When Good Movies End Badly

You know, when Return Of The King had that janky over-long ending, I forgave it. Clearly, Peter Jackson loved the subject matter, and was just having a hard saying good bye to the characters. And, honestly, at the end of 10-hour epic, it was kind of appropriate.

When the Academy decided to give Return of the King 11 Oscars, I figured that was just a way of them acknowledging that they should have given more to the far better films (Fellowship and Towers) that went before it.

Little did I realize it's because Hollywood doesn't have a fuzzy clue how a movie should end. Seems that ever since then, movies have just been trying to emulate the multiple false ending motif of RotK.

(Spoilers in white text, so you have to highlight, or copy and paste, to have the movie ruined. Aren't I nice?)

• This week we watched Shooter. It's a smart, tight action film. To it's credit, they clearly did their research, on sniping and on conspiracy theories. Even more impressive is that the heroes are both likable and believable, which isn't common in action films these days. But then they screw it up with this weird anti-climactic ending on a mountain top, followed by a weird anti-climactic ending in the attorney general's office, followed by a weird anti-climactic ending in a log cabin, followed by a completely unnecessary "driving into the sunset" shot that seems to serve no other purpose than to illustrate that Marky Mark is the kind of jerk who parks a wheel in each lane as he speeds recklessly down the highway. Then again, that scene is probably in Montana, so maybe his poor road manners are forgivable.
• A couple months ago I saw Hancock. It's a fairly clever twist on the Superhero genre, with some good laughs and a fairly satisfying ending, followed by a cheesy bad ending, followed by another cheesy bad ending, then the credits roll for 15 seconds, only to be interrupted by yet another cheesy bad ending. I felt like that poor beached whale, dehydrated and miserable and knowing the only way out was to be thrown end-over-end at a sailboat.
• Even when they manage to make a movie end just once, they still end it wrong - Another almost-great film we recently viewed was The Jacket. Artsy, intelligent, thought provoking, I was hooked 3 seconds after the opening credits were done. It was at times a tiny bit predictable, but only in the right ways: it used that predictability well, setting up "ooh!, are they gonna do that? I sure hope they do!" moments. I kept thinking that this was one of the best films I'd seen in a really long time. Right up until the last minute and a half of the film, then it completely blew it's own premise and self-consistency by making a dumbass amateur mistake. If you're gonna deal with Time Travel, you gotta do it right. What they really needed was a "Twelve Monkeys" ending - that movie stayed true to it's own causality logic, yet was just vague enough that stupid American audiences could lie to themselves (or just not get it) and think it had a happy ending. Something like that would have been much better. The director knew it, too, as evidenced by the four alternate endings on the DVD, all of which amount to single shots attempting to undo the 90 seconds that went before them.

Stupid. The state of cinema in this country really saddens me. And that's coming from a guy who's made Pizza Face Death, A View To A Clone, and CameraMan, so you know my standards aren't very high.