dreadful ending

No Country For Old Men

[Spearmint Rhino]

Great film, dreadful ending

Hieronymus of Hesselink wrote:

No Country For Old Men

Good call. I really didn't see the point of the bit with the old feller in his country shack. I'd have sliced off the last 15 minutes or so.

[Guest]

Great film, dreadful ending

Rosemary's Baby. Absolutely no need for the last scene, which clumsily rams home that they're all satanists, changing it from a great movie about the pregnant woman's paranoia to a good movie about satanists.

Unbreakable. At the end it turns out that Bruce Willis has superpowers, changing it from a still-bad movie about a crippled comic-book obsessive who's desperate to find a real superhero, and a boy whose worship of his father leads him to believe he has special powers, to a ridiculous movie about a bloke who actually is a superhero.

(I think; it's a while since I saw either of them.)

[Guest]

Great film, dreadful ending

There's so many! It seems much harder to end a film well than to begin one brilliantly. I wonder why. Maybe because we're allO OK with narratives that begin in ways we expect or in ways we don't, because we want to assume the rest of the film will make sense of itself, make itself complete. And then when it doesn't we're more disappointed .

Recently, erm, Sunshine springs to mind, in particular. The kind of ending that actually removes all the enjoyment from what you've already seen.

[Guest]

Great film, dreadful ending

Bright Young Things, that's an obvious one. Although in that case, the decision (imposed on Stephen Fry by the studio if I remember serves me correctly) to reverse the book's ending infects the whole film, because Fry has to jigger with the story earlier on to make the bad ending make sense.

[Gangster Octopus]

Great film, dreadful ending

The Lavender Hill Mob. Shove on a daft ending 'cos criminals can't possibly be seen to get away with it...

[ian.64]

Great film, dreadful ending

I wouldn't call it a dreadful ending by any means, but the hand-shake 'all friends together' bit at the conclusion of LA Confidential is a little bit too chummy and happy-ending after two hours of sharply-cynical, beautifully-done crime capering.

[Ginger Yellow]

Great film, dreadful ending

LotR:The Return of the King

An excruciating ending to what had been a perfectly silly movie.

Bad endings kill movies (or any other narrative art form, really) for em. I'd rather watch a mediocre film with a great ending than a great film with a mediocre ending.

[Guest]

Great film, dreadful ending

Rinoceronte Mentaverde wrote:

Hieronymus of Hesselink wrote:

No Country For Old Men

Good call. I really didn't see the point of the bit with the old feller in his country shack. I'd have sliced off the last 15 minutes or so.

************ SPOILER ***********

I would personally have finished it at the point where Javier Bardem is staggering down the road after crashing his car.

[Gyuri]

Great film, dreadful ending

Good call. I really didn't see the point of the bit with the old feller in his country shack. I'd have sliced off the last 15 minutes or so.

I actually liked that ending (even if it was a bit on the nose thematically), but that may just be b/c the movie had built up enough goodwill with me. I did have a problem with the ending to the other big Oscar-bait movie that came out around the same time, There Will Be Blood. I thought the ending pushed the tone of the film too far over the edge into the baroque. It made me laugh, which I didn't think was its intention. I do seem to be the minority with this point of view among my friends, however.

[Guest]

Great film, dreadful ending

I'd rather watch a mediocre film with a great ending than a great film with a mediocre ending.

Yeah that's kind of what I meant. It's probably as simple as you have the strongest impression of the bit you saw most recently and you reintterpret everything that went before in the light of what happens in the 'now'. And the huge power that 'closure' has on narrative.

I remember thinking Ginger Snaps was sharp and witty and even a bit different, and that was all spoilt by the by-numbers scary monster ending.

[Ek weet nie]

Great film, dreadful ending

The psychiatrist bit in Psycho.

I quite liked the ending of No Country For Old Men.

[Mitch]

Great film, dreadful ending

It made me laugh, which I didn't think was its intention. I do seem to be the minority with this point of view among my friends, however.

The OTT rant about milkshakes? Oh, I burst out laughing at the point as well! I thought it was intentional, to be honest.

[Spearmint Rhino]

Great film, dreadful ending

Hieronymus of Hesselink wrote:

Rinoceronte Mentaverde wrote:

Hieronymus of Hesselink wrote:

No Country For Old Men

Good call. I really didn't see the point of the bit with the old feller in his country shack. I'd have sliced off the last 15 minutes or so.

************ SPOILER ***********

I would personally have finished it at the point where Javier Bardem is staggering down the road after crashing his car.

Yeah. Same here.

[Amor de Cosmos]

Great film, dreadful ending

There Will Be Blood. I thought the ending pushed the tone of the film too far over the edge into the baroque. It made me laugh, which I didn't think was its intention. I do seem to be the minority with this point of view among my friends, however.

I'm with you on that. Though I was already chuckling quite a bit at Daniel Day-Lewis's outrageous impersonation of John Huston.

[Jimski]

Great film, dreadful ending

I thought No Country For Old Men had an excellent ending.

Horse has named the biggest offender here - Rosemary's Baby. I'm pretty sure there's never been an overall better film with a worse ending than that.

Another is Suspicion, of course, though Hitchcock was forced to change that (Hays Code, I think) and it showed.

Wasn't too impressed with the ending to Pickpocket either.

[rick derris]

Great film, dreadful ending

monty python - holy grail

I know its a comedy but the ending was just silly (in a bad way)

[goldstone97]

Great film, dreadful ending

Completely agree about There Will Be Blood. I'd been slowly losing patience with the film, but still enjoying it, until it just got silly at the end.

[Kowalski]

Great film, dreadful ending

The Firm, it was just a bit limp after all of the exciting chasing around.

[Guest]

Great film, dreadful ending

It wasn't exactly great before this but I really hated the ending of 'Signs'. It seemed to be saying that all the bad things that had happened to Mel Gibson's ex-priest (wife dying, daughter being weird, son being asthmatic, brother being a sports has-been) were all part of God's great faith-restoring plan, enabling Mel to ...erm, throw water over an alien and hit it with a baseball bat.

[Gyuri]

Great film, dreadful ending

J1s,

I'm with you on Signs. As I think I mentioned in the thread about "The Happening", I actually had a decent amount of patience for the movie until the two-pronged God's plan/water ending.

Another entry, though it's hardly a great movie, is "Return of the Jedi" with that ridiculous Ewok party.

[Jon]

Great film, dreadful ending

You're right about My Fair Lady, Ibn. In the original play, Pygmalion, Eliza goes off and marries Freddie (and presumambly ending her days living above a florist's shop.)

I think audiences railed against this ending, preferring to think that Higgins and Eliza could be reconciled and that this would be the more romantic ending.

Shaw died before My Fair Lady was written, so Lerner and Loewe could change the ending to the preferred Higgins and Eliza ending.

You're right though, if still alive Shaw would have railed against the changed ending. In fact he wrote an essay about why the ending should not be changed:

"The rest of the story need not be shown in action, and indeed,
would hardly need telling if our imaginations were not so
enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the ready-makes and
reach-me-downs of the ragshop in which Romance keeps its stock of
"happy endings" to misfit all stories. Now, the history of Eliza
Doolittle, though called a romance because of the transfiguration
it records seems exceedingly improbable, is common enough. Such
transfigurations have been achieved by hundreds of resolutely
ambitious young women since Nell Gwynne set them the example by
playing queens and fascinating kings in the theatre in which she
began by selling oranges. Nevertheless, people in all directions
have assumed, for no other reason than that she became the
heroine of a romance, that she must have married the hero of it.
This is unbearable, not only because her little drama, if acted
on such a thoughtless assumption, must be spoiled, but because
the true sequel is patent to anyone with a sense of human nature
in general, and of feminine instinct in particular."

Eloquent and forceful his argument may be, but I must admit to a fondness to the musical's ending myself. 'Where devil are my slippers?' being one of the all-time great last lines of a film of any genre.

[G-Man]

Great film, dreadful ending

The ending of The Passion Of The Christ was ridiculous. In the novel, the Jesus character goes off to France with Mary Magdalene and has a daughter.