UPDATED with more examples -- and questions -- after the jump.
Can one bad shot ruin a movie? I can't think of any examples off the top of my head -- I don't think it happens very often -- but I do believe it's possible. I'm not among those who think the final shot of Hal Ashby's "Being There" takes a marvelously sustained balancing act and kicks it to the ground. But I can understand how somebody might feel that way.
But how can just one bad decision -- maybe on screen for just a second or two -- deflate a full-length motion picture? Well, roughly the same way a pinprick in a balloon can, I guess. It can puncture the thin membrane that's sustaining the thing. Without shape and purpose, there's nothing to keep it aloft any longer.
Try thinking of a movie like a pop song. One misplaced note in the melody, one cheesy chord, one tacky lyric, one mispronounced word ("Yes, I hate the way he says 'don't diszgard me' too," Robert Christgau wrote of Elton John's "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" in 1974, and I still remember him mentioning it 35 years later) can render the whole record unlistenable, depending on how sensitive you are to the particular offense.
Or think of a movie as a piece of architecture. A misplaced brick of the wrong color or texture, a sloppy corner, a window stuck in the wrong wall -- could conceivably demolish the overall effect of an otherwise well-designed building. Leave out a stone, or put in one of the wrong size or shape or strength, and all or part of the structure could come crashing down.
Or think of a movie as your face. With one festering pimple right there. And it's permanent. It doesn't take up a lot of facial real estate, but it mars the visage so that it's all anybody notices.
The first time I met Ramin Bahrani (director of "Man Push Cart," "Chop Shop," "Goodbye Solo") at Ebertfest in 2006, he said something on stage about why "Mystic River" was a badly made movie. An involuntary cheer arose from my throat, because that movie had been favorably reviewed and I see it as a godawful mess. Slick as hell, but a factory-crafted product directed on auto-pilot. (Give just about anybody a crew of seasoned pros -- the best cinematographer, the best production designer, the best editors -- and shoot it in classical Hollywood style (master shots, two shots, over-the-shoulders, close-ups) and you'll get some kind of movie. Heck, that's one reason the factory style was invented -- so producers and studio moguls would have plenty of options when they assembled the pictures. Think of it this way and you'll understand how directors like Ron Howard can win Academy Awards.)
Ramin cited a scene in "Mystic River" in which a gun goes off in somebody's kitchen. There's a cutaway to a hole in the ceiling. He cited that as an example of what's wrong with the movie. You know the gun went off. Why do you need an insert shot of the hole? Was there somebody upstairs who got hit? It's not a big deal, it's just a cliché, a lazy choice, a momentary distraction that inadvertently raises questions the movie has no intention of dealing with. That particular shot doesn't "ruin the movie," but it's indicative of the kind of over-baked decisions throughout the film that make it a less-than-inspired achievement.
Last month at the Conference on World Affairs, Bahrani talked about a number of tough decisions he made in "Chop Shop." One of them involves a shot of a discarded flip flop, floating in some run-off water during a sudden rainstorm. He said they just grabbed the shot during the unexpected storm, but that he and his DP Michael Simmonds violently disagreed about it. (This is why they make such a good team -- they both feel passionately about the importance of a single image in a movie made up of thousands.) Simmonds said the camera should never cut away from the characters to follow an inanimate object just because it was supposed to "symbolize" something. It was too heavy-handed. Bahrani appreciated that argument, but saw the image more poetically, and felt it served to mark a turning point in the picture, the end of a phase in the main character's childhood.
These are the kinds of decisions that go to the heart of filmmaking, and it doesn't make any difference if it's an "art film" or a "popcorn movie." Thousands upon thousands of choices still have to be made, and you see the results before you on the screen -- words in a novel, brushstrokes in a painting, notes in a musical composition, lines in an architectural drawing...
I can't think of a concept that's more important to get across to audiences, who still behave (at least unconsciously) as if they believed what Joe Gillis said about them in "Sunset Blvd.," that they "think the actors make it up as they go along." Sure, they understand that motion pictures are scripted, and that they're photographed with cameras. But so much of what we see in movies can go right by us if we're not paying attention. The sounds and images have subliminal effects whether we realize it or not; but we aren't necessarily aware of how or why they have been orchestrated.
As I said in a recent comment, even "roller coaster movies" are planned, designed, built piece by piece, just like any other movie. Some are constructed better than others -- and those are the ones that are most exciting to ride, and re-ride. If you're going to get the most out of the experience, you have to open yourself up to it -- notice the vibrations of the track, the color of the sky, the sound at the top of the first lift hill, the way the air feels on your skin as you go into a turn... That's not over-analysis, it's allowing yourself to be fully alive to the sensations you're being offered.
Movies are like this. Choosing not to pay heed what they're doing, moment by moment, is to shut yourself off from them, to dull your own senses. To me, that would be like not being aware of Paul McCartney's bass lines on a Beatles record; or not noticing the differences between the textures of, say, Van Gogh's brush strokes and Cezanne's; or ignoring the language in a novel -- the sound and flow of the words, the imagery, the poetry. Would the first line of "Moby Dick" have the same resonance if it were "My name is Ishmael" instead of "Call me Ishmael"? What if there was an exclamation point in the final paragraph of "The Great Gatsby"? Or if T.S. Eliot had written: "April is the nastiest month"?
If you asked me, I could write a book about "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself," or, "On their backs were vermiculate patters that were maps of the world in its becoming," or, "I get the willies when I see closed doors" -- or, "Flying too high with some guy in the sky/Is my idea of nothing to do." (People have written books about these things, and for good reason.)
So, if you're receptive, you're going to feel more fully what works... and what doesn't. A critic's function is, of course, first to be open to an experience and then to articulate a personal response, perspective, interpretation, assessment. Nobody can tell you how to feel, and you can't expect anyone else to process the experience quite the same as you. Different things are more or less important to different people. Being able to communicate those differences is what matters.
I can go on and on (and have) about precisely why the opening shots of various movies are so exquisite, why they move or excite me. I can go into raptures describing the chilling final images of David Cronenberg's "The Brood." If movies matter at all to you, you must also be sensitive to negative examples, where effects are misjudged, the best-laid plans sabotaged by flawed choices. Sure, maybe the filmmakers didn't get the footage they needed or wanted that particular day. Maybe they were working under a tight deadline and the picture was about to lock. Maybe they didn't see what was right there in front of their faces, or maybe they did and hoped you wouldn't notice. Maybe they were trying for something they didn't achieve, or that had "unintended consequences." Maybe their intentions were misguided... But excuses aren't the point. What's on the screen is.
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Q: So, can you think of a single moment that has ruined -- or nearly ruined -- a movie for you? A single shot, or sound, or line, or expression that just throws the picture off for you every time? (Or to which you've had to forcibly desensitize yourself in order to appreciate the rest of the picture?)
UPDATE: I just thought of one. I have plenty of problems with both (nearly identical) versions of Michael Haneke's "Funny Games" (see The Funny Games Experiment) -- but I distinctly remember a moment that tipped the movie's hand so blatantly and insultingly that I wanted to boo, hiss, throw things at the screen and walk out. That's when the main perpetrator turns to the camera, smiles, and winks (conspiratorially) at the audience. This moment is so phony, so presumptuous, that it invalidates everything Haneke says he's trying to achieve with the movie.
Here's another one from "Mystic River": The last 15 minutes are such an awkward mess (the badly timed and cutely photographed final phone call from Kevin Bacon's ex that Alex Murillo mentions in comments below; Laura Linney's out-of-nowhere Lady Macbeth scene), but the capper is the gunshot gesture Bacon makes to Sean Penn from across the street during the parade. No way in hell would this cop ever do something as cavalier as that in reference to guns and the murder of Penn's daughter and a mutual childhood friend. The moment is overplayed so broadly (not necessarily by the actors, but by the director) that it turns these murders into a glib joke.
Oh, and how about the black-and-white shots of leaves at the end of "American Beauty" (another movie I disliked all the way through, but this was the icing on the store-bought cake)... while Kevin Spacey's voiceover is describing his precious memories of their bright yellowness?
Oh, oh: And what about when it turns out that "Million Dollar Baby" is actually a letter being written by Morgan Freeman to the estranged daughter of the Clint Eastwood character? Logistics and narrative voice aside, it makes no sense in terms of story or character that he would tell her such a story about her father's surrogate daughter.
On the other hand: Does the super-corny upbeat reunion ending of Spielberg's "War of the Worlds" ruin everything that movie has put you through in the previous two hours? Not for me. Yes, it's as phony and disingenuous as can be, but it's tacked on so half-heartedly I took it as an old-fashioned studio-mandated "happy ending" -- something we weren't supposed to believe -- like the famous, directorially undercut ending of Nicholas Ray's 1956 "Bigger Than Life."
Frame grabs above from "Duck Amuck" (Chuck Jones, 1953)
I probably wouldn't have liked Batman Returns very much anyway, but there's a shot near the end when Michael Keaton, hunched over the controls of the Bat-boat, somehow looks exactly like Inspector Clouseau in a Batman mask. At that moment, all hope was lost.
While not a film, there is a shot in the last few minutes of the final episode of Battlestar Galactica (involving a main characters "leaving") that single-handedly and effortlessly proved that the creators had put less thought into the project than we, the viewers, had given them credit for.
This retro-actively ruined the four years of my life I'd spent following the show.
Given this was possible for a whole show, I'd imagine that, although I can't think of a film example myself, it's certainly happened for other people.
Not a shot, per se, but those dreadful epilogue titles that come up over the final shots of "Unbreakable" completely destroy any impact that ending would have had. That feels like a studio cop-out in every way.
I despise the "clapping" in David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
And in the new Star Trek, Old Man Spock introducing himself with "I have been, and always shall be, your friend" was not only to great a wink at the audience, it also descerated what is arguably the most moving line in the entire Star Trek canon.
And talking about one creative misstep derailing a whole movie, what about the faux-talking heads in Frost/Nixon? Yikes.
Steven Spielberg's "Munich".
Though I have great respect for it, I cannot bring myself to want to watch it again, all because of the astonishingly misguided climactic scene of Avner's traumatic reliving of the massacre while in the midst of making love to his wife.
Reading it off the page, one could conceive of a way in which this scenario could be done effectively, and with more interesting and subtle implications. What Spielberg does with it is a perfect summation of what is wrong with him as a filmmaker.
His technical skills are impeccable, no doubt. But it's the decisions that dictate content, mood and all other intangible aspects of a film that make the difference between a journeyman and an auteur of Kubrickian dimentions.
This scene encapulates for me everything that is wrong with Spielberg. I have seen many instances in much of his work where his creative instincts noticably worked against the film, often manifesting in uninspired (or just plain wrong) casting, overwrought line readings, overt earnestness and uneven tone, among others. Yet despite all this, I find most of his work to be well crafted and overall quite enjoyable. I note the flaws, but I have the fairness of mind to overlook them for the sake of the bigger picture which, in most cases and to varying degrees, is a success.
But never have I come across a single scene so ill-conceived, so irrefutably out of place, as this one. It single-handedly ruins the entire experience of watching what is, up to that point, some of Spielberg's best work. This is why it hurts so much. I recall sitting in the theater, my mind screaming with shock and disbelief "what the HELL was he thinking?".
There is the obvious illogicality of Avner reliving something he never witnessed; Spielberg naturally felt obliged to include the actual massacre onscreen and Avner's inclusion was merely a hamfisted effort to personalize the event with the film's protagonist.
Also, consider the source of Avner's psychological trauma. The film clearly demonstrates the metal strain and moral anguish that the assassinations have had on the team, Avner most of all. Therefore, while his deteriorating state is consistent with this development, the chosen flashback most certainly is not. Has the film not been largely about Avner's ambivalence regarding his assignment? Have the assassinations not had a greater impact on him as a result of him having carried them out personally? Instead, what transpires onscreen comes across as the filmmaker's heavy-handed attempt to show justification for the mission by rubbing our faces in the blood of the victims. Much of the film deals intelligently with the moral questions the mission raises, so there is no reason to revert to emotionalism, most especially at such a late point in the narrative.
Lastly, one would expect that the mental state Avner is in at the moment of the scene would not be especially conducive to sexual arousal. If Spielberg wanted to show the searing effects of Avner's deteriation on his family life or sex life, he should have made Avner impotent, as he likely would have been under those circumstances. This conundrum, combined with the intercutting of Avner's grinding and the leadup to the massacre, unintentionally makes for an almost comical effect, the very last thing one should be thinking about in a scene meant to be harrowing.
Y'know, that's a tough one. If a single shot ruined a movie for me, it's highly unlikely I have that movie on DVD...I don't have anything to help job my memory.
That being said, your words resonate so much with me that I feel morally certain there has been, at some point, something...maybe not a shot, but perhaps a line of dialogue or plot device...that has ruined a movie for me.
Actually, yeah...now that I think of it...how about a scene not from watching a movie but from watching news about a movie? Terms of Endearment. There was so much hype over Shirley McClaine's performance; it was all over almost every entertainment report, and they always showed the same clip - the family dinner scene where her daughter announces she's pregnant, and asks Shirley's character if she's happy; and Shirley's character loses it and screams, "Why should I be happy about being a grandmother?"
Every clip always stopped at the same point, with McClaine's mouth open on the "errrr" at the end of "grandmother"; from the scene her daughter is to her left, but as she screams "grandmother" she's facing straight forward and her eyes are hard right, and after the 5th or 6th time seeing this in freeze frame on the TV I started going "ewww...", and decided I never was going to watch this movie.
Granted, I was 19 at the time and it wasn't the type of movie I'd have likely watched anyway, but...to this day, I will not watch that movie, just to stay away from that scene.
I suppose the irony is that it isn't even the fault of the director or Shirley McClaine. It's the fault of the publicity bozo who gave the clip to the various networks with that annoying freeze frame at the end...
The first shot of Jane Fonda in Julia, sitting at a typewriter with a cigarette dangling from her lips. As soon as I saw that I thought, "No! No, no, no, no, no! I refuse to believe this woman is Lillian Hellman."
Rachel Getting Married: the scene of the AA meeting where Anne Hathaway's character, Kym, reveals what happened to her brother. Everything about it is dysfunctional, from the scene’s placement (cut into the flow seemingly at random so we’re not sure we’re cutting forward or flashing back) to the framing (a tight close-up that sanctifies the character’s pain). Demme could have clinically documented an AA meeting early in the film, and have the confession emerge organically from there. He seems to offer just such a scene near the beginning, but he cuts away just as we’ve settled into the moment (it’s a good scene, partly because it plays it away from the mockery we’ve come to expect from movie depictions of those meetings). Such a sequence would have required more emotional investment than Demme was prepared for. He reserves all the film’s reservoirs of empathy for Kym. The story of the missing brother is a MacGuffin that keeps the first half hour alive and mysterious, but after a while the verbal dance around the matter at hand becomes a burden that Demme needs to relieve. But the scene by scene open endedness of the movie, maintained for the possibility of improvisational epiphanies that never quite arrive, proves suffocating, and in order to make the story work he has to find a way around it. Hence, the abrupt, artificial cut-away to the AA revelation.
The scene itself is badly done. Demme keeps Hathway in close-up through most of the scene, avoiding cut-aways to other attendees, or pulling back to reveal how people around her react to her. The choice to depict the character in such a tight, isolating close-up effectively martyrs her, like a Dreyer heroine. I didn’t have the instantaneous disdain for Kym the way that some people did (I’ve known, and been moved by, real life equivalents), but at some point Demme needed to demonstrate some awareness that the dramatic meat of the story was other people’s reactions to Kym, not her internal ruminations over her own past traumas. That scene inadvertently seemed to play into the character’s most despicable impulses- her fathomless capacity for self-pity, her remove from human communion, her inability to connect to any feelings but her own. It’s a scene of a movie’s imaginative possibilities melting away to reveal something meaner and easier: an acting exercise.
Alan Rickman's line at the end of Dogma: "We can rebuild you."
Cringe. Ruined the film.
The last scene in Spanglish ruined the movie for me, but that was more of a screenwriting thing, I suppose.
However, I'd like to play the devil's advocate and quote Jessica Winter: "Incidentally, it's a fantastic moment in any devoted moviegoer's life when you realize there's no obligation to decide whether you "like" or "don't like" a movie. That figuring out whether or not you "like" a movie can be happily irrelevant to your experience. That even a mediocre film can—maybe just through chance—set off sparks inside."
Granted, it's the same exact thing you're writing about here, but I'd argue it's a valid point of view: one can enjoy a flawed piece of art.
No, I don't think it can (for me at least). It is kind of revealing that you have to resort to metaphors (architecture and the balloon) to illustrate that it would at least be theoretically possible for a single shot to have that effect. But is it really valid to compare a movie to a building or a balloon the way you do it?
I'm certainly not against thorough analysis of complex art works, but should one really let the single pieces get in the way of appreciating the whole? Would you stop liking a Beatles song just because you found that on closer inspection the bass line isn't up to Paul's usual standards?
The sloppy shot in MYSTIC RIVER seems more indicative of a general problem of that movie (it is not the single shot that ruins it).
And the closing shot of BEING THERE for me points to a different question: Can a bad ending (be it a single shot or not) ruin an entire movie? (In the case of BEING THERE I would say, the ending is no par with the rest of the film, it really didn't work for me.)
"On the beach" with Gregory Peck and Anthony Perkins. In a scene quite at the beginning, Anthony Perkins is standing in front of his commander who is talking to him in a sitting position. Camera behind the commander showing Anthony Perkins. His eyes are flying several times between the other actor and the camera. More a goof than a shot, but after 20 years I recall this single scene much better than the rest of the movie, although I still regard "On the beach" as a very good movie. But this shot almost ruined the movie for me.
The final shot very nearly ruined "The Departed" for me. (I know it's a commonly held opinion that the movie is trash anyway because the original is so much better, but I haven't seen the original and the movie resonated quite a bit with me.) I enjoyed the movie so much until that point, but then the rat crawls across the balcony in an act of symbolism so heavy-handed it's almost condescending. I can't say it devalued everything that came before, but it made me leave the movie feeling upset where I'd previously been cathartic. I try to pretend the movie ends thirty seconds earlier.
For me, at least, I think it's more likely that a final shot (or sequence) can spoil a film than something that comes earlier. I can forgive a meandering film that ends well. A solid film with a poor ending just disappoints. I'm thinking of "Reality Bites" and "The Breakfast Club" here.
Jim: Great topic, and well said, but I was distracted by something else, because over the past few years I've 'grown sensitive to a particular offense.'
Why is it that no one can take Clint Eastwood's name in vain? Above there are three paragraphs describing how Mystic River is "a badly made movie," and yet Eastwood's name somehow never gets mentioned. (Instead, Ron Howard gets slammed. Not that I disagree with the slam.)
This isn't a criticism of your piece, nor am I suggesting that you went out of your way to avoid mentioning Eastwood. Instead, I'm fascinated at the large number of people who will say something to the effect of "Mystic River is a a badly made movie," and yet very few people ever say "Eastwood is a poor director." Strange.
This post is just yet another example of this. I realize Eastwood is a legend and a swell guy, but he sure gets handled with kid gloves. Just saying.
I was really enjoying Four Weddings and a Funeral until Andie MacDowell ruined the picture with "Is it raining? I hadn't noticed." I don't remember a specific thing from that movie other than her horrendous line reading. And I've never watched it since.
Burt Reynold's goofy smile and "okay" gesture to the camera in the final freeze-frame shot of "Hooper" comes close to ruining the movie for me.
Almost all of Kubrick's films are amazing while you watch them, but the last scene or shot always leaves you with a question. On a single shot he has you questioning what you saw and what it meant, he leads you into thinking about the movie. As far as I know no other director does that and if they do they don't do it with EVER film they make.
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There was a boring movie called SLC Punk that I just didn't like until the last shot, the last shot has this "punk" kid explaining how it's better to be IN the system then out of the system, because IN the system you can change things. This made me HATE this movie.
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Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) was a good movie, but the final shot of Cagney walking toward the chair and you see those tears in his eyes made it a GREAT movie.
I thought the recent film "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" was brilliant but I've heard that many disliked the entire movie because of one controversial shot near the end of the film.
It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in '07 and according to Metacritic (where the film has the surprisingly high score of 97) it was the best reviewed film of 2008.
Though it won many awards and was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, it was not nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Oscars, many speculate because of that one shot.
I think the title card at the end of Jacob's Ladder (about US gov experiments during Vietnam)is a bit of an insult to all that came before it. The film seems to be a very personal spiritual journey about a man coming to terms with his own death, and all of a sudden you're supposed to view it politically. It's a mixed message that ruins the effect.
While it wasn’t enough to completely destroy my appreciation for the film, the last 5 seconds of the original “Matrix” turned what was a serious, thought-provoking, and exciting science fiction film into an overblown cartoon. After getting out of the phone booth, Neo, played by Keanu Reeves, zooms into the sky towards the camera like friggin’ Superman. This brief moment of Keanu-as-infallible-Savior is really representative of what was wrong with the two sequels. There was no real dramatic tension of whether or not he was going to win, because we already knew he was the prophesized Jesus of the Universe. Will Neo escape the clutches of the deadly Sentinels? Hey, he can fly, can’t he?
Atonement: a great, great movie up until the reveal 9/10ths of the way in that everything you just saw was a fabrication, fiction, a fantasy.
So Kane has just come home from his trip to Europe married. Everyone runs to the window to catch a glimpse of his new bride.
Joseph Cotton says super enthusiastically, "Let's go the the window!"
I don't know why, but that pisses me off every time.
Vacancy was good 2006 genre thriller starring Kate Beckinsdale and Luke Wilson. It wasn't high art, but it was serviceable. The final shot *SPOILER* of Luke Wilson somehow surviving ruined the movie for me. It felt like a tacked on happy ending for what up to them was a pretty gritty little thriller.
The 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead's final shot post-credits where *SPOILER* they all die made it impossible for me to rewatch the movie. I invested two hours in everyone's survival just to have them die in a cutaway shot.
I'm sure I can think of more with time.
This is more of a special effects shot potentially ruining a movie. In "Die Another Day" we have a shot that almost derails a franchise. Towards the end of the film, we have a ill-concieved effects shot that involves Bond "surfing" away from some wave created by melting ice or something silly like that. The movie over-extends itself here and the effects just don't pull it off. It looks silly, and I recall people commenting on it as one of the more eye-rolling portions of the movie. In fact, it's often cited as a scene proving that the Bond series had turned into an over the top spectacle and parody of itself. Similar criticism of that movie in general more or less led to the "Casino Royale" reboot. Granted, Brosnan was going to be done after the film, anyway, but if you squint a little, and allow for some hyperbole, you can consider that scene a franchise ruiner.
Does this include single shots that give story, or just shots that are badly composed or break up the flow or whatever? Ebert's review of Thelma and Louise discusses this thing. Because of the very last shot, he ducked a half-star from the film.
JE: I'm thinking primarily of the latter, but whatever sticks in your craw... The ending of "Thelma & Louise" is, IMHO, insufferably saccharine in so many ways. Just a "Butch Cassidy" rip-off -- though the earlier movie was trying to show how the characters' deaths turned them into historical legends. I think "T&L" could have used a lot less fantasy-fulfillment and prettification in general. Something more like 1974's "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry" perhaps, with the car crashing and exploding horribly into the scenic Grand Canyon might have been more effective...
The bookend sex scenes in "Munich" almost turned me against the movie. We didn't need those scenes to understand the humanity of the character or his moral dilemma. This birth/life/death juxtaposition almost "kitschified" the movie.
Although the film is definitely a flawed film too begin with, Godfather III's shot of an aged Michael Corleone (some of the worst hair and costume design I've ever seen for a character that has such a specific fashion style), is almost enough to ruin the whole series, much less the movie itself.
All of the camera into the back shots in Rope.
I loves me some Vertigo but it drives me nuts to no end when Scottie follows Madeline at such a close range. Later on, we know that she knew he was following her the whole time. However, I still want to scream out, "Back off Scottie or she'll know you're following her!" in each of the driving scenes.
The closing scene in Rachael Getting Married when the camera suddenly changes to Rachael's perspective. That one made me mad. Demme sets up the film in the opening as being from the perspective of Kym, going so far as to shoot from the back set of the car where Kym is seated, literally showing us exactly what Kym is seeing. As the film moves on, that choice in the narrative breaks down as Demme seemingly can't remember how he was filming his movie. The fist big sign that Demme couldn't make up his mind is when the camera suddenly leaves Kym behind to follow Rachael and her dad into the kitchen (took me right out of the film; made no sense with the established narrative structure). When the camera completely abandoned Kym (the focus of its attention for 90% of the film) in the closing scene, I knew I'd finally had it with the film. My wife argued about this film for two hours after seeing it. I have no idea how that mess was so highly regarded.
Dazed and Confused is one of my favorite films but I have to try really hard to ignore how Wiley Wiggens continually brings his hand up to cover his face. I can't tell if it's Mitch or Wiley who is self conscious in those moments but I've always assumed it was Wiley.
There's a shot in Sleepless In Seattle that proved to me that Nora Ephron wasn't simply a creator of pap but that she was a complete hack. If I remember right, the shot begins with Meg Ryan on the right of the frame and then the camera pans over to show a mirror on the left side of the frame (Meg on the right is now off screen) with Ryan reflected in it. Nothing else happens in the shot. It's just a ridiculously "look at me" piece of staging of the worst kind - it's a completely pointless moment in the film made worse by the fact that the shot is such an inane attempt at artistry. Of course, I could be misremembering this one as I've tried to wipe it from my brain.
In Alien, there's that scene after Ash has been "killed" where they arrange his body on the table in order to talk to him. An anonymous arm repeatedly tries to prop up Ash's prop head up but it keeps falling over. Then it suddenly cuts to the exact same shot but with Ian Holm's actual head in place of the fake one so he can do his dialog. The cut is so obvious that it draws attention to the fact that it is a special effect. And keeping the footage of the prop head falling over only goes to telegraph the special effect even more. The whole sequence is so sloppy that it takes me out of the film and makes me wonder what happened. Did they fail to get enough footage of the prop head and they had to use that crappy shot? The scene would be so much better if they'd just retroactively cut out he first part where they try to arrange the prop head.
This is more in the scripting, etc than a bad shot per se but, in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Johnny Depp's blood exploding out of the bed has always been the one moment that ruined what is otherwise amazingly effective horror film.
In Star Wars, there's the moment where the Sand Person raises his arms and then the film is reversed to make it look like his arms are going up and down. Over time, that's become one of the films many quaint moments but I used to have to force myself to ignore it.
They didn't ruin the whole move for me, but there are two moments in "Citizen Kane" that always make me cringe:
1. When Leland asks for the "Declaration of Principles," and compares it to important documents, including "My first report card in school." That line, and the reaction shot of Kane grinning afterwards...
2. When the reporter leaves the Thatcher library and says "Thanks for the use of the hall" and a whacky "wah-wah, wah-wah, wah-wah" from a trumpet tells us just how clever the line was.
At the other end of the spectrum is the "They're on Instruments" gag in "Airplane!"
I guess there's always mistakes.
The point is that no movie is perfect, it's up to us to decide whether to allow it to crash the entire movie, or delete these details in our minds as part of our suspension of disbelief.
Or maybe, as Ebert has pointed out numerous times in the past, our being bothered by such flaws only means we weren't engaged in the movie.
It's mere seconds in a movie that I loved half to death, but the hummingbird in Benjamin Button annoys the crap out of me. Conversely, I can think of a couple of occasions where a single scene made me like a movie I hadn't like up until that point: the revelation at the end of Atonement and the first musical number in Moulin Rouge. With both of those scenes, it was a sort of a revelation as to what kind of movie I was watching.
I don't recall the shot in Mystic River to which Mr. Bahrani refers, but I agree with both of you that it was a bad movie.
Taxi Driver. The last shot appears to be fantasy and puts what happened before into question. Some might also say the psychiatrist's explanation in Psycho lessens the impact of the whole movie.
Neat column, Jim, although I still love "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me" in spite of Elton's bizarre pronunciation.
The shot that immediately leaps to mind for me is the one at the end of L.A. Confidential. (SPOILER WARNING)
The one where the camera cuts to Russell Crowe alive and well. I wanted to throw something at the screen. Up to that point, the movie had been brilliant, engrossing and completely believable. Seeing Crowe and realizing that everything would end up more or less happily for Basinger and him made me want to puke.
JE: "Don't diszgard me" doesn't bug me that much, either. Though, from the very first time I heard the song (a favorite Top 40 AM ballad) I wondered why he sang it that way. On the other hand, the "You see, I've forgotten -- huh" in "Your Song" is pop genius.
The light bulbs, wind, and other 'natural elements' in Doubt.
The cutaway to the screaming guy in the bathtub during the climax of The Truman Show.
'Medichloreans' in Phantom Menace (along with a million other things)
The last 5 minutes of In Bruges.
The last shot of Before the Devil Knows Your Dead
That's all I can think of off the top of my head. The Truman Show one pisses me off the most, because not only is it a horrible cutaway, it's a terrible (and unnecessary) attempt at comic relief during a very tense scene.
Great question. Also, can one shot save a movie?
I was watching Die Hard the other day, for the first time in a good couple of years, and I had forgotten that the ending is mired by a sticks-out-like-a-sore-thumb dose of sentiment; earlier we had the cop, over the police radio, explaining how he accidentally shot a kid once. That scene was already pretty cheap and out of place in an action movie like Die Hard, but it's made so much worse at the end when, out of nowhere, one of the terrorists pops up, alive and well, and that same sergeant who once shot a kid, man, gets to shoot a terrorist and be a hero. It's so cheap, so clumsy, and worst of all so COMPLETELY unnecessary that the whole movie goes thud. Could definitely use a little fan-edit.
British critic Mark Kermode, who considers The Shawshank Redemption one of his favourite movies, maintains that Frank Darabont should have stuck to his guns and had the movie finish one scene before it does. Similarly I Am Legend - a far from great movie - goes on one scene too long, and I sometimes wonder if The Crying Game should have finished on the penultimate scene. But these are scenes rather than shots I suppose.
Off the top of my head I remember one shot in The War of the Roses where, after Michael Douglas thinks he has just eaten paté made from his pet dog, we get a shot of the dog barking outside so we, the audience, know the dog is actually safe. This is a cop-out, and I think Danny Devito was made to include it. I seem to recall seeing another movie lately that had a similarly 'It's ok folks, everything's actually fine' shot, but I forget what it was.
I think that the use of "Halleluja" during the Nite Owl/Spectre love scene in Watchmen was ham-handed and ruinous.
And, not that X-Men Origins: Wolverine was a great movie anyway, but not one but two shots of Hugh Jackman screaming "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" at the sky? C'Mon.
JE: The ending of Spike Lee's "Jungle Fever" (a pretty messy, uneven movie) ends on a similar note. I remember wanting it to work, but not being convinced.
Can't think of ones off the top of my head where a movie I was enjoying was ruined by one specific shot, but some that stick out as particularly bad:
- Your "Mystic River" remark reminded me of another horrible, recurring shot in the film: of the lips of Kevin Bacon's estranged wife, who keeps calling him from the same pay-phone and then not speaking. In three words: wtf?!?!?!?! If you weren't going to develop it anymore, you should have left this subplot out of the adaptation Clint.
- I find "The Graduate" to be one of the most overrated films of all-time, but to me the clincher that establishes it as a snide piece of counterculture catering is when Mike Nichols cuts from Benjamin's famous Christ-like pose tapping on the church glass to the ludicrous reaction-shots of Mrs. Robinson, Mr. Robinson, and the groom, making cartoonishly evil faces. How can anyone see these shots and think this is a masterpiece?
- I love David Fincher's "Seven", so I wouldn't say this shot came anywhere near ruining the film for me, but one that I always cringe at is when the police officers come across the "Sloth" victim, who (shockingly) turns out to be still alive. The moment where he coughs is a true shocker, but after the ensuing chaos, there is a cutback to him writhing on the bed that always strikes me as a little too over-the-top...it's like he's a being from a monster-movie, and it feels out of place in the film.
Can't think of any more right now, but if I do, I'll re-post.
I've never been quite as disappointed in a movie as I was with "Synecdoche, New York", and I think the momentary glimpse of Phillip Seymour Hoffman poking at his feces was the point of loss. It's a terrible, terrible movie for plenty of reasons, but that was the point at which I went from "I wonder" to "I hate" with the whole thing. I've never seen, nor have I wanted to see, the creative spirit dying such a horrible death.
Well, for me it's in Scorcese's 1991 remake of Cape Fear, which I otherwise regard as a well-crafted and well thought-out remake. After all, they found creative ways to use Robert Mitchum (who even utters his "Well, excuse me all over the place" line from the original, but as a different character) and Gregory Peck from the original. Also, they further darkened the Sam Bowden character, which seemed apt for a more modern version of the film.
However, when DeNiro's Max Cady leaps off the houseboat after his face is set ablaze - while he's underwater, his hand comes up out of the whitewater, without the benefit of being able to see, since his head is still underwater(Jason-like, from Friday the 13th) and snatches a loose hanging rope from the side of the boat. This jolted me - in a very bad sense of the word - since the movie was tense, scary, thrilling but NOT cartoonish until that point. If he would have just swam over to the side of the boat and struggled to grab the rope (while he could see it) I wouldn't have felt this way, because that's believable. Him blindly reaching out of the water and randomly snagging a loose rope that JUST HAPPENED to be there at the perfect time was just too unrealistic for me. I had really lost myself in the film and this reminded me that I was "watching a movie" since I didn't believe it for a second. Using movie parlance, before this shot, I had willingly and fully "suspended my disbelief."
I may be the only person who feels this way, but that movie was on its way to greatness (in my mind) until that point. That shot plagues and disappoints me to this day.
I think 'bad shot' is something of a vague concept. When I watch a movie, I'm not usually watching it rating individual shots like they're Olympic ice skaters or something. I tend to prefer shots with a lot of detail, so I like when film makers use wide shot/mediums shots. That's just a preference. Does this mean a close-up is 'bad shot'? Is Tati a better film maker than Dreyer by that rationale? Certainly not.
Take your examples of The Dark Knight back in the day. It wasn't just a 'single shot' that was the problem, it was a series of bad decisions that led to a frustrating experience. It was the rhythm (or lack thereof) of the images that was the problem. It was that the individual elements didn't gel together to form a meaningful whole. Deconstructing the parts apart from the whole is kind of meaningless.
In answer to your question, I have never said to myself "Damn, that one shot just about killed the movie", either a movie is well directed or it isn't.
When you say 'ruined' a movie, in the case of "Being There", if I did feel that last shot went too far that would far from *ruin* the movie for me. That would be a problem I have with the very ending and most of the rest of the movie would still be very good. Ruined would imply that I didn't like the movie and I don't think I would ever not like a movie because of *one* shot, I would just mention that one shot doesn't work. And, frankly, one pimple is not going to change my opinion of somebody either, nor would how Elton John pronounces one word change my opinion of his whole song and certainly not his album. To me that is nitpicking, whatever else you wanna call it. "Nobody can tell you how to feel, and you can't expect anyone else to process the experience quite the same as you. Different things are more or less important to different people." And sometimes a little imperfection is not gonna ruin a movie for us... or even imperfections throughout. It all depends on what else is there. I'll agree that one shot can ruin one scene or one aspect of a movie but the whole thing? Maybe it's possible but I can't think of one example that would do it for me.
JE: As Pauline Kael said (and Dennis Cozzalio quotes at the top of "Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule"), "Great movies are rarely perfect movies." What I'm asking is IF you can think of a mistake so egregious that you would call it "bad" (and why you would consider it so). Then, if such a mistake would be enough to invalidate the movie.
But, no, I didn't mean to imply that a pimple, even a permanent one, would cause you to dismiss an entire person (which is why I said "your face," not someone else's) -- just to suggest how, subjectively, your feeling about your face could change if it were disfigured by such relatively small but noticeable flaw.
I think we may be missing the boat here, because we are talking in generalizations. And there’s one thing I’ve learned about film if something is wrong that you can’t put your finger on it, then it’s the editing stupid.
The shot in "Mystic River" of the hole in the ceiling isn't sloppy. Numerous times shots are taken during filming that may not make it through editing. It showed exactly what it thought it would show and did so concisely. It's inclusion is sloppy.
Particularly in the studio system this happens, but you discount the studio system so readily. I'd much rather have the old studio system then let’s say the early 90's where based on my accounts quality films were a rare commodity, at least by my estimate and personal taste (in spite of our thinking that it was when independent film was still independent there wasn’t a lot there).
I guess this is the inevitable Eastwood backlash, but Eastwood is no Oppie. Eastwood uses it as a framework for the rest of the crew to work within and in doing so he lets people's talents shine. He’s not out there trying to make the perfect movie or the perfect shot. And In spite of some messiness (which he basically adopted from Siegel) and studio flourishes (ala the ending of Gran Torino), I personally feel he can achieve a tremendous emotional variation over his career. No, he doesn’t manhandle the medium like a Kubrick (an intellectual heavy weight) or Fincher (in spite of Jim’s affections is an absolute intellectual lightweight), but he’s not nearly as ham-fisted as Ron Howard. Mystic River is the most over-rated of his catalog and yes it’s sloppy. I think the directoral comparison comes from both directors frequently appeal to nostalgia, but I’d watch Letters from Iwo Jima a thousand times before rewatching Frost/Nixon. I can list a number of things that Eastwood does well and numerous shots I remember for their effectiveness (the intimacy of the final scene with Penn and Linney in Mystic River, the Sauna scene in Breezy, the Ape show scene in White Hunter), but when it came to Howard…I remember chuckling at the end of A Beautiful Mind.
Of note I don't think a single shot ruins a movie. Is there one line in a book that ruins it? Eastwood directs almost in a literary way. I think he’s the Hemingway of directing, but there were plenty of inexact prose in his works, does that ruin them all? In every movie there are successes and failures and just because we pick up on one aspect in one scene and harp on it and use it as a way to pick apart some movies that weren’t nearly so bad unless it’s a symptom of the whole movie that we were too stupid to pick on until then. Really when you have such a visceral reaction to something for something so minute you should probably look at yourself (It may stem from you more than the movie). So we learned Ramin is even more of an editing hawk than me, which is saying something. Really does one shot spend all the value that a film has built to that point? Personally, I think this is ridiculous. I won’t rewatch something because of an aspect. Like I just watched “Killshot” and while the acting was borderline terrible, but that’s not why I wouldn’t watch it. Simply the dialog. Why would Elmore Leonard try to write a story in the Midwest?
I do think a line can ruin a song, simply because they are usually so short. Thunder Road: I’ve got this guitar and learned how to make it talk? No thanks after the first stanza I press skip.
As far as I'm concerned, any movie that features a performance/art unveiling/Great Speech and ends it with The Slow Clap is instantly and forever doomed along with its creators to an eternity in the seventh circle of hell for the Violent against Art.
Specifically, I actually have a beef against "Days of Heaven." Rarely do I blind buy DVDs, but its reputation was so great, that I splurged for the Criterion edition. I watched it on the bigscreen TV with my parents, and it was truly a beauty to behold...until the last scene as Linda walks along the train tracks talking, and she says, "I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine." Suddenly and abruptly the scene fades to black. Cue credits. Huh? I remember all three of us pausing in silence, and saying, "That's it?" Such a graceful, well paced movie damaged by (imo) a botched line reading combined with a shot that is way too short and abrupt to fade. It completely undermined the rest of the film for me, so much so that I've only rarely revisited it, and to view a specific scene for my own work. I've never watched the film in its entirety since that first screening debacle. That ending was a massive let down.
Best,
BR
Well, Jim, I feel your pimple-on-my-face metaphor doesn't exactly work because we're talking about how we feel about how somebody else's film, not our own. And there's more to a film than what flaws meet the eye, other emotions and ideas that arise from the film, just as there is more to a person than their face. If you're loving aspects of a movie, you might forgive a few pimples here and there.
Now, if you wanna use that example to talk about how a filmmaker looks at their movies... I know many filmmakers, like Woody Allen, hate to watch their movies again years down the road because they see imperfections that most audiences are willing to ignore but, because the filmmaker's name is on the flick, the filmmaker worries about these imperfections all the more.
For Ramin Bahrani and Michael Simmond's, some sticker on a bumper is of great importance. I wouldn't have noticed it. And if I did? Life goes on and so does the movie. I look around and see what else is there that interests or moves me.
To come back to "Being There", there's a scene where Shirley Maclaine's character is rolling around sexually I suppose on a rug while Sellers' watches T.V. ...That's a pimple. The rest of the movie is still great.
"What I'm asking is IF you can think of a mistake so egregious that you would call it "bad" (and why you would consider it so)."
And I'm saying... I for one cannot think of any such mistake. And I've read what everybody else posted here and can't agree with any of the posts, especially the one about the rat at the end of "The Departed", which always bothered me a little but after the rest of the film, it's just a rat. I'm open to the possibility though that a shot could ruin a film... I just haven't seen it happen yet... I'll keep checking in to see what others can come up with...
JE: OK, maybe the pimple metaphor doesn't work. See? You try things and sometimes you wind up with one metaphor too many. I was trying to come at it from a different angle, emphasizing subjectivity, but there's no denying it's your face and somebody else's movie. I added a few more sentences/examples to the end of the post. What I'm saying is that if you can articulate what makes a moment in a movie "great" then you should also be able to articulate what makes a moment FAIL when you see it. If you're aware and sensitive to one experience, you are open to feeling and noticing the other, as well. (I'm using the Kaelian "you" here.) I just encourage people to be in touch with what they're thinking and feeling when they watch a movie. They're probably responding to something, whether they know it or not.
Whilst it doesn't ruin the movie for me (and I'm grateful that it appears relatively early in the film), the blantant spelling-out-for-you-ness of "Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?" from THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD really takes me out of the film for a minute or two.
It's hard to believe that someone wasn't in the editing room with Dominick saying "Come on, the audience REALLY needs to get the idea here" when the rest of the film is spellbinding and subtle.
Radovan, I read the second sex scene in Munich in a completely different way. To me, the point is to contrast it with the first scene where Avner and his wife are clearly making love. The second scene shows Avner unable to return to his life after everything that's transpired. He can't get the images out of his head. It doesn't matter if they are literally his visions because what you see in your mind's eye is completely vague. They are just images of horror and he can not shut them off, not even during sex with the woman he loves. You allude to this being the intent a bit but then you say, "Instead, what transpires onscreen comes across as the filmmaker's heavy-handed attempt to show justification for the mission by rubbing our faces in the blood of the victims."
Wow. I don't think that could be in any more opposition to what I believe Spielberg intended. The film does not justify the mission, it shows that taking an eye for an eye just leaves more people dead and that those who survive have had their humanity diminished. It's the sex scene at the end, especially after showing how cool and calculating Avner had been during the assassinations, that nails home the point that he will never be okay. Spielberg's point is not to justify the violence but to say that somebody needs to take a stand by NOT perpetuating it.
I see Tom picking on those scenes in a later post as well. I had no idea those sex scenes were so derided. A "birth/life/death" juxtaposition. Really?! I don't see it that way at all (but if I did, I can see how it would be complaint worthy). I see it as just being about how Avner's mind is consumed by the horrors he's seen and how he can't shut it off.
Just curious, do people have issues with the contrasting sex scenes in Coming Home and A History of Violence as well?
Gavin Breeden, what shot in 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days are you referring to? I remember feeling that I'd just seen a perfect film. Nothing stood out because it was all just so right. You've got me curious now.
Ryan Kelly, would your opinion of Jim's question be any different if it was simply asking if a shot ever took you out of a movie (i.e., stood out because it didn't fit) rather than asking if it ruined the movie? For me, a lot of the bad shots/moments I can think of don't ruin the film so much as distract from it.
In the Michael Keaton film "Multiplicity" there is a shot that completely ruined it for me, though it may have happened more than once.
When there are several versions of Keaton in the same room, the camera moves in a strange way that I have not seen elsewhere. It feels unnatural and distracting, completely reminding me that I'm watching a movie with special effects.
It pans slowly as if to say, "Hey! While we could have cut to some different shots of the room, we spent extra money on CGI to get all the Keatons in the same shot, see?!"
It's not a great movie. But it had potential to be entertaining. Now, instead of remembering the funny parts, I'm reminded of the weird one.
"Final Cut." I saw it with friends, and a few minutes before the ending, the film broke. So we got our passes to see it again and came back. In the last portion of the film, I went from curiosity to disdain. There is one scene, where Robin Williams suddenly realizes he is dealing with a serious customer, and as if by magic, that character metamorphized into a bland, cliched Hollywood double crosser. I felt transported from the realm of "what if" to the realm of retreaded summer blockbusters. The same change is used beautifully in Kaufman's "Adaptation" as a dissonant. In "Final Cut" it is only a false note.
Brain Rose:
"Specifically, I actually have a beef against "Days of Heaven." Rarely do I blind buy DVDs, but its reputation was so great, that I splurged for the Criterion edition. I watched it on the bigscreen TV with my parents, and it was truly a beauty to behold...until the last scene as Linda walks along the train tracks talking, and she says, "I was hoping things would work out for her. She was a good friend of mine." Suddenly and abruptly the scene fades to black. Cue credits. Huh? I remember all three of us pausing in silence, and saying, "That's it?" Such a graceful, well paced movie damaged by (imo) a botched line reading combined with a shot that is way too short and abrupt to fade. It completely undermined the rest of the film for me, so much so that I've only rarely revisited it, and to view a specific scene for my own work. I've never watched the film in its entirety since that first screening debacle. That ending was a massive let down."
I think the ending is perfect because the 'good friend of mine' she is referring to is an older girl she barely knows. But she says the line so honestly that I'm sure she really thinks that's what a 'good friend' is. And so I'm left to conclude that this girl doesn't know how bad she's had it. And that's what the movie is all about... The title "Days of Heaven", I always thought, refers to how childhood is often thought of as bright, beautiful days before everything was wrong but there are those of us who had childhoods that weren't so happy and yet we still seem to glaze sunny days over it in our memory when, really, those were sad, hellish days we were too young and naive to realize. The abrupt ending of that final scene worked emotionally for me too, cause it stunned me and left me with a bittersweet emotion that made me think about that last line and what I had seen... and who and what this movie and really been about. This girl and her unhappy childhood, which she overlooked at the time.
***
Ps. Jim, all those examples you added above are, to my knowledge from reading what you've wrote about them, movies you were already disliking/ had issues with. What about a movie that was fine until the shot that ruined it all for you? I can think of plenty movies I already had issues with that a shot was the nail in the coffin for but if I hadn't have had all those other issues, that shot might have been taken in stride...
I applaud Bahrani for his attention to detail in Chop Shop, but despite that effort (and all the critical applause it has garnered) that movie completely failed for me. I think I have narrowed it down to two reasons.
The first is the trailer. I realize this isn't exactly what you are talking about but it has a similar effect. When a trailer co opts important scenes from a movie it can completely deflate those moments while you're watching it. For the first 30 minutes of the film all I could do was say "yep, there's that scene that was in the trailer, I wonder when that other scene will show up... oh there it is." It didn't help that the trailer was terribly boring or that I watched the trailer (an extra on the DVD) immediately before watching the movie.
The second aspect fits more into this discussion and was the misshaped brick that toppled the whole tower for me. There are a number of scenes that are framed such that the characters are walking directly toward or away from a dollying camera. Often one character is in the fore ground while the other in the background. I'm not sure why these scenes really stood out to me, but after a couple of them it really got on my nerves. I was already a little bored with the film and wondering when it would get more interesting, but then I started noticing these shots and contempt welled within me. Completely irrational, completely emotional, but all the same there it was.
I think perhaps if I watched the movie again, knowing that the plot isn't going to go anywhere and with a forgiving attitude toward a few specific shots, I might find much to appreciate in it.
Great topic, Jim. I've been enjoying your blog now for some time.
I must agree with the earlier commenter about the final shot in The Godfather, Part III. The movie worked for me right up until that point. The scene of the shooting on the stairs near the end of the movie was heart-wrenching. Coppola's use of silence and then sound for Pacino's scream is very moving, at least for me.
And then comes the final shot. It completely undoes the entire movie -- I will not go so far as to say the entire franchise, as the earlier commenter did, but it renders everything we've seen in the movie up until that point irrelevant and pointless. On top of that grand problem of its meaning, it is cartoonish. Outlandish. Just plain unlikely. It required suspending a different set of beliefs from the belief we already consented to suspend for the rest of the movie.
The concept of a "shot ruining a movie" has its analogy in the notion of a passage ruining a novel, and I'm certain there are a number of your readers who can identify with that, as well. As with most of the examples above, I think that most passages that ruin novels tend to be found at or near the end.
The moral, I think, is this:
Thou Shalt not betray at the end of your work the expectations thou created leading up to that point.
I have a couple. The two I have picked occur in films that are so meticulous in their appearence and execution they seem totally out of place. The first is when Roy Batty releases the dove into a bright blue sky at the end of the original version of Blade Runner. While it didn't ruin the movie at all, it made me sooo disappointed that they let it through to the screen. The other scene is at the end of Angel Heart when the cop says to Harry "you're gonna burn for this one" and he replies "I know, in Hell" and it cuts to the baby in the cops arms and the eyes are supposed to look demonic and scary but they like they have been cut out of cardboard and stuck on the baby's face. Terrible.
I'll probably get reamed for this, but in "No Country for Old Men" I can't stand the dissolve from the two pennies in the hotel room to the long shot of Tommy Lee Jones driving up to the house of the old man with the cats. I was loving the movie up to that point, but this completely killed the tension. I realize the Coens always turn film convention on its head (this is the reason many people hated "Burn After Reading," a movie I loved) but I just can't make this transition, or the film's ending, work for me.
To play ball though...
Don't ask how I found myself watching this movie but here I was watching "Fast & Furious" this year and during the car races you have pedestrians *repeatedly narrowly* jumping out of the way... Cars are blown up into the air and landing like homing missiles on other cars... Earlier in the movie you have Paul Walker's character jump through a window and tackle a man holding a gun off a balcony and down onto the top of a car and, then, after all that, Walker has the presence of mind to aim the gun at him and the guy is still alive without a broken neck or vertebrae ... I find all these series of shots preposterous to the degree that I couldn't care anymore cause the filmmakers could make what they wanted happen whenever they wanted it to whereas, in the first movie, cars driving under trucks is an idea that seems *almost* doable - it's something I had imagined doing before while in traffic jams and needing something to daydream about - and so I went along with it...
Also the heavy use of CGI in the flick versus the real stunts in the first movie was a disappointment.
But all these problems I listed could, hypothetically, be excusable if there was anything happening on screen that I could care about. Logistical problems don't bother me in a movie like "Lethal Weapon" because I care about the characters. But "F&F" is simply a glamorization of all the worst things glamorized in movies these days from brooding, single-minded men and revenge stories to plots designed to have one ridiculous spectacle that would never happen after another. Of course, there is also the routine flaunting of 'luxuries' - suped-up cars, indoor golf courses, flashy clubs, expensive clothes, drugs and booze - and reckless spectacles, short-tempered confrontation and, naturally, scantily clothed women dancing between scenes.
That's what the people want. What I want is not behaved characters but humans who are aware superficial excess can't make up for a lack of personality and testosterone overload is not something to be proud of. There's a scene where Paul Walker acts like a schoolyard bully loosing it on some guy, a jerk in the film but that's hardly an excuse. His boss comes in and says "You're getting blood on my floor." *Audience I was with laughs. I smack my head at how cruel and inhumane audiences are to laugh at such a scene* And then in the next scene he's like an empty-headed, spoiled kid in a candy store customizing cars for his next FBI mission. (Tax dollars put to good use.... not that that occurs to audiences.) And how many upgrades does he want? "All of 'em". *Audience laughs. I try not to grit my teeth.*
By the time the car-wars in the second half come around, I had fallen asleep from the brain-numbing.
And, to change gears for a moment, I haven't seen "Star Trek" yet but those lens flares are annoying and pointless. And, yet, even them I can excuse if the movie moves me or has some other amazing visuals to salvage the flick. The boat scene alone in "Fitzcarraldo" is worth the price of admission.
By the way... Movies people are mentioning here seem to be, by my measure, some alright films. Which makes me wonder what sort of standards people have compared to mine. To me, stuff like "F&F" is the real junk. I'd rather watch "Mystic River" any day, flawed as it may be, it's more human.
I second the shot of the dog in 'The War of the Roses.' The scene about the dog is so good, so truly vicious, that we can feel the story crossing a line of decency it can't uncross. And then they do uncross it with a shot showing it walking around later, which just lets all the air out of it and interrupts the entire upping-the-stakes progression of the story. I ache to be able to get rid of that shot just through sheer force of will every time I see it.
Also agree with the parachuting special effects shot in 'Die Another Day.' I really thought the movie was great fun, but that shot hits the wrong note, to say the least. It's amazing how much expense and artistry can go to a shot that looks so puny and phony it might as well have been an Army man on a tabletop model.
I was going to include another one of my own to actually contribute something, but I'm blanking. I could certainly talk about closing scenes that I thought ruined an otherwise very good movie...don't get me started.
Gus Van Sant's MILK.
Mind you, although imperfect, I think it is a great film. But I had to come around in time to name it a great film, because the first time I saw it I was so incredibly frustrated by the melodrama of the slow-motion death scene.
In fact, the film has what I think are the best and worst images together, with the beautiful shot of Milk's head -- the shot of an icon, if you will, the type that would be used for historical figures in our pennies or dollar bills -- followed by that hammered, unsubtle shot of him looking through the window. Seriously, it ALMOST ruined the film in that first viewing.
I'll also mention that I think it is easier to get over bad shots if they're somewhere in the middle of the film. Filmmakers shouldn't underestimate the last taste that they leave in the audiences' mouth. A lot of these example cited above are good proof, I think, since most of these have to do with endings or near it, underlining the importance that if we're going "uuwww"and "aawww" through the experience, it is vital you leave with the former.
Any film which shows the triumph of evil depresses me, so the ending shot of "Basic Instinct" made me dislike it intensely. I don't know if this meets your criteria, because I don't remember how I felt about the film before that point.
American Beauty may not be the idea of a universal classic but the film worked for me, except for bit where the Thora Birch character has to strip for Wes Benton's idle filming pursuits. That cheapened the film considerable notched for me. Ditto with the Annette Bening/Peter Gallagher sex scene that was in bad taste.
Speaking of Thora Birch, the opening graduation scene Ghost World suffered considerably thanks to her grimacing shots.
I have three. the first is a superfluous inclusion in an otherwise great film. The second is a bad shot in a fun movie. The third is a ham fisted setup that drains surprise and suspense from the finale of a film.
It's hard for me to say this, because it really is my favorite film, but the whole motorcycle death and reporter questioning introduction to Lawrence of Arabia is a total botch. It hardly relates to the rest of the movie, and it obviously rips off Citizen Kane. The rest of the film sets up the fact that he is a man alone wherever he is so well that it is unnecessary.
I have a few, but I'll start with Star Wars, which is a great fun film up to the final shot. I can't help but notice that Chewbacca is on a lower step. Why? So his head can line up with everybody else in the final shot. For an awards ceremony it makes no sense as it would indicate that he was either less or more worthy than the others. And he bellows! Why? It's all too obviously a construct.
The introduction fueled hotel in Quantum of Solace completely spoils the last 20 minutes of the movie. First, Bond does not know it's there, so why do we have to know about it? They make such a big deal out of it too soon, so that you know it will blow up and spend the rest of the time wondering exactly what will set it off instead of watching the movie.
This discussion brings to mind a recent heated debate over a shot of this kind - the late shot of Bill Murray muttering in Scarlett Johanssen's ear toward the end of "Lost in Translation". Opinions differ about the quality of that picture (I thought it was terrific), and even more about that single shot. Should Sofia Coppola have let the audience in on what he said to her? In not doing so, did she ruin her movie? Or would she have ruined her movie if she had done so?
To my mind, one of the movie's themes is the need for a place of one's own. Those two characters are made to fill pre-set roles, and they spend a good part of the film carving out some personal space together. So I say that what Bill says to Scarlett at the end is none of the audience's business. Revealing it would be forcing the two characters into a pre-set role once again, and concealing the last lines of dialogue was the proper choice.
I think Mark Romanek has a great ability to take everything one step too far. While it's usually more than one shot there's a distinct moment in all of his films and videos (blood coming out of Robin Williams eyes in One Hour Photo, the crucifixion scene in his Hurt video) where you just know he's gone overboard. As such, he works better in mediums where over the top necessarily means better like 99 Problems, Closer, Speed of Sound. Anything that involves subtlety he'll go with until he tries way too hard to drive it home.
As a kid, I would close my eyes on repeated viewings of Star Wars whenever Obi Wan's light saber flickers out during his battle with Darth Vader. Wasn't it obvious to anyone cutting the movie that he is standing there with a stick?
In some of the early Bond films it really bugs me when they speed up the action during fight scenes, hard to make sense out of what you're seeing.
In The Road Warrior, Mel's truck door is ripped off and there is a crew member visible crouching in the cabin with him.
Some of these are just goofs, but they can really kill the mood.
The problem with Being There isn't the last shot... it's what comes *after* the credits. Those goddamn, WTF-are-these-doing-here BLOOPERS at the end of something so quiet and complex. Sweet Jeebus.
The Mr Orange sequence from Reservoir Dogs (it isn't exactly just one shot, but it does a lot of damage). I realize its meant to pass the time between the exit and re-entrance of Mr. Pink, Mr. White and Nice Guy Eddie, and to answer the question everyone has been asking up until that point, but the sequence is so long it stops the movie dead. It would be better to simply fade or dissolve from (spoilers!) Mr. Orange shooting Mr. Blonde to the return of Eddie, Pink and White and the entrance of Joe. Since Joe, and then Mr. Orange, only a minute or two later (and much more succinctly) supply the same information as that in the Mr. Orange sequence, the whole thing becomes superfluous (though you could keep the heist-planning scenes and the naming scene if, to complete the film's structure, you absolutely had to have a Mr. Orange section).
Ellen Page's monologue in the film "Smart People" when she tells her father that they don't have to compensate for a lack of intelligence just ruined the film for me. The camera, I believe is on her during the entire time and I can't believe that anyone who watches that scene would not be just a little turned off by Ellen Page. To be fair, the monlogue is horrible but Page doesn;t even try to make it go down easy for the audience. If I would have to point out two shorters shot that ruined the film for me, which complimented that scene, it would be a shot of Page's smug face handing Dennis Quaid her notepad with title ideas for his new book, which include "You Can't Read." The shot of Quaid smiling at her also further ruins the film. This scene and those two shots seem to go against what the movie is trying to do, which is make the audience sympathize with these two characters. Any sympathy that could come from me completely vanished with this scene.
I may not be the first one to post this one, because I didn't read any of the comments, but I can't stand the shot of the Joker leaving the bank in the school bus in the opening of "The Dark Knight."
I loved this movie, but that one little part makes me cringe every time, especially when a newcomer is in the room. They always say exactly what I'm thinking, "How did NOBODY see, or REACT TO, what just happened?"
For being so early in the film, I have seen it turn many people off the rest of the movie due to its absurdity. Other people, however, have said it is a commentary on how people just let crime happen in our society. That seemed like an interesting case, but then again I believe the shot could have been handled in a more legible fashion.
All in all, I can't remember if there was a movie where just one shot turned me off of it for good. If I don't like a certain movie, I tend to find a lot of things wrong with it. Either way, I'm going to end this comment with this; At least Mystic River was better than Gran Torino.
Definitely, think The Shining when the room full of skeletons randomly appears totally ruined the substance of that scene.
One of the commentaries even said that it was as if Kubrick was settling to a specific horror style.
The entire final scene of Atonement ruined it for me - from the "I'm sorry, could we stop for a minute" voiceover reveal of the aged Briony forward. The revelation that the last half-hour of the movie was an utter lie upset me as I was watching it, but the more I thought about it, it really made me loathe the film.
Well, as long as all your examples can come in movies that you disliked all the way through, so can mine: In Crash (spoiler alert, I guess), when the camera pushes in on the blanks in the drawer. As if the film hadn't thoroughly insulted our intelligence already, it delivers that final F-You.
JE: Actually, I was with "Funny Games" and even "American Beauty" for a little while. I think "AB" jumped the shark in the rose petal/gymnasium scene. That was where I remember thinking: "Oh, what a mistake to take down the lights and shine a spot. Too obvious. Too theatrical." Only later did I find out that Sam Mendes was best known as a theater director.
I completely agree with your first two examples. I loved Funny Games until that point. Absolutely hated it with an unholy passion from that point on (actually, the real clincher was the remote control scene).
And yes, the last fifteen minutes of Mystic River are dreadful, but unfortunately the movie wasn't all that good to begin with.
The last shot of Raising Victor Vargas kind of ruined the movie for me. The scene that precedes it, with the family sitting around the living room and the kid playing the piano, would have been a beautiful, transcendent final shot. But then the director had to go and ruin it by throwing in that final Hero Shot of Victor walking away from the camera.
Before I talk about the two film scenes I despise, I would like to mention the most infamous 'out of place' scene in movie history. For years, critics have savagely attacked, disected, and pondered the psychiatrist scene at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's classic 'Psycho'. To be fair, if one jumps over this scene with the help of a DVD remote, the films does work better. To an extent, Hitchcock distrusted the intelligence of his audience, and seems to have inserted this scene with utter condescention. While I'm not sure of The Master's intentions, I think the scene serves a purpose in one respect; it offers further closure for the supporting characters who were touched by the deaths of Marion Crane and Lt. Arbogast. That being said, I think the weakness of the scene lies not in its motives, but in the delivery. The actor who played the psychiatrist did a terrible job, and completely mishandled the dialogue. Hitchcock had a reputation for 'letting his actors act', as he felt himself to be the star of the film, and the actors were cattle. I am not sure how many takes were needed for this scene, but Hitch should have made an exception for his own rule, and stopped the actor in his tracks.
The film 'The Goonies' contains the two movie scenes I despise the most. The first is the scene in the attic (or was it a basement)? The protagonist, Mikey, has a brief exchange with his older brother about their father. Immediately, the groundwork is layed for something extraordinary, especially considering that up to that point, ten gazillion undeveloped characters have been tossed at the audience with no time for digestion. Unfortunately, the movie takes the relationship between Mikey and his dad nowhere (yeah, I know they hug at the end, but so what)? I find myself resenting Mikey's tag- along friends, whose mouths, inventions, hormones, and attitudes ruin what should be the story of ONE boy with an overactive imagination and a cool dad. That leads me to the second scene I hate... the scene at the bottom of the wishing well. There's coins everywhere, possibly enough to save the town from a greedy developer. The friends face a moral dilemna. Do they take the coins and get out alive, or do they move forward and pursue the treausure they set out to find? Yawn, yawn, yawn! The audience is asked to invest emotions in the problems of kids we haven't been given enough time to care about. 'The Goonies' largely fails to invoke the sympathies of the moviegoer, which is why this scene blows down the cheese door. Mikey's obligatory speech is one of the most unintentionally laughable moments in 80's film lore. And where's the dad?!
There's one shot toward the end of "The Shining" when Wendy is running through the hotel and sees a guy sitting on a bed in what appears to be a bear costume. I know crazy stuff happens in that hotel, but what was that?
I don't really know if one shot can completely ruin a movie. The shot would have to be really bad. Some comments posted here refer to scenes rather than shots (such as the sex scene in "Munich" which I'll admit was unnecessary, but did not ruin the movie for me).
Sometimes lines of dialogue particularly tick me off. There's one line in "The Sixth Sense" when the mom says to Cole: "I found something in your bureau drawer today." It's just one line and it hardly ruins the movie, but I've never heard someone use the word "bureau" outside of French class or if someone's referring to a government agency. Even though I like Shyamlyan and think that even after making three of the worst movies I have ever seen he can still make a comeback, I just don't think he can write dialogue very well (some exceptions: scene in the car in "Sixth Sense"; asthma attack scene in "Signs").
I have some problems with the last 40 minutes of "Psycho", but that's mainly because the first hour is probably the most perfect stretch of film I can think of. Aside from the infamous psychiatrist scene, I really don't like the scene (which may be all in one shot, so it might count) where the boyfriend confronts Norman Bates during the climax. Anthony Perkins gives one of the most naturalistic performances in film history, so it's very distracting when this guy comes like he walked off the set of a bad 1940s film noir. The scene feels very stagey and kind of phony, which is a shame since the film is a very nearly perfect work by possibly the greatest filmmaker of all time. But it certainly didn't ruin the entire movie.
Not that it was a great movie to begin with, but when Malebolgia in "Spawn" first appears screen...I remember even thinking back in '97 that the CG on him was horrible. The quality doesn't match the movie's other effects all. That shot still makes the movie fall on its face the hardest when I watch it today.
Also, those "floating person" shots in Spike Lee's films. It might've been a cool technique when he first used it, but now it just looks awkwardly funny and out-of-place ("Inside Man").
JE: The first time I remember seeing that locked-down floaty shot was in Scorsese's "Mean Streets," used to show Harvey Keitel's drunkenness. I don't know what they are meant to accomplish in Lee's movies, except to indicate that he's seen "Mean Streets."
I think it depends on how you view film - myself, I don't think a single shot can bring down the rest of a film, but that also depends on where that shot is in relation to everything else, and what it's intended effect was supposed to be.
It's not a shot, but the 'Rosebud' plot-hole in Citizen Kane does nothing to the rest of the film. We notice it, and we acknowledge it's there, but it's not throwing paint on any of the film's other elements.
I have tried to think of one shot that totally destroyed a movie I had been tracking with up until that point. Destroyed it to the point that I could not enjoy anything that came after it. I can't think of one. Scenes? Yes. A number of final shots have been mentioned, and I think that's the most obvious place where a film could be dropped.
As I was trying to think of examples, and coming up short, I began to think of Pauline Kael. (I am paraphrasing, and I can't remember what review or article this idea appeared in, but I want to give her the credit). She once expressed the notion that, because a film if made up of so many different things (actors, camera movements, music, sets, etc. etc.), there is almost always something to appreciate in even the worst of movies. If this is the case (and I think it is), that might explain why no one shot had obliterated a movie for me. I can always enjoy the soundtrack, or an actors performance.
Three of my biggest gripes were already mentioned: the final moments of Jungle Fever (Spike does nto know how to end movies. At all.), the final Briony voiceover in Atonement (I was iffy on the film at that point, but to hear that the entire second half of the film didn't happen is the exact same as the "it was all a dream" cliche) and the final shot of The Departed (a completely obvious metaphor that Marty should have realized was dumb.)
One of the most bizarre instances of this occured for me while watching the bad Vin Diesel movie, A Man Apart. The movie is exactly one scene too long, and it's immediately obvious to pinpoint which scene it is because it's the last one. The movie has wrapped itself up, and then we get a curiously out of place final scene that wraps things up EVEN MORE, as if we needed the closure. Bizarre.
As far as individual shots go, for some reason, the last shot in the otherwise excellent Broken Flowers seems like too much. It's already been implied that the boy Bill Murray's character meets may have been his son. We don't need a shot of him staring off into the distance to get that message across. And another recent remake, The Last House On The Left, has a final shot that gets a laugh when the absolute last thing it should be getting is a laugh.
I remember being bored with "Gladiator" throughout its seemingly endless running time, but what really threw me out of the movie was the combat sequence in which the lion is introduced. For a split second there, Russell Crowe is actually wrestling with a furry stuffed animal head. So obviously fake. The rest of this clunkily edited film never recovered, though I must say it has one of the most effective and haunting scores I've ever heard.
I was also bored and restless throughout "Spiderman 3," but there was a certain moment when my 15-year-old daughter and I glanced at each other and burst into spontaneous laughter, and that was it: We were officially out of the movie. Later I was pissed off, because I loved "Spiderman 2," and the third movie was wrong in every way imaginable.
I've never been comfortable with the ending of "No Country For Old Men," even though I know it comes directly from the novel. To me, it just did not work cinematically. Two other shots in that movie bothered me: The spurting gore of the pickup truck victim as Bardem chases Brolin (too horror movie-ish), and Bardem's shooting of Stephen Root's character, which seems to be played for laughs. Both of those shots distracted me because the emotions they called up were at odds with the overall tone of the material. (I digress, but when I first read the book, the directors of the hilariously low class "Big Lebowski" did not spring to mind for the film version.)
I like "The Dark Knight" for its fearsome intensity and the power of its performances, but the assassination of the judge confuses me: Were the cops at the door setting her up, or did they unknowingly lure her to her death? Also: Did Joker kill Rachel? Or Maroni? Both deny it. But somebody did. I can't help but feel some vital information got lost in the intersecting storylines.
The first appearance of Karen Allen in "Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" threw me. I loved her in "Raiders of the Lost Ark," but could not stand her in the fourth film. Something about her grin told me nobody was home and I couldn't get past it.
Jesus, where to begin with "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"? Is it fair to say that I was thrown off and distracted by every single aspect of this film? I knew I was in trouble when I first got a look at Cate Blanchett's "old lady" makeup. The Katrina wraparound story is a needless distraction, poorly photographed, half-baked, a boring waste of time. But then we get the faux newsreel-type footage of the watchmaker building the backward-running clock, and the special effects shots of the WWI soldiers, and then more Katrina ... and THEN Brad Pitt's not-at-all-like-Tom-Hanks-narrating-Forrest Gump v.o. narration. Can David Fincher please land the next Batman movie? No more romantic fantasies for this guy!
One that hasn't been mentioned yet is at the end of "Superman II" when Clark wipes Lois' memory of the entire story, thus completely negating her character arc.
Another is the baseball hitting Robin Williams on the head being the way he gets his memory back of being Peter Pan in "Hook." The film had other problems, but that was the scene that made me push the 'pan' button.
And, though it didn't completely ruin the film for me, the scene in "The da Vinci Code," where the police captain tells his lieutenant how he "knows" Langdon is guilty, and the lieutenant buys it.
I may think of some more later.
Most films are of a piece, even the bad ones, and so I tend not to feel that a single thing derails a film completely unless it's already been headed off the rails. People mentioned The Departed, American Beauty, Crash -- for me, all of those movies had tipped their hands long before they did any one thing that was a camel-breaker. They're perfect examples of middlebrow filmmaking, movies that are nowhere nearly as wise (or clever) as they think they are, and sabotage themselves by getting too far in over their head and not being able to survive going the distance.
I was particularly outraged by The Departed, since the original HK movie was everything the remake was not, and the remake was so astonishingly bad in every respect that I begged for someone to tell me Scorsese had in fact delegated directing responsibility to someone else. (Doubly infuriating that Scorsese copped awards for what was arguably the worst film he ever made.) Taxi Driver's open-ended conclusion at least left you with questions; this one just made me shout "WHY? WHY?" (As in, why did they even bother?)
The "evil sex scene" in Munich did not derail the film for me. I saw what Spielberg was trying to do, and while I wouldn't have made that particular choice myself, I saw why he made it. The film is effective as drama, far less so as history or political analysis, but then again, anyone who goes to the movies in lieu of doing real homework about a subject probably gets what they deserve.
Oh Lord. When Rhett's daughter falls off the horse. Took me right out of the movie, I was laughing so hard.
Oh, and all 2 hours and 45 minutes of "Benjamin Button." It's like one long, excrutiatingly boring shot.
And agreed on the point about Ash's head in Alien: I think it's the one and only "bad" shot in an otherwise perfect film.
I'll get accused of being "too cool for school" for saying this, but one of the most offputting scenes in an otherwise great movie has recently been posted here: the "sister/daughter" scene in "Chinatown." It certainly doesn't ruin the movie but I can't help but laugh out loud at the painfully overwrought acting from Dunaway (who made a career of such performances). I really didn't think the movie had missed a beat until then and suddenly this scene that looks like a bad rehearsal that someone accidentally filmed. I like it better with keyboard cat playing them off.
Almost forgot this one. Though it didn't ruin the entire movie, the shot, in "Interview with the Vampire," of the Sun shining directly overhead into the narrow well, in Paris.
haggie, I was referring to the infamous "fetus in the bathroom shot." Some folks felt it was a bit heavy-handed. The shot lasts for what seems like an eternity. It is certainly uncomfortable to watch and for some viewers, it's a deal-breaker.
In the otherwise wonderful Mr. Roberts, two quick scenes, both involving overdubbed sounds, absolutely make my skin crawl. Its been a while, but one involves a group of laboring sailors looking up at some nurses and whistling at them in perfect unison. The whistles are so loud and obviously fake they just yank me right out of the movie and set me to cringing. In the other, Jack Lemon is supposedly singing/humming to himself in one scene but every time he even partially faces the camera his mouth is clearly not moving. Just plain bad overdubbing.
Also, the musical travel montages in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid are intolerable.
Although it doesn't "ruin" what I think is a highly underrated film, I hate the end credits of The Edge, where there's this slow fade-out on Anthony Hopkins' face and then a credit to "Bart the Bear" that appears too quickly and jolts me out of the film.
Also I really enjoyed Smoke, but at the end there's a great scene of Harvey Keitel telling this story about stealing a camera from an old lady, and the film slowly zooms in on his face, and it should just end there, but then Wayne Wang chooses to SHOW us the story Keitel just related and it's so unnecessary and cartoonish.
I have to disagree with some of the others here and say the end of Being There and Taxi Driver are like ice cream on pie, the perfect endings to great films.
This thread reminds me of two Onion AV Club lists, When Great Scenes Happen to Bad Movies and When Bad Scenes Happen to Great Movies
In the first on-foot chase scene in Quantum of Solace while Bond and the other guy are fighting on some scaffolding there's a single shot of them falling off of it and it is so obviously CGI that I cringe every time I see it and it makes me not want to continue. In another movie that effect probably would have been fine, but not in a franchise that is usually great with real stunts, especially after the amazing on-foot chase scene in Casino Royale with the free-runner. That scene was fantastic. But the use of an effect here cheapened the whole movie for me.
Re: Lee's fondness for the floaty gimmick -- I'd always thought it was pinched from Belle's eerie glide through the castle in Cocteau's Beauty & the Beast. But I guess Lee probably got it 2nd-hand....
No-one's mentioned the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil shot in Planet of the Apes? It's not a great film anyway, but jeepers that really takes the wind out of the sails, just for the sake of a cheap laugh.
Yeah, the silly series of shocks, especially the cobwebbed skeletons, that Shelley Duvall is subjected to at the end of The Shining really are disappointing, considering how beautifully, originally creepy the rest of the film is.
A few Peckinpah moments: (1) the opening of The Wild Bunch is still a brain-scarring marvel, but there's one moment of overreaching for me: when the excellent Jerry Fielding score ratchets up the tension one extra notch with.... amplified heartbeats. Too much. (2) the mismatched shots in the big "will you marry me?" scene with Benny & Elita picnicking keep throwing me out of the scene.... indeed, I wonder if the closeups on Oates are from a studio set (the foliage & sky don't move & don't especially resemble the background in the other shots). -- & in both cases, I'd say that I still love the films despite the odd pimple :) ...
The ending of the Usual Suspects, I suppose, ruins the movie. We find out that the entire plot line is suspect. I know that's the "point" of the film so maybe it doesn't ruin it so much since it wouldn't exist without the plot twist. But it seems very problematic for a film or a book to hinge so strongly on a single scene. In my opinion, a good film (or book) cannot have spoilers. I should be able to watch it with as much anticipation and excitement after knowing the ending. You know, like The Tragedy of Hamlet. I know the ending before I even arrive at the theatre and yet it gets better and better every time I watch or read it. So this isn't a decision of the director that ruined the Usual Suspects (or any M. Night Sh... movie) but the decision to film it in the first place.
Near the end of Queen Margot, there's an artificially speeded shot of a carriage riding out of Paris. It's a pretty bad effect that completely takes you out of the movie.
However, I've also been thinking about the reverse scenario: a single shot that suddenly makes you realise just how great the movie you're watching is. In Monsieur Klein, it's actually the very last shot. It's a simple close-up of Alain Delon's face which makes shockingly clear that the movie was leading up to this point all along. I don't want to spoil it here, but I consider it one of the greatest endings in cinema history.
I was in a generous, tolerant mood with "Star Wars: Ep. 2," right up until the worst dialogue in the movie, the exchange between Anakin and Padme, where they acknowledge they are in love but couldn't possibly give in to their feelings due to various "Days of Our Lives"-type reasonings. In a movie filled with laughable dialogue, this scene took the prize.
"I Am Legend" contained numerous shots that were distracting in that they added unnecessary information or details the movie couldn't deal with. The opening hunt/chase scene between Will Smith and those lions, that was the first WTF? moment for me. Then you had the single shaft of sunlight slicing between two skyscrapers while vampire/zombie dogs menaced Big Willie. A laughable effect that killed whatever suspense the movie had generated up until then.
I generally liked Oliver Stone's "W.," but there were two inserts that distracted me. One was of somebody's foot stepping on a food item (I think) on the ground. I kept wondering about the meaning of that shot, what it symbolized ... and now I realize it was just a needless distraction.
I thought "Minority Report" front-loaded all its action scenes into its first hour and then left us with a rather dry and dull (and predictable) whodunit plot that was resolved with all the shocking aplomb of a TV movie. But for me the big distraction, the shot that sent me off on a tangent, was the one where Tom Cruise drops the eyeballs on the floor and they go rolling down the hall towards a drain, I think. A slapsticky moment that raised questions Spielberg never answered. Did Cruise's character live out the rest of his life with someone else's eyes in his head? WTF?
The gimmicky special effects shot where Capt. Sparrow escapes Davy Jones' locker in "At World's End," one of the worst movies I've ever seen. (Yes, all special effects shots are gimmicky in one way or another, but this one was especially juvenile.)
And, finally, oh my God, "The Happening." It NEVER worked for me, I had already been giggling (especially when poor Mark Wahlberg, et al, try and outrace THE WIND), but the moment that killed the whole thing for me was the scene where Marky Mark engages in a terribly one-sided conversation with a plant. Now, this was bad enough ... but his realization that he is, in fact, talking to a PLASTIC plant (Marky, are you disappointed?) turned the whole movie into a sort of big-budget sequel to "Plan Nine from Outer Space." This movie is so bad, and so unintentionally funny (which is to say hilarious), that I am actually considering buying it.
While I loved Aronofsky's "The Wrestler", Evan Rachel Wood's turn as Randy's estranged daughter was a completely sour note, specifically in the scene where Randy returns to her house to ask forgiveness for missing their dinner date. Mickey Rourke's performance throughout the film was so natural and powerful that the contrast with Wood's clanging tone in that scene shows just how miscast, and just how far in over her head she really was. If you borrow Ashley Judd's blistering five minutes in Wayne Wang's "Smoke" as Harvey Keitel's estranged daughter, and make a gift of it to "The Wrestler", that was the daughter, and the performance, that Mickey Rourke and Randy the Ram deserved.
We sure do love to bitch, don't we? As Film-goers, as cinephiles, as people. Here we're offered a rather pointed query about specific shots that unravel a whole film ... and it immediately garners more replies (and in a shorter period of time) than anything Jim's posted since, what, the Dark Knight debacle, maybe? What's more: very few of these replies seem to be interested in discussing actual compositions, so much as simply bitching about stuff that "doesn't work", etc. Cripes.
"There isn't enough time in the day," and all that, but I think it should be pointed out to the 3 or 4 (or more?) people who've complained about the "ending" of Joe Wright's Atonement (you know, that whole epilogue / denoument / last part with old-lady-Briony -- whatever you want to call it (certainly not a particular "shot"...)) that it's more than just the previous half-hour's events that are thrown into doubt by this late twist. The whole film is revealed as a "lie": a lengthy fiction composed by a guilty (and desperate-for-forgiveness) Briony who doesn't know how else to cope with her conscience apart from performing this creative (but fantastical) act of -- yes, you guessed it -- atonement.
The implications of this development are myriad and broad, and not just for the central character in this particular narrative. Are fictions always self-serving? Can they ever communicate capital-T "Truth"? Do they really have the power to lend meaning to lived experience? Are they merely a means of survival, re-creating or channeling our experiences and memories, histories and feelings into knowable forms -- usually innaccurate ones -- so that we can live with ourselves, our insignificance, and (in some cases) our misdeeds?
The bottom line is that all fictions are some kind of lie (if frequently benign), so the question becomes: do they genuinely have the power to redeem or salvage our lives from the chaos of lived experience, or are they merely a sop to our conscience/consciousness, bolstering a necessary sense of self-importance in the belittling face of the infinite?
So yeah, the whole film is a lie, a fabrication, a version of events as they might have been / could have been / should have been, etc. -- not just the previous half-hour. It's all a (complex, layered, and elaborate) fiction. What's more, we're left with the uncomfortable implication that, so is every other film we've ever seen. That's the bloody point, folks.
I'm surprised to see all the hate for the closing of 'Atonement;' I thought that monologue actually saved the movie. Up until then the story seemed to be getting choppy and losing plausibility in order to arrive at a happy ending, and so it was good to find out that it wasn't really copping out the way it seemed to be...and it's just a wonderfully merciless narrative kick to the groin (which is arguably more than you can say for anything that leads up to it). If the story had ended the way it looked like it was going to, I think it would have been much the worse for it. (I was actually sinking into my seat during the opening scenes—how many contrived misunderstandings can happen in the same day?—but not by then.)
I finally thought of some!
I know it wasn't exactly a Best Picture contender up until then, but there's a mind-blowingly bad effects shot in 'Earthquake' that never fails to make me or anyone else I've seen it with laugh out loud in pure scorn. During the big earthquake scene, after loads of amazing (and somewhat less amazing) matte and model work, we get a scene where a group of people in an elevator plummet to the ground, crashing to the floor as the phoniest animated blood you'll ever see "splatters" towards the camera. It's not even "animated" in the traditional sense; it's just a still drawing of blood splatters superimposed over the picture and zoomed in. How that effect was considered acceptable I'll never know. It's waaaay below the standards of everything else in the movie.
The closing shot of 'In the Valley of Elah' also comes to mind. I was astonished that the same man who made 'Crash' could make something this subtle and intelligent, that so completely avoided numerous opportunities to be the same sort of screed 'Crash' was from the word go...right up until that last shot of the American flag, which is exactly as blaring a "message" as I was expecting the entire movie to be. It doesn't ruin the rest of the movie for me, but it certainly gives it a good try. (To a lesser degree, the big American flag during the climax of 'Blow Out' did the same thing for me; then again with Brian De Palma you kind of expect him to go deliriously overboard in any way he can.)
I also thought the last shot of 'The Ninth Gate' kind of trashed everything that had come before it, but that was more because there didn't seem to be a last shot. If the entire story was just going to run into a wall like that, what was the point of telling it?
I think that the final shot of "Being There" is actually brilliant. It changes your all perspective of the movie. Maybe Chance is actually too good for the world and maybe we are wrong for laughing at him and the public's reaction to him.
Anyways, I never liked the ending of The Deer Hunter with everyone singing God Bless America, the way everyone looks in the shot feels inorganic in a movie that is supposedly "a slice-of-life."
Am I the only person who liked Mystic River?
Anyway, here's one that doesn't ruin the movie for me, but I cringe every time I see it: In Sam Raimi's "A Simple Plan," there's a scene where someone gets blasted with a shotgun at close range. Raimi decided for some reason to give the finger to the laws of physics and send the victim flying through the air and into some kitchen cupboards before falling to the floor. Worse, it's rather obvious that what you're actually seeing is a dummy being jerked backward by a cable. The rest of the movie is a totally plausible thriller about average people in a mundane town trying to keep the lid on their criminal activities, but when this scene comes it's like all of a sudden you're watching Army of Darkness again.
Jesus, man. American Beauty, Crash, Million Dollar Baby, Funny Games...you keep going back to the same damn targets again and again and again. All that's missing this time is Natural Born Killers. This is as bad as Dark Knight fan-boyism (oh yeah, you missed that target this time around too), only it's the other side of the same coin.
A few moments that really irk me from the "Life without George" from "It's a Wonderful Life," which I love:
1) Clarence the angel identifies himself as "Clarence Oddbody, AS2." When asked what AS2 means, he responds, "Angel Second Class!" huh? I know Clarence isn't meant to be very bright, but really. (Also: some of the Clarence scenes really overuse "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" on the score. Annoying.)
2) When George looks at the tree he thought he had crashed into and rails at the tree's guardian (or something), the guy says, "You must mean two other trees!" Maybe Capra et al. thought the incongruity was funny?
3) Worst of all, of course, there's the fact that the worst horror in this world without George is that Mary is--gasp!--an unmarried librarian. I know this is the 1940s, but the rest of the film manages to avoid this type of stupid patriarchal B.S. (the presentation of Violet, who, it's implied, might actually be a prostitute, is more nuanced). A lot of the "Pottersville" section dates, I guess, because of the equation of jazz halls and strip clubs with pure evil, but I think it makes sense, mostly, that a Potter-run enterprise would stick to the lowest common demoninator to keep the rabble just entertained enough on their baser instincts (although: jazz halls? really?) that they don't try to wish for anything better. But bits of it still grate. Still a great movie though, and this misery of most of the characters (and death of others) still rings true.
On another note: I agree with what was said a while back about the sneering faces mouthing obscenities in "The Graduate" (Mr. and Mrs. Robinson, and Elaine's beau), but while it's tonally off from the rest of the film I don't mind it all that much; I think it's from Ben's perspective, or perhaps Elaine's. Additionally, the movie isn't all that one sided; immediately afterwards Elaine, in the back of the bus, realizes she's ruined her life (and that's how I interpret her reaction to Benjamin's blank stare) and so I think that the mouthing-obscenities, while cartoonish, do kind of work.
As far as "American Beauty," I think the absolute biggest mistake, and the one that tips the scales, is the final montage of images over Lester's narration; up until then, one could argue, perhpas not well, but one could, that Lester and Ricky are not meant to be the film's heroes, just another bunch of more-screwed-up-people in a film with no moral centre, and that Lester's shallow attempts at self-fulfillment and then merely deciding not to sleep with the object of his fantasy is not meant to be some kind of deep achievement. If you don't take Ricky or Lester as the film's heroes, then the movie merely becomes a puzzle with no apparent point besides "suburbia is f---ed up," but if you do then it becomes pretty much morally reprehensible. So I guess that's a case in which a final scene/shot takes a film from mediocre and puzzling to downright bad.
Also: yes, I agree about the end of "The Matrix" being less than ideal Too over-the-top, too silly--and yes, the film itself is over-the-top, but it was a good progression before then. here, not so much.
Not a scene but a subplot: I'm with Ebert on the romance part of "The Searchers." I'm just not sure I get why it's there, and it takes me out of the film. I don't mind films blending comedy and drama (and dark revenge drama and light romantic comedy), but the plotlines don't seem to mix at all, and, last time I watched the movie, the romance material seemed, well, stupid. Maybe on a rewatch I'll understand.
There are lots of cases of studio-imposed happy endings that grate. Jim wrote a good defence of the "Ambersons" ending that made it to theatres, and I'm not too down on that one (if we can all agree that Welles' original would have been preferable). But how about the ending to "The Wind," which could perhaps only be justified as the protagonist finally going insane? Or the inexplicable last scene of "Frankenstein" ("A toast to the house of Frankenstein!")? "Psycho" has already been mentioned, although I don't believe that's a studio choice (and I haven't watched it in a long enough time that I don't feel I can comment).
In other notes: I didn't mind Evan Rachel Wood at all in "The Wrestler." If she was overacting, it makes sense as a teenager/young adult needing to, yes, act her feelings as much as she can so that they don't get hurt on again. (The scene in "The Wrestler" that did strike me as out of place was Randy waking up in the room with the girl he'd slept with and finding all her firefighter posters. The idea of her being an obsessive firefighter fetishist seemed a bit too wacky to me.)
Nice topic, Jim.
"Fight Club" has a couple of shots that kinda bug me - the "reveal" scene between Pitt and Norton in the hotel and the subsequent shots of Norton beating on himself. I get how they support the story but they seemed too gratuitous given the level of intelligence in practically every other scene. I still love the movie despite this perceive lapse in judgement.
The line-up scene in "The Usual Suspects" has always irritated me. Stephen Baldwin's demeanor and the contrived set-up came off as phony. For me, the entire film has not aged well - the more I see of it today, the more I dislike it. The first viewing was fabulous - it's been diminishing returns since then.
The scene in "The Departed" where Nicholson sneaks up behind DiCaprio after having a discussion with him in the restaurant/bar (Jack is doing some kind of jokey pantomime thing). It came off as a lame attempt at humor in a movie that didn't require it. This is just a minor annoyance.
I saw "Taken" recently and I thought it was an above-average revenge thriller - great pace, reasonably plausible in a vague-sort-of-way and Liam Neeson is a terrific choice. However, every scene with the daughter was jaw-dropping bad. She was 17 yet behaved like a hyperactive 5-year-old. I just didn't get it.
To end on a positive note, I consider the introduction shot of Henry Fonda in "Once Upon a Time in the West" to be the singularly best shot in a thoroughly excellent film.
In response to Pat C. on May 15, 2009 2:19 PM
Any film which shows the triumph of evil depresses me, so the ending shot of "Basic Instinct" made me dislike it intensely.
Speaking of Basic Instinct, the whole scene where Sharon Stone is being interviewed by the police turned me off. So she's not wearing underwear and opens her legs...do we for one minute think that these cops haven't seen a woman's vagina ever before? Real cops would have been bored, and started asking her about what she was trying to hide by distracting them.
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. I have all sorts of complaints about how Peter Jackson and his writing crew took bad situations from the books and made them worse (e.g., in Two Towers, the battle of Helm's Deep had 10,000 orcs and men in Saruman's army, versus 2,000 riders of Rohan. In the movie, there are only 300 riders, and I remember thinking, "What? Odds of 5 to 1 aren't dire enough?"
But what really threw me about Return of the King was the scene when Gandalf gets made at Denethor, because Denethor hasn't done anything to prepare for Mordor's attack. Ian McKellan bellows, "You have done nothing!"
And while that didn't ruin the movie for me, it certainly ruined much of the Minas Tirith segments. Denethor was in despair; he clearly saw vast armies preparing in Mordor by way of the Palantir, and he foresaw the final defeat of Gondor. But he still possessed the dignity and pride to go down fighting, and he did everything he could to prepare Gondor for war.
I liked American Beauty. A lot. Saw it three times in a theater. Beautiful, rich, well-acted, funny as hell, dark. I agree about Crash; that whole movie is "one bad shot," and phony and preachy and implausible, as well. Nothing about that movie works (well, OK, to be fair, EXCEPT for the rather well-directed sequence in which Matt Dillon makes his heroic rescue from the burning SUV), but I didn't start hating the movie until ... oh, heck, forget it, I hated it almost from the start.
Just saw "Star Trek" and also have to agree that JJ Abrams's directorial flourishes (the whip pans in space, the uncomfortably cramped photography, and worst of all, the blinding light sources that streak and spot and blur and obscure EVERY FRAME) were a distraction in an otherwise entertaining and VERY well-cast film.
All this hate for Mystic River? It was a very fine movie, not great art certainly, but a lot of fun. Far from a mess, considering Eastwood is a great professional. Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, they win awards and receive praise (even from Ebert!) while you jealous nerds complain and complain . . . even years after the films have been made. Me thinks you-all have it out for Eastwood. For real quality entertainment, go watch It's Pat, I guess.
One spot-on example that leaps to mind: "Titanic." James Cameron has us absorbed in every step of Jack and Rose's tale: they meet, they fall in love, they fight desperately to escape the sinking ship, and the whole epic saga is building inexorably to the final moment in the sea. To top it off, he has two of the finest actors of their generation on screen to deliver the payoff. And what does it turn out we've been building toward? "Jack, there's a boat. Jack, there's a boat. Jack, there's a boat." Easily the worst line reading Kate Winslet has ever delivered, but then again, it's probably the worst line she's ever had to deliver. And in that precise moment, the movie becomes unwatchable.
For me, "Pulp Fiction" will always be about 99% a great movie. The only scene that I absolutely can't stand is the aggressively offensive and unfunny "dead n***er storage" sequence in the "Bonnie Situation" segment. Tarantino's awful acting and repeated use of the N-word just make this an uncomfortable viewing experience in an otherwise great film.
I've always believed Saving Private Ryan was a perfect moview until the 'coda' at the very end. There's a dissolve/morph from young Ryan's (Matt Damon's) eyes to the older Ryan's as he looks at Captain Miller's grave marker/cross. What a great shot! It should have just faded out RIGHT THERE! Instead, he starts whining to his wife, "Tell me I'm a good man," or something to that effect. And then she has to console him. And then he stands upright and salutes the grave marker/cross in a waaaaaay over the top theatrical motion. (Don't forget the heavy handed music, too.) I'm sure Speilberg thought people would be bawling their eyes out in the theaters at this sight but all three times (yes, three times) I saw it in '98 there were snickers coming from all around.
And I STILL love this movie but, like many who have commented about their picks earlier, I have to hit the 'stop' button 2 minutes before the actual movie ends.
First off, I definitely agree with the other comments bringing up the final shots of The Godfather Part III and The Shawshank Redemption. However, I think both of these fit into a more general category of bad-endings as much as they do bad single shots, with the border between the two blurred due to the fact that the endings are almost entirely this one shot. In this category, I would add the following examples (spoiler alerts):
American Beauty: Even though I loved this movie, I hated the reveal on Chris Cooper’s character being the shooter. With the tone of the ending, it would have been so much better left open, with us seeing the pan through all of the characters, and simply leave it open for the audience to piece together who the shooter was. I know that the original screenplay had the main storyline set in a trial of the Thora Birch & boyfriend on trial for the murder, through which the rest of the story took place, and in that context it made sense to reveal the shooter at the end, when we know that he is murdered from the outset of the film. But the short time between the act and the reveal made the entire thing lessen in effect.
The Usual Suspects: Not as much of a single shot as much as a montage. When the movie does the reveal by going through all of the names and references on the bulletin board, almost all of them, with the exception of Kobayashi, are in a single rant at the outset of the Verbal Kint conversation with the detective, and felt artificially inserted in the dialogue at the time he says them. When I saw the film the first time, I felt like the only reason for all of the many references was that the filmmakers didn’t think the single Kobayashi reference would be sufficient for the audience to get the punchline; once that thought entered my head, I felt like I was watching the screenplay rather than the characters, and the entire movie fell apart for me afterwards.
Minority Report: The focus on the Samantha Morton character at the end gave the impression that the movie thought that the issues at play were about the three psychic characters, as opposed to those in addition to all of the other issues that made the movie interesting throughout. Leaving us with the knowledge that at least those characters are okay had me leaving the theatre with the sense that the filmmakers missed the point of their own movie.
Blood Diamond: The fact that the movie ran away with the Djimon Hounsou character at the end, especially the shot where he is giving the talk at the podium at the very end. If ever there was a film that didn’t work enough for its happy ending, it was that one.
Wonder Boys: If his entire novel was written the way the narrative over that final sequence is, there’s no way to believe that he is this amazing novelist, and the entire premise of the whole movie evaporates.
On the original topic of single shots, I also think that it’s useful to distinguish between two different types of bad shots: bad single shots where the characters in them are speaking terrible dialogue that kills the film, and single shots where the shot itself is the issue. I went back through Ebert et al's top ten movies back to 1995, and came up with the following titles that fit these categories:
Bad dialogue:
Black Hawk Down: In the scene where the soldier dies on the table, all of the other characters have relaxed around that soldier, and then suddenly the medic starts goes crazy on the CPR and everything else, after having stopped to that point. The entire setup of that shot felt like the only reason he does this is to give the Josh Hartnett character the chance to make him stop, thus reinforcing a particular character trait, which again has us watching the screenplay rather than the characters. In a film that does an incredibly good job of placing us inside a hectic warzone while still giving us a strong sense of where each of the groups are, that one shot pulled me entirely out of the film.
Juno: When Juno gets back from the adoptive parents house after the husband tells her he’s leaving his wife, and she gets home upset and her father asks her what’s up, her response to that question just shut down that entire character for me. Before that line, she was an incredibly believable person, afterwards I was watching the screenplay.
One Hour Photo: The Robin Williams’ rant in questioning that gives implicitly the backstory to his character killed that film for me. It was such an intriguing and fascinating character study while he was a complete mystery, once the film “explained” him it lost all interest to me, especially since it felt like the only reason he was explained was because it felt like the filmmakers thought that the audience would want/need an explanation, as though that was the ending that polled better.
The 25th Hour: The Edward Norton rant into the mirror was entirely unnecessary, and again pulled the screenplay into the film. It felt more like a scene that Spike Lee wanted to have in there, as a reference to another Spike Lee film, as opposed to something that added to that film or to our understanding of that character.
Traffic: The scene where the Topher Grace character lectures the Michael Douglas character in the car when they are looking for Douglas’ daughter, felt like points that the screenwriters wanted to have somebody say more than words that that particular character would say in that particular moment. (Similar screenwriter-statements killed Hotel Rwanda for me, which I went in really wanting to love but which the manipulations of the screenplay angered me.)
All About My Mother: Maybe it’s a case where the cultural references didn't translate, but I simply couldn’t believe that an audience who came wanting one particular show would be satisfied to watch the transvestite character instead. The pan of the audience smiling and nodding when the offer of that character giving their life-story as a replacement show seemed so unconvincing to me that it pulled me out of the entire movie.
Bad shots:
Sideways: The shot where the Paul Giamatti character is drinking the bottle of wine in the fast food restaurant. That entire subplot just seemed unnecessary to me, and by that point in the film it felt like the movie wanted to be over already.
Little Children: The shot where the Kate Winslet character is screaming in the stands after Scott Wilson scores the touchdown. I couldn’t understand how none of the characters felt thrown off by the fact that there was a single clearly deranged person in the stands watching them.
The New World: I still loved this film, but the shot of the one character spitting while he is screaming at the Colin Farrell character when he is tied up outside by the mutineers just seemed unnecessary and gratuitous.
Good Will Hunting: At the end of the film, there are two too many shots of Ben Affleck realizing that Will is gone, as though the movie doesn’t know that his character’s epiphany isn’t interesting by that point. It felt like Ben-Affleck-screenwriter wanted to focus on Ben-Affleck-character more.
i don't think there's ever been one single element that i disliked so much that i then hated the film itself, although there have been several times a bad enough ending has made me hate a whole movie (like Village or Matchstick Men).
but because i can't much think of anything else, i'm gonna mention two things about the movie i watched last night again, Rashomon. i love it to death, but two things infuriate me every time i see it - the ham-handed ending, where the character actually says something like "you've given me faith in humanity again"; charming, sure, but sorta spoils the grittiness that the rest of the movie had. the other one is the lead actresses' screams and eyebrows. silly things to be annoyed by, sure, but her i can't look at anything else when her eyebrows are in the frame, and her screams and cries are like nails on a chalkboard.
I love the movie Delicatessen. It's my second-favorite movie of all time, and I saw it 9 times in the theater. However, there is one shot that keeps it from being a perfect movie for me (SPOILER) : the shot where the Butcher gets the Boomerang knife stuck in his forehead. The few minutes (or seconds?) from that point to the point where he actually dies just annoy me.
On the other hand, my _favorite_ movie, Dr. Strangelove, is 100% perfect, as very few other films have ever been as far as I'm concerned.
I agree with earlier comments about heavy-handed symbolism in the last shot of The Departed. For me, it was the wedding scene in The Deer Hunter. When the communion wine spilled on the bride's wedding dress, I knew the groom wasn't coming back from Vietnam. Regarding the final shot of Thelma & Louise, the shot as originally filmed did continue longer, with B.B. King's "You Better Not Look Down" playing. That would have been an egregious mistake, giving an auditory joking quality to the death of two characters the audience (or at least most of the female audience) was emotionally invested in. I think the way it was released very intentionally put these characters into "history", despite being fictional as opposed to real historical figures Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It could be argued that we should have seen their death, the way we saw Bonnie & Clyde's car shot to pieces. Tough artistic call either way, with no way to keep everyone happy. Few movies leave me thinking "Perfect" as I finish them. The Godfather and The Full Monty come to mind, but I remember at least one critic wanting The Full Monty to continue past its brilliant final shot.
I agree with the dog shot in War of the Roses - the movie gets so deliciously nasty towards the end so I don't see the point of revealing the dog's alive.
How 'bout the final scene in Face/Off? SPOILER "Here's a new child to replace your dead one. Happy ending!" Ick.
As for music, the first lyric that came to mind is in I Love New York by Madonna when she rhymes "New York" with "dork." Confessions on a Dance Floor was her best album in years, but that line, jeez it clangs.
Not that it ruins STAR WARS for me (as someone who saw it when I was 10, nothing could ruin that movie), but there's a shot on the Millennium Falcon when Chewbacca raises his arms to flip some switches that his arms look way too skinny -- like, you know, it's just an actor in a costume.
I agree that the "rat shot" in THE DEPARTED takes you right out of the movie (luckily, it's the last shot), but I think I heard somewhere Scorsese saw this as his version of a Warner Bros. gangster movie, and a shot like that would be right at home back in the 1930s. If you can keep that in mind, it's not quite so awful.
And William B -- you're right! That "AS2" business bothered me, too.
Thought of another one (I need more hobbies). Sometimes a plot hole can be huge and glaring, but if the movie is working well enough you can fail to notice it until afterwards, when you suddenly think "hey, wait a minute..."
And sometimes it's High Tension (**SPOILERS**), which isn't very good to start with and only gets worse once we find out that the hulking, vicious killer we've been watching is actually a fantasy in the mind of the main character, who's been doing all of the killing herself. It wasn't the twist that (completely) sunk that movie for me, so much; it was the way it was revealed. We see the girl killing someone on a surveillance videotape, the soundtrack goes WHUUUMMMM with the Ominous Note Of Horror As We Realize The Truth...and then they cut right to the killer's truck, which by any stretch of logic shouldn't actually exist.
(I also really enjoy that they flash back to nearly everything in the movie after that but still fail to explain where she got the truck. Brilliant.)
I love the film, but many that I know believe that the last shot of Lars von Trier's 'Breaking the Waves' ruins the entire film. That is if viewers have been able to make it to that point.
If you know the film, you know the shot I'm referring to. But I can't say what it is, in case you haven't seen it. It's one of my favorites, and am unable to hint at what the last image contains.
Titanic: I actually admire this film quite a bit for being a mash-up of melodrama and 70s-style disaster film. But, the one moment that kills me in the film is Winslet's line of dialog: "I'm flying!" I quote that one often, typically in response to something inane, whether the words fit the context or not. The line is just so stupid that for me it's become the equivalence of saying "duh." I could live with the hammy scene if they'd only done it with no dialog.
The Departed: The shot of Martin Sheen falling comes to mind. I think Jim mentioned this one a while back. It's such a terrible choice on Scorcese's part, especially when you compare it to the same sequence in Infernal Affairs where the guy's body drops into the frame in the background of a shot.
Studio SNAFU: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Unnecessary imposed prologue and epilogue, when McCarthy on his knees in the middle of the road would've been a perfect ending shot. Another case in point: American version of Strangers on a Train, which throws in a lame comic relief final scene.
Tom Cruise outlining his strategy for getting Jack Nicholson to crack in A Few Good Men before we get to the courtroom. Roger pointed this out in his review.
Two shots at the end of War of the Worlds (2005): The dumb kid is still alive.
I agree with the person who mentioned Saving Private Ryan. Just end on the old man's face; enough said. The long, slow dolly shot into a closeup of Captain Miller's grave is silly in its reverence of a fictional soldier (in contrast to the ending of Schindler's List, for example).
This is more a line having an ill effect on a movie than a shot, but I remember sitting in the theater watching X-Men and while I wasn't absolutely in love with the movie I found it enjoyable. And then Halle Berry utters this line:
Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else.
I started laughing so hard at the absolute absurdity of that line that I almost choked on my Goobers.
I've been racking my brain, and I don't think a single shot in a film has ever ruined a movie for me. A movie is either good or it isn't I guess, or maybe I'm just too forgiving. There are shots or sequences in some films I could do without, but to say they ruin the whole movie for me would be wrong.
Steven Spielberg almost ruined two of his movies for me with terrible shots: Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List.
In the first, it was the awkward reaction of the hero's family to his doubt and grief. Their presence in that final scene tipped a dubious screenwriting decision heavily over the edge.
In Schindler's List, I was completely taken out of movieland by Schindler's hamhanded monologue near the end. And the "gathering of survivors" made the same mistakes Saving Private Ryan did.
I loved these movies, but if I had been enthralled just a little less, these scenes might've been enough to ruin the entire movie.
The utterly fake robin at the end of "Blue Velvet."
The sing-a-long in "Rio Bravo," while not ruining it, certainly detracts from an otherwise great film.
The Star Wars Trilogy officially ends for me the first time an ewok pops into frame in "Return of the Jedi."
When the dime-store novelist in "Unforgiven" starts yapping "You just shot five men." In fact, every scene he's in.
When Paul Giamatti's character steals money from his elderly mother in "Sideways." He loses all sympathy after that.
At the end of "Angels in America," when the main characters conclude by spouting their political opinions DIRECTLY INTO THE CAMERA.
The Fade out and fade back up during Irulan's introduction in Lynch's "Dune": "Oh, and one more thing..."
When Russel Crowe's character "interrogates" the DA by dangling him out a window, in "L.A. Confidential." An action movie cliche in an otherwise excellent film.
I personally think that fake robin at the end of Blue Velvet is brilliant. Nobody in their right mind would think it looked remotely real, the point is the horrible falseness that overwhelms the final moments of the film.
"It's a strange world isn't it?"is such a fake and howdy-doody 1930s sort of feel-good line that feels so utterly incongruous with the horrors we've witnessed that we can't help but see it as a bleak comment on humanity's intellectual and moral cowardice, retreating into fantasy and false safety in a world of darkness and monsters.
In my opinion, the last scene of Blue Velvet alone pretty much blows the entirety of American Beauty out of the water.
Yes, the comments here are kind of getting away from the actual point of this article. It's a shot that takes you out of the film. Not dialogue or a scene.
But, a separate article about unnecessarily happy endings may be a good one. While I must admit, I like some movies to have happy endings, and often an unhappy ending is stuck onto a movie for no good reason and can just be a let down. But when it doesn't match the tone of the film, it's obvious. While I didn't want Minority Report to be a sad ending for everyone, it almost seems over-the-top happy. Cruise and his wife are back together, and we get another movie with a, "Well, at least we have a new replacement kid!" Though, I am sort of in love with the notion that real ending is Cruise getting incarcerated, and the happy ending is a dream he's having.
It's funny that you mention an end-of-movie wink as one of your examples. Two major films that I mostly liked featured end-of-movie winks that outraged me so much that I still can't think of either film without immediately cringing at the memory of the wink: Schindler's List, in which there should be no wink, anywhere, and Return of the King, wherein Frodo, who is leaving the world behind because he's too miserable to continue being in it, takes leave of everyone he loves most, boards a ship going somewhere he can't imagine, and... turns and gives a sort of salute to his weeping friends. I swear, if he'd had a hat he would have tipped it. And maybe sung a cheery little ditty as well.
Also, I like Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet, but both of them suffer from painfully zany wind-up intros apparently meant to loosen you up to the point where you can accept the eccentricities of the rest of the films - and I do get sucked in once they settle down. But if I didn't fast-forward through the Loony-Tunes moments at the start, they'd be a huge obstacle.
This may be piling on, but the shot that drove me nuts in American Beauty hasn't been mentioned yet. And that's the dancing-bag shot. For me, the bottom falls off the film at that moment--from then on the young lovers are the clearly superior characters, but it's a useless, insipid superiority rooted entirely in their rejection of stale, boring suburban cliches. What's strange is that I actually like the dancing-bag shot on its own: it's easy to laugh at its high-school-art-student pretentiousness, but it's also pretty easy to see the genuine grace of it. Come to think of it, it reminds me of shots in Aguirre and Grizzly Man. In another film, it could be a great shot; in American Beauty, it's the shot that sinks the ship.
Another one: the first appearance of the brain bubbles in Dark City. Just about everything else in that film is great, but it's a failure because they couldn't figure out how to present tuning as a personal action. Even the name--yech--it's like a description of how that shot ruined the movie. Tooning.
The shot in "Signs" which reveals that the visitors are just men in green alien costumes.
It's so funny, but the moment that yanked me out of a film most recently was, of all things, Point Break.
Yes, the film is absurd to the point that it might well be taking place in a paralell universe. I'm fine with that. I happily agree to believe that Keanu Reeves is a twenty five year old ex-football star FBI agent named Johnny Utah and his first assignment is to infiltrate a gang of beach bum surfer adrenaline junkies who have robbed thirty banks in three years without being caught and are lead by a Zenlike surfer god whose only dream is to ride the world's biggest wave when he's not jumping out of airplanes. No problem with any of that, and the movie takes the absurdity seriously, which is the only way to make it watchable.
So we're laughing and watching, until the third act, when Keanu and Gary Busey are staking out the bank they think the robbers will hit before clearing out for the winter. Gary decides he's hungry and sends Keanu to the sandwich stand around the corner. K dutifully heads out.
While Keanu is ordering the food and paying, the robbers pull up behind him on the street, pour out of their car and run into the bank. It's supposed to be funny, but I wouldn't know because at that very moment, Keanu is told his total for TWO MEATBALL SANDWICHES, ONE TUNA SANDWICH, AND TWO DRINKS:
"Seven sixty-five."
What the hell?? Did this place teleport in from the Great Depression? Since when do three sandwiches and two drinks cost under twenty dollars? Yes, the movie was made in 1991 but prices were not that low, and haven't been since 1937. Totally threw me and everyone in the room (all of whom work in food service) for a loop, and the next several minutes were given over to speculation as to what the food must be made of, or if it was a front for a beachside Mafia operation. So, future directors, go over your scripts with a fine tooth comb, because God is really in the details.
Jim, sorry to hear of your fine employer's troubles, and perhaps renting some B prison movies and fantasizing that scumbag in the role of "new fish terrorized and killed" might help.
No. A movie is a baseball game. If you're ahead 12-0 and you commit a two-base error you still win the game 12-0 or 12-1. One error in an otherwise fruitful life - murder - and you're doing 20 to life. You can't commit murder in a movie; nothing is more important to me than movies but cringing is not being murdered.
I will pipe up in defense of "The Departed" here. I don't get why that final shot bothered so many people. The movie is far from humorless, and as a result I took that shot as the movie's last joke. It's not a "look how deep this is!" bit of symbolism; it's "yes, this is heavy-handed - let's have a chuckle about it, eh?" I really like that shot; it always makes me laugh.
I can't think of many single shots that killed an otherwise good movie for me, or even came close. But I do hate both the line and shot at the end of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" when Indy has returned victorious to the suddenly-brimming-with-life village, and he gazes with warm smugness into the eyes of the village leader and says, "Yes, I understand their power now" (referring to the Shankara stones). The line is ham-fisted beyond belief, of course, and Spielberg underlines it with an irritatingly-staged shot; worst of all, Ford (an actor of high intelligence) has a glazed look that screams, "I can't BELIEVE I'm being forced to say this crap." I'll always stick up for "Temple" as very underrated, and the 2nd best Indy movie by a mile, but that moment single-handedly hurts the movie the way the Willie Scott character does for many others. (I'm OK with her.)
Here's a weird selection: the famous "pan away from Travis" shot in "Taxi Driver." Not a bad shot per se, but I've heard the anecdotes and dissections of it so many times that I can't watch the scene any more without thinking about it. If the rest of the movie seems visceral and sort of like a visual tone poem, that shot seems more intellectual and distancing to me. I don't know quite how I feel about it, but I certainly am tired of trying to figure it out.
Brett, that comment about "Signs" made me laugh real good. Thanks.
It's a line of dialogue (or two lines, really), and I note we're supposed to be talking about visuals, but I really can't resist bringing up a line from "Fellowship of the Ring" and "Return of the King". Didn't ruin the movies for me, since Jackson's LOTR was a good deal better than we had any right to expect, but it came awfully close when poor Gimli actually had to look up at Aragon the first time and say "Nobody tosses a dwarf!" And later, when Aragon obviously has to get Gimli over a gap, Gimli again looks up at him, this time so pitifully, and says something like "You won't tell anyone about this, will you?" Suddenly I'm a million miles away from Middle Earth and hanging around some bar at Happy Hour about three drinks past the point where anyone can distinguish what's funny and what's just pathetic.
There are a lot of examples of disappointing final shots, or climactic shots that aren't quite at the end. Like The Matrix, Seven, The Usual Suspects, or The Fountain. It's not really the fault of the individual scene, as much as it is the fault of the rest of the film for implying that the scene would resolve issues that it clearly doesn't.
A couple of weird cases for me are Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood. The final shot of each of these is a reveal of something that seems like it should be dramatic, but which appears totally matter-of-fact. The presentation is pretty static and balanced (from what I remember anyway), and the rest of the films hardly encourage the expectation of a highly dramatic climax--in fact, both reveals are of things that are hinted at throughout the films. The two shots don't ruin the two movies for me, but they really cloud the meaning of what would otherwise seem like pretty straightforward films. I mean, throughout Boogie Nights you can kind of guess that the dude had a penis; what is that last shot supposed to add? I don't mean that to sound snarky; I'm just totally puzzled by those two shots.
"Quantum of Solace." During the opening foot chase (not the car chase) that begins in the dungeons, the camera repeatedly cuts to show snippets of the horse race going on above. Is there any reason for this crosscutting whatsoever, other than a precocious director trying to artificially generate tension? The sheer purposelessness of this nearly derails the film from the beginning for me... which is a shame, since it is, in terms of script and acting, one of the strongest Bond films otherwise (perhaps I'm in a minority with that opinion).
And here's a question for you, Jim: If one shot can define a movie, then what do you think is the most important spot in the film to place a "key shot"? As far as I know, we still have the Opening Shots Project going to draw attention to shots that do a particularly good job of establishing the tone of the film. But what about closing shots, which leave us with the final impression the director wants us to take away from a film? Or should the "money shot," so to speak, be saved for a key point in the story's dramatic arch, such as a moment of realization or revelation? "Citizen Kane," for instance, is saturated with brilliant shots, but the most powerful one for me is a simple, unassuming shot of tears swelling in Charlie Kane's eyes when he looks in the snow globe towards the end and mutters "rosebud."
The final shot of "Breaking the Waves" practically killed the movie for me. SPOILERS The CGI bells ringing in the sky not only takes me out of it visually but really strains plausibility. The sound of the bells alone would have been enough.
Like many have said, the conclusion to "Atonement" is atrocious. But the 5 minute tracking shot at Dunkirk is gratuitous and wholly unnecessary. Nevermind that fact that the movie switches gears and thinks its a war film at that point, it just comes across as a showy display of technical prowess that advances nothing of the story.
And one of the last shots in "The Village" when SPOILERS the ranger goes back to get medicine and its shot from the perspective of his superior sitting in a chair. The reflection on the glass of a cabinet reveals vaguely that it is Shyamalan himself as the superior. Ugh. As if we already weren't aware that he has been pulling the strings.
Also the whole aging in reverse scenario in "Benjamin Button" aggravated me. SPOILERS So if he is born as an elderly baby, why does he not die as a full grown baby-man. Instead, he starts as a baby and dies as a baby. Does that make sense to anyone?
Elsie: I hear you. I have the same problem with those films (for me, "Moulin Rouge" gets better, "Romeo + Juliet" doesn't). Baz has the same problem with "Australia," which has a first act that is edited and shot so oddly with strange clashing tones careening about, sometimes even within the same shot. You got it exactly right when you called Baz's intros "painfully zany." I think "Australia" improves greatly after it calms down by the end of the first hour. It's still not great but it ends up being a - as much as I hate the term - guilty pleasure.
I agree with Max's comment about Quantum of Solace but more because Forster plays the same hand later in the film when he intercuts the outdoor play with the plot. You can't go to the well twice in one film. C'mon.
Shane, I saw the long shot on the beach in Atonement differently. By not cutting, the shot was really effective at portraying the enormity of the war. I understand the potential for pretentiousness in doing a long take, but that one worked for me. To each their own, of course. I'm also one of those who threw up a bit in their mouth at the horrid ending reveal.
Specialagentdalecooper, I think you hit the nail on the head with the word "distancing" when describing the pan into the hallway. That's how it should feel.
This is a great topic.
My vote is for Saving Private Ryan, which plummets precipitously in the last 15 minutes, but is completely undermined by the backlit American flag waving in the wind at the close of the film. Unnecessarily jingoistic to the point of cant.
I agree with the choices of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Saving Private Ryan, but not the latter's choice of shot. Apologies if I missed someone mentioning mine, but that digital dissolve from Matt Damon's face to the old Damon is an abomination that truly ruins the ending of that film. A closeup of Damon's eyes that cuts to a close-up of the older actor's eyes and pulls out would have been fine, but that digital trickery completely undermines the emotional intent of the moment. Although to be fair, the whole bookend story just plain sucks, since it's not even freaking Private Ryan's story to begin with.
Haven't had a chance to read all the posts so far but...
I'm surprised no one mentioned the infamous "Life of David Gale", A movie that was fine until the last minute or so.
One of the worst movies I've ever seen is "Holy Smoke" which contains one of the worst, most laughable scenes/shots in movie history: Harvey Keitel walking through the Australian desert in a dress, makeup smeared on his face, crying his eyes out. We're supposed to believe that his character, a strong and experienced psychologist who has seen it all, is reduced to that after spending a couple days with a naked Kate Winslet? Puhl-eeze!
-Doughdee222
Munich, but for completely different reasons. Large part of that film was shot in Budapest, the city I live in and for some reason (lack of time/money), Spielberg used the same small, very distinct street to stand in for at least two different streets in two different cities. When you walk there every now and then, and you see the same place as Paris, that really takes you out of the film.
Not to mention the crazy James Bondian bicycle pump/silencer guns they use to kill the woman. Seriously, why couldn't they just use guns? When they try to pump and unscrew the thing when they are reloading made me think of all the sketches of Monty Python related to biking.
those awful helicopter tracking shots in all of the lord of the rings movies and the crescendo of orchestral music accompanying it.
ugh.
that being said, I do think broadstroking can be an extremely good thing. I mean what if Shakespeare had not had Hamlet say, "to be or not to be" and instead placed subtle clues in the text to show that he is thinking about existence and mortality. Too subtle is bad sometimes.
This is a script issue but I think it counts. Kill Bill Vol. 1 - this exchange:
Silly Rabbit.
Trix.
Are.
For.
Kids.
That is one giant pimple on an otherwise perfect film.
Just to throw it out there...
In A History of Violence, Cronenberg holds for one extra, uncomfortable moment on the close up of the guy's exploded head at the end of the diner scene. That fraction of a second does so much to convey the film's themes, in this case reminding the audience that (unlike what other movies have shown us) bullets destroy bodies. Death is not pretty, even when administered by a hero. It's just a great example of a shot that helps turn a really good movie into a great one.
Seriously? I get censored for using the 'p' word when talking about Boogie Nights? That sort of rules out a lot of discussion about that film. Okay, how about this: in Day of the Dead, when the flesh-eating ghouls rip that guy's head off, the shot is just too deliberate. I know, the effect demands it, but it just doesn't look like anything in the context of the movie--always makes me think of stretching the mozzarella on pizza.
The final shot - hell, the last five minutes or so - of "Sid and Nancy" was so saccharine and cheap that it kind of soured me on the whole film. Up until that point I kept thinking to myself that Alex Cox was indulging in his weirdo surrealist comedy impulses too much, but the incredible acting and some nicely written scenes allowed me to enjoy it. I don't want to spoil it, since I'd rather others make their own decision, but those who have seen the film know exactly what I'm talking about.
I really hated the final shot of "Finding Neverland" of all things. There was such a beautiful moment with Kate Winslet going into Neverland but the final shot of Johnny Depp and the kid hugging just looked really awkward and contrived. Great movie, the final shot just left a bad taste in my mouth.
Can a bad shot ruin a movie? I think so. It hasn't happened to me yet, but one shot that was bad enough could do it. It certainly can take a great movie and make it a good one, or make a good movie just ok.
"Also, I like Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge and Romeo + Juliet, but both of them suffer from painfully zany wind-up intros apparently meant to loosen you up to the point where you can accept the eccentricities of the rest of the films - and I do get sucked in once they settle down. But if I didn't fast-forward through the Loony-Tunes moments at the start, they'd be a huge obstacle."
That's funny, the beginnings of those two movies (say, the first 20 minutes or so of each) are the ONLY parts I like.
The commonly replayed scene of the stereotyped Japanese neighbor, Mr. Yunioshi, in the otherwise famous film 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' completely ruins the entire movie.
Those shots of Bana sweating while having violent war-sex in Munich. Thinking about that scene makes me laugh out loud to this day.
When watching Goldeneye, the shot where Pierce Brosnan stuck his head out of a tank in a grinning fashion made me grab my coat and immediately leave the theatre - and subsequently skip the next two Bond films. It took me years to not associate the franchise with that one shot.
Mental note: rewatch that scene when at home to pinpoint the shot.
So many screwups, so little time...
Given time for rumination, I could probably come up with a bunch of my own favorites. However, Chris's comment on the 'Psycho' shrink is an irresistible cue for a long-standing pet theory of mine.
First off: why is the scene there in the first place? The answer, obviously, is the Production Code, still very much in force in 1959, when 'Psycho' was filmed. Hitchcock, who was always a canny businessman as well as a filmmaker, knew he would have trouble getting an MPAA seal, and could expect trouble releasing the picture, without some kind of explanation for Norman Bates's behavior. The shrink is there brcause, for business reasons, he has to be.
That brings us to Chris's complaint: Simon Oakland's performance. Admittedly, Oakland is the least likely psychiatrist in movie history. The standard typecast for such a role would be: elderly, white-haired, soft-spoken, empathetic - a Viennese wise man, someone like Eduard Franz, for example. Instead, Hitchcock casts Simon Oakland, whose whole career before (and indeed after) 'Psycho' was spent playing tough characters - tough cops, tough gangsters, tough bosses. I've always had the feeling that Hitchcock's casting of Oakland was his way of sending the scene up - kidding it on the square, so to speak. Stephen Rebello's book on the making of 'Psycho' has a story that when Hitchcock shot the scene, he sais to Oakland afterwards,"Thank you, Mr. Oakland. You just saved my picture." Which meant, I guess, that if he had to have an explanation scene, at least he got to goof it a bit, after the fashion of his TV show.
Well, that's my theory, which together with two bucks, will buy you a Sunday paper. Thanks for the use of the hall. *WAH-WAH-WAH*
I feel the need to chime in on The Godfather III because I've been hearing nonstop since I've seen it how it's 'so terrible,' but I actually like the movie and one of the reasons happens to be the final shot! heh, then I see a lot of people here ripping on it. I think it was a great capper because it comes immediately after the scene - described by someone previously to me very well - where his daughter is murdered outside the church. So, we see how his involvement in the mafia's life of crime has taken his daughter's life and that's his price to pay, correct? And then, we see that he dies alone, in that last shot falling off the wheelchair. I thought it was a perfect ending for his character to have such a sad 'fall from grace' ending.
Great Topic, and I've enjoyed the comments throughout. I also think that the Graduate is hugely overrated, but I just love the shot of Anne Bancroft putting on her stockings with Hoffman in the background. For me, I have a rather unusual movie moment that almost ruins a movie for me.
In SLAP SHOT I just absolutely hate it when Ned Braden does his striptease in the final game, I've gotten to the point where i just stop watching after Newman's old time (Eddy Shore) hockey speech.
Christ, Radovan, you are almost painfully smug.
It's Jim's blog, not yours. And Jim, this is a great idea--to contribute: the last shot of the robin in "Blue Velvet" is really heavy handed.
I have one that follows in the same vein as the War of the Roses scene.
It's a pretty bad film, but one of the few scenes that works in Independence Day is the scene where the aliens unleash their attack on Earth's cities. At the end of the scene, Will Smith's girlfriend, her son, and her dog are trying to get out of L.A. Their car gets stuck in a traffic jam in a tunnel, and the girlfriend and kid run away from the giant, city-eradicating fireball on foot. Of all the people running for their lives, the girlfriend alone notices a doorway to an access stairwell in the tunnel. They get into the stairwell, but instead of continuing to run for their lives--or closing the door--they call out to the dog, who didn't follow them when they made a run for it. The scene ends with the dog jumping through the doorway, as the fireball wooshes by behind him.
Forget that standing in a doorway just off to the side of a tunnel isn't much protection from a city-eradicating fireball. This was the triumphant climax of the movie's biggest action set piece. People in the theater actually cheered.
I'm a dog lover and all, but in that scene millions of people--including a few characters who were built up just so we'd feel bad when they died--were exterminated, including probably a few thousand who were in that tunnel, and we're supposed to feel happy that Will Smith's girlfriend's dog made it?
Roland Emmerich also stepped on the climax of his other big set piece in the movie, by having a comic relief character destroy the Death Star, while giving a mid-dogfight speech about how much he loves his kids.
Four examples that I can think of...
It's already been mentioned, but the final homecoming scene in Spielberg's "War of the Worlds". Decent movie up until that point, but I think the ending actually did ruin the whole thing.
Again from Spielberg, the bookend scenes in the cemetery from "Saving Private Ryan", particularly the shots of the waving American flags. Didn't quite ruin the movie, but still awful.
Much longer than a single shot, but the Broadway Melody sequence in "Singin' in the Rain" always takes me completely out of the movie, to the point where I usually just skip the entire scene. I understand that it was a convention of the time period, but it still strikes me as the low point in an otherwise great movie.
In "Citizen Kane", the scene where Thatcher reads, "I think it would be fun to run a newspaper," and then turns and growls at the camera. Obviously, it didn't ruin the movie, but it seems so clumsy and ill-advised that I think it would a better movie without it.
The first close view on Klaus Kinski's ridiculous vampire teeth in Herzog's Nosferatu had me going: Great. Count Dracula is a rabbit... I instantly lost all interest in watching the rest of the film.
Just look at the shot and tell me if you can take it seriously:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1KO55JBuFE
Steve: I think that "Boogie Nights" is a masterpiece on every level, and the final shot is absolutely necessary. We aren't supposed to be surprised by the length of Dirk's massive appendage, because it's been hinted at so much through the entire movie. It's basically all he has. The final shot makes us understand how disappointing it is when we look at it. It's just a product. All he can do is admire it, reciting lines from his "glory days", which were pretty stupid in and of themselves. Trust me, it's a perfect final shot.
As for me, I don't actually think that a movie can be entirely ruined by a single shot, unless it's something with very few shots at all. If you think "Russian Ark" has a bad shot, then the entire movie is awful. What does seem to be the case here is that there is some organizing intelligence (Intelligent Design, you might say) in films - which could be disorganized, shoddy, and incoherent - and a single shot can tip off everything that's wrong about the rest of the movie. I was actually really angry for a while during Watchmen of all things, as I couldn't get over the uselessness of the pan to the blood spilling out of the crack beneath the bathroom door. It's a dazzling image in the comic, but since Snyder has already delivered the fine shot of the swinging door, there's no need to add the bloody water to the spectacle other than for pure showiness, or a sense of pleasing the fanboys, or to increase Snyder's own dumb-as-hell bloodlust. It's already clear what Rorschach has been doing in there, and the movie wastes precious seconds that could have been used in, oh, explaining how the gang broke in and escaped so easily.
Although, come to think of it, there is one movie I remember being utterly neutral and unaffected by until a grotesquely awful moment near the end that revealed the whole movie as an ugly sham, cynically manipulating its audience for pure indulgence of "powerfulness" or whatever you call it. In "Testament" (SPOILERS AHEAD), the scene at the end where the retarded Japanese kid (Named Hiroshi! Get it?) is used in such an ugly, exploitative way as an emotionally wrenching plot device. After he finds the candles (or something) for the birthday-cake graham-cracker scene, Jane Alexander (or her son) wonders out loud how he found the candle. Hiroshi responds with a stupid-as-hell "Gee, shucks! Ain't it great to have a wacky retarded kid around to fix everything! Because we're magical!" look that made me feel as though he was putting the characters on with this repulsive "silly retard" act just to keep his motives mysterious. Although that obviously wasn't the intention, I couldn't believe how sick I felt by the presence of that single shot in a movie that offers a dreadfully simplistic look at the effects of nuclear war, with characters so badly developed it's almost impossible to feel for their eventual fates beyond the Pavlovian responses triggered by ugly manipulations like James Horner's bell-ringing score. In addition to that, the scene where Alexander hears the Beatles for the last time is ruined entirely by the fact that it's NOT REALLY THE BEATLES she's listening to, but some godawful soundalike hired on the cheap. I'm sorry for this, but what an awful movie it is. Seriously. "The Day After" may be dated, but in watching it recently (to get the taste of "Testament" out of my mouth) I was struck by how genuinely powerful and honest the film is in its emotional material.
The final shot in Titanic, when all the spirits who perished in the sinking applaud the other-worldly reunion of Jack and Rose. For me, this seems a little too much like James Cameron giving himself a pat on the back for making the movie. As an audience member, I don't need the director telling me where and when to give a film its props, no matter how good it may be.
It doesn't "ruin" the entire duology, but the reveal of "Beatrix Kiddo" in Kill Bill Vol.2 was an annoying, self-indulgent letdown.
I'm with you, Eric - I dig the final shot of Godfather III. The two sequels are built around parallels to the first film and showing the death of Michael fits right in. To not show Michael's death would have gone completely against the way the entire series was structured and its themes.
When Vito died, he was with his family - he may have murdered, but we got a sense that always did what he did for the betterment of his family and the other Italian-Americans around him. Michael's actions were in complete contrast to Vito's and they led to the dissolution of the Corleone family. When Michael dies, he is alone (framed perfectly with Michael on the left side, looking of-screen to emphasize the empty space around him). Michael's death at the end is the series' final criticism of the corporation and how American business practices are destroying the institution of family (as well as other institutions, such as the church).
There aren't many scenes bad enough to ruin a good movie. Good movies you tend to forgive; and truly bad scenes usually happen in movies which are bad in the first place.
There are many cringe-worthy scenes in Watchmen, nearly all of them involving Silk Spectre II. I still enjoyed the movie despite them.
Can you count the last twenty minutes of A.I.? At least with that film, you could just stop watching.
Some UNUSUALLY bad scenes in some not-so-good movies:
- Dune (Lynch version): Kyle McLaughlin falling down the side of a cliff, in what is painfully obviously a bluescreen shot.
- Robin Hood (Kevin Kostner version): Kostner is leaping over a castle wall in slo-mo, and right after he makes it, cut to a scene of Christian Slater saying "F--k me, he made it." (Until this point, nobody had said anything in a dialect other than fake Middle English.)
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (movie version): The scene with Zaphod, Trillian, and the Truth-Telling Gun.
- If you're feeling masochistic, rent the DVD of I Know Who Killed Me, and watch the alternate ending. It is quite possibly the only thing that could have made the film even worse.
- Two words: The Village.
On the other hand, some "bad" scenes are so ridiculous that they end up elevating the entire movie. For example: Seven Women for Satan. This is pretty standard Eurosleaze horror, except that the killings are all of naked women being chased off of cliffs. (You heard me.) There's one scene near the end that is so abrupt, I had to rewind it so I could laugh at it again.
@Ted: Believe me, I like the movie, but I still don't understand that last shot. Its purpose doesn't seem to be to add any information about the character--by the end of the film we've already seen how empty his life is outside of work.
Maybe the purpose of the shot is to make all of those implications concrete, much like the cow's-eye shot in Un Chien Andalou makes the implied cut shockingly concrete. But if that's the case, the timing's all wrong--the audience has been paying attention to this issue for the entire film, so they either have a fully-vivid image in their head already, or they're apathetic to it.
It's a real puzzle; I can totally see how the shot fits with the rest of the film, but it just never seemed to add anything, apart from the superficial sensationalism.
I would ditto the comment about Minority Report, film that I though was excellent outside of Spielberg's hellbent notions to attempt to include such a range of emotions in each film. The eyeball rolling down the ramps was forced. Spielberg is so unwilling to let a story develop that he hogties it. Cut the eyeball roll and the ending (simply end it with Cruise joining "the flock" and run credits) and now you have a much more daring movie. (Instead of the "It'll all work out in the end" ending)
Though I think something needs to be said about dramatic changes in tone. They always cause dramatic reactions from the viewers. If you go along for the ride, then there are tremendous rewards, but otherwise you're left on shore and out come the hypercritical side of the viewer. When it fails to work I agree with Electronichate, that it is often because of failure of the viewer to realize what the director has done, or it is the failure of the director to make a movie good enough to work up to that point and suck you down the vortex.
Personally, Mystic River's dramatics worked for me. I think a lot of people missed the fact that it wasn't a genre piece at all and this lead to a tremendous amount of misapproximation in the viewers, which Eastwood was predicting and this made the change in dramatics that much more emotional (I find it funny that emotional scenes cause so much division, and if they do that probably means it worked...maybe too well). I remember a discussion about Larry David and Seinfeld, Jason Alexander said "This is ludicrous, no one would ever react this way." Larry replied, "I was in this very situation and reacted exactly this way." I have a much bigger problem when movies assume things, like in The Da Vinci Code where they know to escape the plane as it lands in London. This is a logical error (and therefore assumes I'm stupid and wouldn't notice). Simply saying, "No one would do that," I think is pretty short sighted. You need something more objective than that to say it is wrong. Maybe you don't like it, but it isn't truly wrong. This gets us into the shades of gray of artwork where things have varying degrees of truth and rather than the black and white of science.
This is just to pick on JE for picking on "American Beauty." JE writes:
"I think 'AB' jumped the shark in the rose petal/gymnasium scene. That was where I remember thinking: 'Oh, what a mistake to take down the lights and shine a spot. Too obvious. Too theatrical.' Only later did I find out that Sam Mendes was best known as a theater director." (May 15, 5:59pm)
Yes, the scene is very theatrical. But does that make it bad? Well, is it bad for movie musicals to burst theatrically into song and dance? No. Sometimes theatricality itself is the main point. And sometimes it's instrumental; it helps make a different point. In "AB" Lester Burnham views life with cynicism and detachment. To him, most other people are inauthentic "actors" staging "performances." That's how Lester thinks of Angela the cheerleader. So why not use an obvious symbol, a spotlight, to convey Lester's mindset? Lester's thoughts aren't subtle; why should the symbolism be?
Compare with Selma's songs in "Dancer in the Dark." There the extreme theatricality is indispensable, if unsubtle.
"AB" has some pretty bad scenes (e.g. most of the closing montage) but the gymnasium scene isn't one of them.
I'm going to go with "A.I." on this one, though not because the final shot was bad... it was incomplete. David and his mother are reunited in a simulated bedroom in a simulated house thousands of years in the future. This was ostensibly arranged by the future-beings as some sort of experiment so that they too may understand emotions. What the final shot needed was an abrupt cut to the future beings... coldly observing Daniel and his mom. Then cut to black. Instead we get the slow pull-back and tear-jerking music typical of a dozen Spielberg movies. This was supposed to be the Kubrick/Spielberg hybrid... instead Spielberg give the final word to himself.
The first thing that came to my mind was the movie Slither, a horror/comedy which I found entertaining above my expectations. That is until the scene where the two young girls are shown writhing in their beds as they are being killed by the giant slugs. For me it was an unnecessary shot that totally took the fun out of the movie.
There's one example that comes to mind, probably because I just revisited the film a few days ago. The shot doesn't ruin the movie, but it stains an otherwise perfect movie. It's the final scene in Roman Polanski's ROSEMARY'S BABY. The entire scene is handled quite ham-fistedly; all the subtleness and ambiguity Polanski has so carefully and skillfully employed throughout the movie completely goes out the window when all of a sudden, coven members shout a passionate "Hail Satan" and Roman Castevet pompously explains that "Satan is the father of your son!". But when Rosemary asks, "What have you done to his eyes?", and Castevet explains that the child has his father's eyes, there's an insert of yellow cat-like eyes - probably an image linking the scene to the hallucinatory rape scene earlier in the movie. It's a completely unneccessary shot that feels tacked-on; we don't need to see those eyes, and indeed the implication of Rosemary's question would be much stronger if the shot had been removed. The film is still a masterpiece, but if it wasn't for the final scene and this particular shot, it'd be a *complete* masterpiece.
Double Indemnity - Fred MacMurray didn't take off his wedding ring. The first shot he leans in to hold Stanwyck and kiss her, you see he's got a wedding band on. This completely disrupts and ruins the movie because now you're wondering whether he's got a wife that we haven't been introduced to, or whether the crew was too incompetent to notice while filming that a character shouldn't have a ring if not married.
That's the best example I could think of for a single shot that completely ruined the movie.
I was very excited to see "The Exorcist" when it was re-edited about ten years ago. I enjoyed the additional scenes not in the original version.
The one stumble was the scene where the girl sort of "crab walks" down the stairs. It's obviously some kind of trick camera shot. First, it's not a good shot anyway; the camera pans and it doesn't blur and the timing is just "off". Second, it doesn't fit the rest of the movie which - up to that point - has been very realistic in feel, almost to the point of feeling like a documentary.
I understand why they didn't put it in the original cut of the film. I didn't understand why - 20 years later - they didn't put that shot right back on the cutting room floor where it belonged.
The scene in Suspect (Cher) when the prosecutor throws something (keys I think) at the accused and the fact that they are caught by his left hand, proves that he is left handed -- which is news to everyone that has ever played baseball.
The preposterous ending of The Village ruins an already bad movie that is filled with inconsistencies.
The full frontal nudity of Dr. Manhattan instantly transported most moviegoers out of the story -- especially if kids were in the theater.
The "birth" of Darth Vader in the final Star Wars movie is horrendous; having him scream "NOOOOO" at the heavens is cartoonish.
Also, the text that runs on the screen during the ending of the movie Unbreakable is completely lazy writing. You can't end a movie with words on a screen as a prologue -- you have to show the confrontation, the arrest, the fallout.
Finally, the adherence to the book No Country For Old Men by the Cohens denies the audience of seeing the demise of the character that they have been rooting for the whole movie. The genre of a chase movie demands that the final battle not take place off-screen.
The killing of Dick (Scatman Crothers)upon his entrance into the hotel in The Shining sent viewers out of the theater (he was the hero of the book). The decision to shift from demonic possession to schizophrenia/karma?? with the ending shot completely destroys the movie for those that remained.
Some say the frogs raining in Magnolia ruins the movie or perhaps the music video -- I'm not one of them.
That's funny, I always saw the tacked-on ending to Godfather III as Coppola's revenge against the picture. There! I killed the main character! Now you can't make any more lousy sequels, hah hah! Wasn't that movie made because the studio wanted to revive the franchise? It existed purely as a money-making machine, nothing more, and it reduced the original Godfather into a simple formula where you could churn out endless sequels (cue the video games).
I can't think that a final scene or a single moment could ruin a picture. If a movie fails, it's for many reasons, its sins piling up steadily over time. I much prefer Pauline Kael's view that even bad movies can be salvaged by a single moment, a single performance.
A good example of this was a Brandon Frasier movie called Monkeybone. It was a terribly lame picture, like Roger Rabbit crossed with Poochie the Dog. But there was one sequence near the end where Chris Kattan plays a reanimated corpse. That was just hyterically funny and absurd.
Another good example: the spectacular car chase in Bullit. The rest of the movie is a preachy wash. But that's the best damned car chase in the movies.
Another great example of a spectacular moment that singly elevates a movie: the boy bell-maker in Andrei Rublev. You could take a nap through the middle of that movie and not miss a thing, but once you get to the boy and his bell, you are rewarded with one of the greatest punchlines in any movie.
Okay, enough with the good, now in with the bad. I can think of one movie that is completely sabotaged at the end - Eddie Murphy's singing at the end of Shrek. Ow ow owwww!! My girl wants to party all the time party all the time parrrrrty ow ow owww!! My ears are broken!
That's it! I now hate this movie. Shrek stinks.
The overflowing aquarium in "Femme Fatale." A film with a pretty good opening scene and that's it.
How about Pretty in Pink? No matter what side of the should-Andie-have-ended-up-with-Blaine-or-Duckie debate, a scene at the prom almost toasts the rest of the final cut of the movie. Duckie tells Andie to go after Blaine, then turns around and gets noticed by a hot, rich blonde who just happens to go to her prom stag.
It was just a feel-good moment added to give the audience solace that everything would turn out OK with Duckie. But in the universe created by the movie, no way Kristi Swanson falls for Jon Cryer. If this scene was that necessary, couldn't it have involved a cute punker chick who was more likely to fall for Duckie? Of course not, because there were NO non-rich new wave kids at the prom, further reinforcing the stereotype that the movie was supposed to preach against.
How about Pretty in Pink? No matter what side of the should-Andie-have-ended-up-with-Blaine-or-Duckie debate you are on, a scene at the prom almost toasts the rest of the final cut of the movie. Duckie tells Andie to go after Blaine, then turns around and gets noticed by a hot, rich blonde who just happens to go to her prom stag.
It was just a feel-good moment added to give the audience solace that everything would turn out OK with Duckie. But in the universe created by the movie, no way Kristi Swanson falls for Jon Cryer. If this scene was that necessary, couldn't it have involved a cute punker chick who was more likely to fall for Duckie? Of course not, because there were NO non-rich new wave kids at the prom, further reinforcing the stereotype that the movie was supposed to preach against.
The "I am Malcolm X" scene with the children at the end of Spike Lee's film was pretty awful, but the film was too good to be ruined by that bit of idiocy.
It might be too late for anyone to even bother reading my two cents, but I'm going to try to tackle a modern classic that is truly ruined by a single shot: Children of Men.
The dramaturgy of Children of Men is simple. It revolves around the sacrifices made by a number of people in the hope of saving the human race, despite how slim that hope is, and despite that they will never know the eventual fate of the people they are trying to save. Following this central idea, the script fells its major characters one by one, as each gives up his life to propel the others towards the next plot point; and the camera and editing keep the movie in the immediate orbit of Theo.
At the end of the movie, only Theo and his pregnant charge Kee remain, and Theo is dying as they wait for the ship that is meant to fetch them. But they are already late, and it is uncertain if their last hope still remains. The camera frames them in a long shot, bobbing in the mist. Then a close-up of Kee, yelling and pointing, and a cut to the ship itself (the word TOMORROW painted along its plimsoll line), before we cut to Theo's face: his eyes are closed, his mouth curled at the edges in a half-smile. And yet the final shot of the movie returns to the long shot of them bobbing in their sad little boat, with no ship emerging through the mist.
There are two strong affective pushes here, in opposite directions: 1) that Kee is consoling the dying Theo, and she actually sees no ship; 2) that the ship has arrived. If (1), then the cut to the ship is incongruous, not least because of the heavy-handed "TOMORROW" symbolism; not least because we leave Theo's perspective for no good reason, when we've stayed with it for the rest of the movie; but also because, as I've mentioned above, a major theme of the movie is sacrificing for a cause even if you don't know how things will turn out. If (2), then the final shot is incongruous, because it implies a much bleaker state of affairs than the shot of the ship would suggest.
I'm thinking that the filmmakers were going for (2), but preliminary focus-group tests led to the addition of the more hopeful shot (it can really be taken out of the movie without confusion), turning it into (1).
The old Doris Day musical The Pajama Game was kind of fun until that one number where all the adults are having giddy "fun 'n' games" and picnics in the park, and there are wierd shots of them kicking their legs in the air and such...I haven't seen it in a long time and can't describe it more clearly, but you see, that's because those shots put me off so much. They were just embarrassing to behold.
I was really enjoying the quirky charm of Garden State up until the scene in the hotel, where the employees are using hidden cameras to watch customers have intercourse. The sleaziness and language in the scene was a mental shock after the meandering nature of the earlier parts of the film. Plus it had the unfortunate effect of making you paranoid: "Have hotel employees ever done that in real life? What if--what if they have hidden cameras in the next hotel I stay at?"
This is kind of random, but I hate how Oliver Stone's "W" ends with the words THE END when it clearly wasn't. If he had included TO BE CONTINUED... or something of that kind, or just left a final title card out altogether, it could have worked. But to tack on THE END on an in-progress retelling of the George W. Bush story is not only nonsensical but left me with a bad taste in my mouth, knowing how erroneous that statement was.
I have a few...
In Shakespeare in Love, when Geoffrey Rush is recruiting players for Romeo & Ethel, he jumps up on a table and gives a two-fingered whistle that screams "I have never whistled with two fingers in my life."
In Sleepless in Seattle, the kid is holding a vinyl LP and says that if you play it backwards, it says that Paul is dead. But the label on the album was red, which would most likely make it Columbia, and certainly not EMI or Apple. Such a small thing, but it made me sit up and go "Heyyyy!"
In Forrest Gump, Nixon sets up Gump at a nice hotel. Gump calls security and tells them something funny is going on in a nearby room. When he hangs up, we get a lingering closeup of Watergate Hotel stationery. Why? Was there a chance people might have mistaken it for a Motel Six?
Finally, from the opening line "One hundred years ago... in 1859...", the dialogue in Dead Poets Society spelled out every single thing going on around it. But the last straw that broke the camel's back came after Robert Sean Leonard, who'd been hounded by a tyrannical father throughout, committed a terrible act. Afterward, one of his upset friends cries out, "His father made him do this!" Oh. Thanks for clearing that up, Captain Obvious.
For me, it's unbelievably bad form for Bahrani to call Eastwood's Mystic River a badly made film. It's one thing to examine a piece of work with a critical eye but c'mon . . . No one would deny him the right to express his opinions but is Bahrani so artistically self-absorbed that he doesn't realize that Eastwood is a different breed of filmmaker in a different stage of his career and life. It's well known that Eastwood works on a swift schedule and does not pore over individual shots with the same level of attention and detail that Bahrani does. Eastwood is in his seventies and does not have the luxury of time. Perhaps if he were in his thirties like Bahrani, with a good part of his life still out in front of time, he could endlessly turn things over in his own head for a number of months or years and get everything just so. It would appear that Bahrani's artistic ego is enormous since he is not above trashing the work of accomplished directors, and in the process apparently cast himself as an observant filmmaker with a finely tuned artistic antenna. Honestly, the hubris.
I will forever dislike Julia Roberts due to one moment in "Sleeping with the Enemy" when she is crying - its difficult to describe why I hate that moment - its poorly acted, makes her character completely unsympathetic, and too long. I can't remember anything else about that movie now - but the movie was wrecked by her performance. I avoided her films for years and still really don't care for her.
The end of the "The Matrix" with Kenunu flying onto the sky did pull me out of the movie and was confusing and a bad ending - it could have ended with the voice over and Neo walking down the street fading into the crowd. The whole series could have ended perfectly right before that flying moment.
I loved "O Brother, Where art Thou?", but the entire film was ruined for my cousin by one scene. Nothing else in the film could redeem it for him. When Ulysses McGill and company meet George Nelson for the first time on the road, Nelson makes a comment about cows, shoots some and subsequently one of the chase cars runs into a cow. That scene was needlessly graphic and overly violent compared to the rest of the film(in my cousins opinion). It completely took him out of the movie.
Oh - in just about any comic book movie - CGI effects that have no regard for actual physics take me out of the movie - like Spider Man swinging faster than possible, the Hulk throwing a tank as though the tank itself is a solid piece of plastic, or Superman saving a plane by grabbing the outside of the plane ignoring the fact that the plane would likely fold around him, etc... scenes like that turn the movie into a video game. In these movies CGI should enhance reality, not complete ignore it.
Which reminds me - I did not see "Knowing" due to a scene in the commercials. It showed an airliner flying into the ground, with the wing slowing being erased by contact with the ground. One would expect the wing to catch and the whole plane to crash - but that would not look cool... ugh.. so I skipped the movie.
I will forever dislike Julia Roberts due to one moment in "Sleeping with the Enemy" when she is crying - its difficult to describe why I hate that moment - its poorly acted, makes her character completely unsympathetic, and too long. I can't remember anything else about that movie now - but the movie was wrecked by her performance. I avoided her films for years and still really don't care for her.
The end of the "The Matrix" with Kenunu flying onto the sky did pull me out of the movie and was confusing and a bad ending - it could have ended with the voice over and Neo walking down the street fading into the crowd. The whole series could have ended perfectly right before that flying moment.
I loved "O Brother, Where art Thou?", but the entire film was ruined for my cousin by one scene. Nothing else in the film could redeem it for him. When Ulysses McGill and company meet George Nelson for the first time on the road, Nelson makes a comment about cows, shoots some and subsequently one of the chase cars runs into a cow. That scene was needlessly graphic and overly violent compared to the rest of the film(in my cousins opinion). It completely took him out of the movie.
Oh - in just about any comic book movie - CGI effects that have no regard for actual physics take me out of the movie - like Spider Man swinging faster than possible, the Hulk throwing a tank as though the tank itself is a solid piece of plastic, or Superman saving a plane by grabbing the outside of the plane ignoring the fact that the plane would likely fold around him, etc... scenes like that turn the movie into a video game. In these movies CGI should enhance reality, not complete ignore it.
Which reminds me - I did not see "Knowing" due to a scene in the commercials. It showed an airliner flying into the ground, with the wing slowing being erased by contact with the ground. One would expect the wing to catch and the whole plane to crash - but that would not look cool... ugh.. so I skipped the movie.
DL, I can't agree on NCFOM. If Moss had died on screen, that would have given a level of importance to his death in a film that is going out of its way to play up the existential notion that death is (as a noun) uncaring and (as a verb) completely common and ordinary. Death is coming for everyone; Moss's death is no more important than anyone else's.
A couple responses to comments here:
Firstly, for the gentleman commenting about the unnatural camera pans in "Multiplicity." These shots were NOT the result of Ramis' production techniques. Ramis took care to frame his film in Panavision 2.35 : 1 and worked hard to exploit the format for the film's primary premise; that there could be four distinct Michael Keaton characters in the same shot. It has been well-documented all over the internet and in publication about the great bureaucratic mess that precipitated the home release of "Multiplicity" in PAN&SCAN, rather than Widescreen. The Pan&Scan includes synthetic camera pans that are NOT part of Ramis' original production; they're created in a new process in order to provide some more screen information to 4:3 aspect viewers. Clearly this violates the very point of Ramis' choice of Panavision for his film and it's a very unfortunate blight on this comedy. I was lucky to procure the laserdisc release, which preserves the 2.35:1 aspect ratio (there's also a region 2 DVD out there in anamorphic widescreen if you want to search for it.) If you watch the film in its original aspect ratio, scenes like the Keaton clones brushing their teeth in the bathroom work as intended, with three clones standing next to each other in the same shot, including their respective reflections in the mirror.
Secondly, to "Jeremy" w/respect to "KNOWING".... I've studied many a plane crash (it's my morbid hobby) and it's important to point out that the rendering of the plane crash in "Knowing" is physically consistent. Although it seems counter-intuitive, the frame of a plane, including its wings, are actually quite thin, and more or less disintegrate upon impact at even moderate velocities. Look at this vid of a B-52 crash at relatively low speed, and you can see that the wing that contacts the ground first seems to just melt into the ground. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmbEGcNG4B0
The artists on "Knowing" studied many of these plane crashes and got the modeling correct.
As a kid, I would close my eyes on repeated viewings of Star Wars whenever Obi Wan's light saber flickers out during his battle with Darth Vader. Wasn't it obvious to anyone cutting the movie that he is standing there with a stick?
Yes! I saw it in the theater on first release, and that shot made it look like Obi Wan's saber was losing power. When it was re-released with the horrible additional digital footage, I still don't think it was fixed.
In Angels and Demons (SPOILER) I was totally taken out of the movie once Ewan McGregor says "Don't trust anybody" (or something like that). It's the biggest hand-tipping cliche in the movies. I spent the rest of the filming waiting for him to be revealed as the bad guy.
The last scene in "Doubt" when Meryl Streep's character breaks down and cries because she might have been wrong. That could not have seemed more tacked on. I was just determining I liked the movie and thought the performances were excellent as promised and then bam! straight from an imaginary movie out of left field, there comes a completely inappropriate ending. If anything her character would have been more convinced she had been right since the priest went on to something better with no punishment at all. I guess we had to have some more "Doubt" because that was the name of movie.
Buffalo '66.
Didn't need that cringeworthy, sentimental final shot of Gallo lying beside Ricci. It would have been the perfect ending just to have him walk out of the donut shop on his way to, perhaps, a less bitter life.
Colin, maybe I just misread you post, but the final shot of Children of Men clearly shows the Tomorrow coming out of the mist, which to me, was a necessary moment of catharsis after a movie that was pretty much relentless in its bleakness. I think it remains the best film of the decade.
In the DVD Director's Cut of Star Trek-The Motion Picture, V'ger is revealed in a long shot to be a long, cylindrical shape with 6 'spikes' coming out perpendicular to the main body.
Before Robert Wise had a chance to finish the picture just a couple of years ago, we had never seen Vger in whole, only in pieces as the Enterprise investigated it.
I never wanted to know what Vger looked like in whole and I think this took a little mystery out of a picture that already had too much going against it.
I like ST-TMP. It';s not anybody's iodea of a great movie or great Star Trek, but it still has a lot to recommend it, and the Director's Cut is better then previous versions.
In order for one shot to ruin a movie, its has to take you out of the movie and ruin everything that is building to that time.
Best clear example for me would be the reaction to the speech from COl. Slate at the end of Scent of a Woman. The teachers huddel together then standing ovation from the students. Takes you right out of the movie.
Two movies stand out...
--Atonement--kudos to the others who pointed this out. The last scene is so self-indulgent and fraudulent it completely shreds the best aspects of the previous 9/10ths of the movie. Making characters in fiction out of those you wronged isn't atonement, it's exlpoitation.
--Magnolia. The rest of the movie is a very excellent put together grounded movie, relying completely on the individual characters and their emotional interactions with each other. And how does PT Anderson tie up the story? By having a deluge of frogs drop out of nowhere. I know some who actually like this denouement, but it is so inconsistent with the rest of the film that anticipating this ending completely ruins every aspect of the film if you try to watch it again. Its not even good as a deus ex machina.
(DL: The "birth" of Darth Vader in the final Star Wars movie is horrendous; having him scream "NOOOOO" at the heavens is cartoonish)
Exactly. I can't believe George Lucas either didn't realise, or chose to ignore, how much of a laughable cliché it is when a distraught character bellows "NOOOOO" in a movie. In fact, in "Rambo: First Blood Part II" (1985), Rambo originally reacted to the death of his female Vietnamese sidekick with a "NOOOOO" bellow, but test audiences laughed at it and the filmmakers wisely cut it out of the film. So what was unintentionally comedic and passé as far back as 1985 was used seriously by George Lucas in 2005!
in the original Star Wars, there's a shot during the climatic fight between Obi-Wan and Vader where Obi-Wan turns with his lightsaber towards the camera, and...the light seems to go out, and it looks like he's just holding a thin blue wire or something. Even the sound effects seem to cheapen in my memory with this shot, but that might be my mind running away with how badly this particular shot looks. I seem to remember them addressing this shot somewhat in the special editions, but never to a degree that seemed satisfactory. What bothers me most about it is that I don't know if it's supposed to look a certain way to indicate that Obi-Wan's weapon is failing (which wouldn't seem to be the case, as nowhere in the entire series does a lightsaber of anyone else's lose power, or does anyone even mention such a thing happening), or if it's just a really terrible effect.
Anyway, to answer the original question, YES, one shot can over time start to grate to the extent that it damages an entire movie. I love Star Wars, but whenever that scene comes up, a scene that should be one of the most compelling of the entire series, I have to look away or it ruins the rest of the movie for me.
Jaws.
The movie works because of what we don't see. The shark is revealed sparingly. Then, in the end, the shark hops up on the boat.
It's corny and awful.
Love the final shot of Godfather III. Michael gets his ultimate reward by outliving everyone - father, brothers, beloved daughter - and dying alone. Talk about damnation.
Back to Minority Report, which I think is full of goofs and inconsistencies: The shot early in the film where Tom Cruise is running across the street into a house where a murder is about to occur. First he's wearing his helmet, then, for no reason, he yanks it off his head, just as he barges through the door. Er, you're a police officer about to enter a situation where YOU KNOW violence is about to occur ... and you take off your protective headgear? Oh, wait ... the character is being played, after all, by Tom Cruise, and we in the audience simply MUST see his face.
Also: the shot where it's obviously a stunt double lying on his back in the exercise room after Cruise's character leaps off the pod and crashes through a window. Fake!
Here's one more bad example: in Not Of This Earth (the remake), the creepy fish-out-of-water alien is in the doctor's office, not understanding any of the norms of a doctor's office, and nurse Tracy Lords tells him that he can look at the magazine next to him while he waits for the doctor. The next shot is of the creepy alien man picking up the magazine and reading it, instead of acting like a fish-out-of-water alien--clearly he should have leaned over and simply stared at the outside of the magazine.
Okay, so it wouldn't be a great joke, but that moment was a clear signal that the filmmakers weren't going to take their shots. There are other times when the film is pretty bad technically or aesthetically, but this is the one moment that it can't be defended as sacrificing every other consideration for goofy misogeny. Um, I guess that's not the most ringing endorsement of the rest of the film, but this shot is just so much worse.
One has always bugged me. In De Palma's "Scarface" during the chainsaw scene the camera pans away and looks outside, making the audience decision to not look at the blood and gore the results when saw meets flesh. The movie is a satire that is otherwise drenched in excess and De Palma's decision completely derails the movie for me.
On a less related note I spent the entire first half of "The Village" in a spell, deeply entranced by this world M. Night created, only the have the rug pulled out and the movie fall into M. Night twisty-ness.
On the other end of the spectrum. At a screening for the "Dawn Of The Dead" remake I was sold twice. First with perfectly framed shot from the sky as the zombie attack is seen from house to house and also being granted my wish of "please let there be a zombie baby!" as they set up such a moment. Rarely does a Hollywood movie take that perfect step to left field you hope it will. I have yet to like a Zach Snyder movie since, but I will keep hoping he finds that moment again.
In "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", the singing of "Twist and Shout" on the parade float. Ugh.
In "Dead Man Walking" when Sean Penn is strapped to the table for the lethal injection, and they stand him up to address the witnesses and he looks like Christ on the cross. Gimme a break.
I believe that the last shot of Zhang Yimou's "Raise The Red Lantern" (which I won't spoil here) ruined an otherwise great movie.
In "The Rock," there is a shot of Ed Harris as Gen. Hummel leaning against a white tile wall after he's been shot several times. As with so many other choices Michael Bay makes, Hummel dies, and begins sliding down the wall. Instead of allowing Hummel the honor of sliding out of the frame, Bay and his editors cut away quickly to the continuing gunfight, then come back to Hummel in ECU as he slides down the wall, blood gurgling out of his mouth. The 2nd shot destroys everything about the 1st shot; taste and class (and an elegant exit for Hummel) is replaced by a grotesque and vulgar death shot. The 2nd shot's vulgarity absoulutely ruins the rest of this movie for me.
Worst shot in any movie ever: Saving Private Ryan's flashback shot. The entire movie, beginning on a closeup of Tom Hanks's eyes, is actually being told from Matt Damon's perspective. Spielberg cheated the audience and nobody called him out on it when it came out.
Hello Jim,
I've never seen the worst shot ever, because it happened off screen. Killing off Newt in Alien 3 has to have been one of the worst ideas in the history of professionnal cinema.
I've avoided that movie for 17 years, just because of that.
Michel Lamontagne
I think some of you guys are being way too harsh; did that one guy REALLY walk out on "Goldeneye" because there was a shot he didn't like? Wow. But at least it spared him having to watch "Tomorrow Never Dies".
That said, now it's my turn. I loved Danny Boyle's "Sunshine"; it was beautiful, powerful, and thought-provoking, and it ended on a perfect note. Then the credits rolled over a pounding techno track, which was totally out of character with the rest of the movie, and absolutely killed the mood. Argghhh!
Tony Reichenberger: --Atonement--kudos to the others who pointed this out. The last scene is so self-indulgent and fraudulent it completely shreds the best aspects of the previous 9/10ths of the movie. Making characters in fiction out of those you wronged isn't atonement, it's exlpoitation.
And kudos to you too, Tony, because that is precisely the point. It's what the film is about. Book too. This is not a flaw.
See upthread (way upthread) for my more detailed defense...
Aburrow: The shot early in [Minority Report] where Tom Cruise is running across the street into a house where a murder is about to occur. First he's wearing his helmet, then, for no reason, he yanks it off his head, just as he barges through the door. Er, you're a police officer about to enter a situation where YOU KNOW violence is about to occur ... and you take off your protective headgear? Oh, wait ... the character is being played, after all, by Tom Cruise, and we in the audience simply MUST see his face.
Actually, he knocks his helmet off as soon as he starts running, rather than during his sprint or sometime afterwards. This is probably for the same reason a catcher will pull off his mask when he has to make a difficult play. Nice try, though.
@Michel: Coincidentally, I just picked up the set of Alien movies, because it'd been so long since I last saw any of them and was curious how the first two held up. And I was surprised by the fact that I definitely prefer 3 over 2.
The way the two films handle the Newt character is a good illustration of the drastic difference in artistic choices in the two films. To my taste, the heavy-handed moralism of Aliens is trite and boring (you know that Ripley and Newt are safe because they're good, so who cares about what actually happens?), and makes the barrage of one-liners a painful sloganeering exercise. Again, to my tastes; probably not many people will agree with that.
Alien3 on the other hand, hits you in the face with Newt's death pretty early (and it's timed nicely, to give you enough time to realize how much you hope she's still alive). Because bad things can happen in this movie, there's a reason to fear the aliens--you're not safe just by being a good person. There's a feeling of dread throughout 3, that makes it totally worth watching (despite the muddy action sequences, and confusion about which character is which). Any goodness in Alien3 is because of decisions like Newt, not despite them.
The final shot in Ridley Scott's Thelma and Louise prevents a good film from becoming a great one. When the Thunderbird goes off the cliff into freeze-frame, the shot should have been held for 5 or 10 more seconds in silence to allow the implications to sink in, followed by a much more subtle theme song along the lines of "I Will Remember You". That would have made it a near-perfect movie. As it is, the ending is way too heavy-handed. Scott didn't didn't have the courage to see his movie completely through.
It could have been worse. I understand one of the endings discussed had T & L driving away on the floor of the Grand Canyon, which would have torpedoed the movie for me.
I agree that one shot or scene can detract significantly from the overall feeling a movie leaves yo with. "Changing Lanes" -- a terrific movie up through the dinner scene at the end with Ben Affleck and his wife and in-laws (where it should have ended) was lessened by an additional, last "happy scene" where Sam Jackson gets his second chance with his wife and a new house. The movie would work so much better overall without that last scene, which was out of step with the rest of the film.
It's not a single shot, but the over-the-top gore in Watchmen really ruined it. Snyder was trying to make the film's violence "cool," imbuing it with the kind of stuff that would draw fans of horror movie viscera. However, the graphic novel was never concerned about looking "cool." The violence was peripheral and often took place off-frame.
Perhaps if I were to single out one moment, it would be Rorschach's transformation. Instead of the graphic novel's metaphorical immolation (of both the murderer and Rorschach's innocence), what we got was an ugly, meaningless shot of a butcher knife repeatedly chopping a man's skull.
Joshua S. wrote "One has always bugged me. In De Palma's "Scarface" during the chainsaw scene the camera pans away and looks outside, making the audience decision to not look at the blood and gore the results when saw meets flesh. The movie is a satire that is otherwise drenched in excess and De Palma's decision completely derails the movie for me."
Watch the scene again. The panning shot takes us outside to the view of Montana's pals hitting on some bikini-clad ladies, then takes us back inside, where the chainsaw action has not yet taken place. This is a classic de Palma play: make us think we are going to be spared seeing any of the gruesome action by panning outside, then panning back to show that the action has still not happened. Mr. de Palma appropriated more than just plotlines and style from Hitchcock; he also took from him a perverse enjoyment of manipulating the audience.
Rather than one specific movie, the type of scene that ruins a film for me is the type that renders everything before it pointless. Many here have already commented on that in particular movies, such as The Usual Suspects, for which the final scene destroys the film, IMHO, and the rest of the film is not all that good anyway, again IMHO.
I will comment on one specific film: Rashomon. The Kurosawa classic is justly revered, and I love Kurosawa movies, but I do feel that the very end of the film was a shade tacked-on, an attempt by Kurosawa to find uplift in this morally ambiguous tale. It does not by any stretch of the imagination ruin the film, but Kurosawa was so brilliant at his craft that any flaw just forces itself to the front of the mind.
Finally, a recommendation: make sure to watch The Passion of Joan of Arc, by Carl Dreyer. Ebert writes it up in his Great Movies section; I got to see it on DVD recently. Now I happen to think that Ebert is a pompous jackass (albeit a very readable one), but when he is right, he is right. Watch this film, folks; it is well worth it.
It didn't ruin the movie, but there's a moment in Star Wars that never fails to distract me.
When our heroes are about to leave Mos Eisley in the Millennium Falcon and the stormtroopers catch them and start shooting at them, there's a shot of a stormtrooper being shot and falling to his knees. A brief cutaway, then back to the stormtrooper, who falls to his knees again. Another brief cutaway, and then a cut back to the stormtrooper, who falls to his knees a third time. Three times, really? How did the editors not catch this?
By Kevin H. on May 28, 2009 8:22 AM
(In re: atonement)
And kudos to you too, Tony, because that is precisely the point. It's what the film is about. Book too. This is not a flaw.
See upthread (way upthread) for my more detailed defense...
Dear Kevin-
I don't think you understand the meaning of the word "atonement" and seem bent on being an apologist for the movie based on its better attributes.
What the book/movie was about was the character's attempt to redeem herself to two people she wronged in a dishonest and horrific manner. But atonement is inevitably out of reach and that she never can truly redeem herself. If it were just that, I would have no problem it. Thats a story worth watching.
But its not just what it is about. SPOILER ALERT: Instead, what happens is that the character writes a book the events, giving the two people she wronged a happy ending of sorts, since she was not able to offer it while they lived. First of all, fabricating history by altering events for a book, turning non-fiction to fiction, is just dishonest and does a disservice to the people she wronged. Second, giving them a happy ending together which didnt happen since they died before any redemption could occur is done not to benefit their memories, but to make HER feel better about. Its self-indulgent and exploitative--just as I mentioned in my original post. Lastly, it swindles the audience by saying half of what you just saw, this story you saw unfold for the past 90 minutes, didnt happen to these characters. OK then, so WHY TELL IT? It strips from the story any reason to listen to it, and replaces it with an admission of prevarication. It serves no purpose.
SIGNS:
Great movie until M. Night felt compelled to show a dude in a rubber alien suit at the end. I thought this cheezed up the suspense.
Remember Phoenix watching the news in the closet of the child's bithday video that caught just a glimpse of the creature? Remember his reaction? Perfect.
Two things: on the Enter the Dragon restoration, they include a scene early on where Lee dicusses his philosophy. I know his family liked having this scene in there but it slows the action, it uses a bad Bruce Lee imatation in the only Lee film that actually uses his voice, and it makes a following scene with the british agent redundant.
Also, Stepmother. Hated the movie anyway, but the final shot is indicative of why it's such a bad movie. As the movie starts to end, there is a freeze frame of the whole family plus Robert's character. Now if it had faded out then, I wouldn't have thought much of it. But then they do a close up of Roberts and Sarandan. So the movie seems to be saying that even though Sarandan's character is dying, her relationship with her ex and especially her children is not as important as the relationship between her and the woman who is now sleeping with her husband. Of course we know it is because it is Sarandon and Roberts and we need to be told to worship them.
I always felt the Taxi Driver cut-away scene was really over-rated. It's not a bad shot -- just hopelessly over analysed and over rated. People simply make too much of it.
As for the ending of Godfather Part III, I think it's a great shot -- the only problem with it is the stupid make-up and the obviously fake wig Pacino is wearing. Other than that I found it extremly poignant and effective.
Still taking entries here?
Every so often I'll find myself looking at a movie where I know something of the basic subject matter, so I'll spot a howler that nobody else notices. My example is 'Network". Several times in the movie, the plot point is made that the UBS network has 67 affiliates. In 1975, when "Network" was made, ABC, the the smallest of the nets in terms of affiliate strength, had about 180 stations; NBC and CBS were both over 200 stations strong. I attribute this to the fact that Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet hadn't worked regularly in TV since the '50s, thus were not aware of how much the landscape had expanded. But I noticed it, and it sank the pictuer for me.
I had similar snags with "Tootsie" and "Quiz Show", but my boss is lurking, so maybe another time...
I've never had a film ruined by a single shot before. Usually, for me, determining whether I like or dislike a film (or to what degree I like or dislike it) is a cumulative effort. It's a whole collection of good or bad shots/dialog/whatever that end up influencing my opinion.
But then I saw Danny Boyle's "Sunshine". I've never had another film experience like it. As I was watching that film I was forming my opinion with every frame, and every minute I was loving that film more and more. I was so hooked. So enthralled by it, and the idea, and how he had pulled it off. I was ready to vault it to the top of my list of favorite sci-fi films.
And then Boyle pulled a 180 with the film. Everyone who has seen the film knows what I'm talking about; there's a moment when that film and its direction completely changed. It becomes a different film. A lesser film.
In that instant everything I had thought up to that point was shattered completely. I went from loving it to hating it in literally seconds.
I've never had a film experience ruined so quickly or severely (and not be the result of an obnoxious audience member). "Sunshine" went from being one of the best sci-fi films I'd ever seen to being a completely piece of junk in a matter of seconds. With one scene Boyle changed everything, and it wasn't for the better.
When I think back to the critically acclaimed TV movie "Brian's Song," one shot has always stuck in my mind as sinking the integrity of the movie. James Caan is standing up at a lunch table singing his "fight song" while Billy Dee Williams places a plate of mashed potatoes in his seat. When Caan finishes singing, he sits down, and we get a close-up of his rump landing on the squished potatoes. That close-up struck me at the age of 18 as so incredibly unnecessary that it taught me a lesson about filmmaking.
I have to agree that Spike Lee constantly has awkward shots in his movies. They really take the viewer out of the moment. Besides the shots mentioned above, there's the color/musical sequence from "She's Gotta Have It," the talent show pop songs in "School Daze," the video game sequence of "Inside Man," and a special effects shot in the documentary "Original Kings of Comedy."
Additionally, the music in his films is sometimes so jarring and mixed so poorly that it feels like the score was from another movie. The score in "Do the Right Thing" is so intrusive sometimes.
On another note, Lee has also made movies where there is only one or two good shots in the entire movie. In "Summer of Sam," the movie starts and finishes with Jimmy Breslin and his story about the case. I would have rather sat and watched him talk for two hours instead of the film he bookended.
Also...there's a scene in They Live where the main character and a friend have a long, drawn out fistfight in an alley (famously spoofed on South Park). The fight, essentially, ends in a draw anyway, so there wasn't much point. Supposedly the fight was originally only going to be 20 seconds, but it was extended out for an extra five minutes. It's more than a shot, but it's just not necessary.
The end of "War of the Worlds" is yet another example of David Koepp -- an otherwise great writer -- not knowing how to end a movie. See also: Indiana Jones 4, Ghost Town, Panic Room. Everything up until Tim Robbins' introduction is top-notch; from then it just goes steadily downhill until the son's miraculous survival clinches it.
Good examples in the article, although, do you not like Mystic River or something? Because I really wasn't sure. I don't think you got that across clearly enough.
Here's a new one: in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Ben splits on Daisy while she's pregnant with their daughter. Screenwriter Eric Roth, knowing that audiences probably wouldn't like Ben for doing that, forces Daisy to later proclaim that Benjamin did the right thing by leaving her. It's the ugliest, most half-heartedly cynical attempt to regain an audience's sympathies I've ever seen. It's a writing issue more than a "shot" issue, but that one moment killed the movie for me.
I have to agree with the people who've mentioned Danny Boyle's "Sunshine" (2007), although it's more a case of the entire plot taking a 180 turn for the worse rather than just one bad shot.
I wanted to like "Sunshine." I really did. I was looking forward to it, being a fan of the previous Danny Boyle/Alex Garland/Cillian Murphy collaboration, "28 Days Later" (2002). And I actually did like "Sunshine" at first: for about the first 2/3, I thought it was a great movie – superior sci-fi. There was no heavy-handed plot exposition, we simply accept the premise and the situation, the focus was on the mission, and the characters spoke, hypothesised and bickered like real people in a real situation – they weren’t uttering the clichéd, idiot dialogue that's usually the norm for most sci-fi movies these days. It reminded me of "Alien" (even though "Sunshine" featured an improbably younger and more glamorous set of astronauts).
Then the whole thing turns into a frickin' slasher movie. Hell, it turned into an "Event Horizon" rip-off, and THAT movie was 10 years old at the time (and was pretty derivative itself). And with crisis upon crisis being piled upon the characters, I ended up not caring anymore about what happened to them, I just wanted it to be over. It’s not often I see a movie where I can pinpoint the exact moment it turns to crud, but when the "fifth crewmember!" revelation happened in "Sunshine" it almost seemed surreal, how a movie that started off well could become so awesomely bad so suddenly – it almost seemed like a different production crew took over before the movie was completed, and botched it. This was worse than seeing a movie that’s totally bad. "Sunshine" betrays its audience. I'm not sure I've seen anything else quite like it.
I agree with the person that mentioned the Andie McDowel line from "Four Weddings and a Funeral". "Is it raining? I hadn't noticed." While it does not ruin the entire movie for me, it comes awfully close. I cringe at that scene whenever I watch the movie.
In "Saving Private Ryan", Spielberg makes a point of showing that the German soldier who fatally shoots Tom Hanks is the same soldier they had captured and subsequently released earlier in the film. This is the only German soldier given any significant screen time in the film; which is fine since this is a story told from the perspective of American soldiers.
That being said, by choosing to have the only German the audience recognizes kill the film's heroic protagonist, it seems to suggest that they were wrong to release him earlier, and not killing him when they had a chance led to the death of Tom Hanks' character. I'm sure this wasn't the intention, but why make a point of showing that it was the same soldier? I find it distracting, unneccessary, and thematically dubious.
Tony wrote:
Dear Kevin-
I don't think you understand the meaning of the word "atonement"...
(!)*
I'm inclined to think, on the other hand, that you've misread (rather than "misunderstood") the film and its intentions -- as well as underestimated the sophistication of novelist Ian McEwan, who likes nothing more than to layer his (often meta-)narratives with complex ironies.
(*Seriously? What, like I don't own a dictionary? -- I guess that's what I get for being snarky. Maybe I'll try to tone it down to avoid this kind of spectacular condescension in future. I can't make any promises...)
...and seem bent on being an apologist for the movie based on its better attributes.
First, try to refrain from telling people what they're all about. Makes 'em ornery. Second, this is more than a bit vague, don't you think? I mean which of the film's "better attributes" did I build my "apology" around? Do you know, or is this just a hand-wavy dismissal sans argument?
What the book/movie was about was the character's attempt to redeem herself to two people she wronged in a dishonest and horrific manner. But atonement is inevitably out of reach and that she never can truly redeem herself.
I'm with you so far. Clearly we agree on the basic storyline.
If it were just that, I would have no problem it. Thats a story worth watching.
Apart from the reductiveness, this is again rather vague (and asking that a film be "just" anything is practically an invitation to read your comment as a plea for greater simplicity (i.e., less complexity)).
But since this is mostly set-up for the argument that follows...:
SPOILER ALERT: Instead, what happens is that the character writes a book the events, giving the two people she wronged a happy ending of sorts, since she was not able to offer it while they lived. First of all, fabricating history by altering events for a book, turning non-fiction to fiction, is just dishonest and does a disservice to the people she wronged.
I whole-heartedly agree. We don't seem to differ much on this point.
(Things start to get more complicated, of course, with the realization that all fiction -- to one degree or another -- is converted "non-fiction", based on the creator's observation of life...)
Second, giving them a happy ending together which didnt happen since they died before any redemption could occur is done not to benefit their memories, but to make HER feel better about. Its self-indulgent and exploitative--just as I mentioned in my original post.
Again I agree. And again I'd like to argue that this is indeed the point -- made first by McEwan, yes, but Wright and co. followed pretty admirably in his footsteps, imho.
Lastly, it swindles the audience...
I'd say "implicates", but to each his own. (Note that this is the first time I've disagreed with a word of your central argument. Apparently, it's not in the premises where we differ, but in the conclusion.)
...by saying half of what you just saw, this story you saw unfold for the past 90 minutes, didnt happen to these characters. OK then, so WHY TELL IT?
Well why tell any fictional story? They're all nothing more or less than a pack of "lies", right? (Acknowledged or otherwise.) Can we at least agree that it's the meta-fictional conceit that throws you, rather than some "fault" in the film or its creators? The willing self-reflexivity and not the "bad" storytelling?
(Also worth noting: Briony's revelation implies that all of what we just saw -- all 120+ minutes of it -- "didn't happen": i.e., the whole central narrative is meant to be part of her novel, not just the post-war episodes. This is why the film is so hyper-stylized -- it's a clue to the bigger picture...)
It strips from the story any reason to listen to it, and replaces it with an admission of prevarication. It serves no purpose.
Not at all. In fact, the focus of the narrative leaps from the frustrated/doomed romance to its frustrated/doomed creator. The whole story is re-defined from this new perspective, creating a fantastically loaded document where before we had (what we assumed to be) simply truth (insofar as the agreed-upon-lie of any fictional world can be considered "true").
What's more, the (explicit) leap from narrative to narrator suggests yet another (implicit) leap: from fictional narrator to "real-life" author (if you'll forgive the Matrix-y scare-quotes). That is, not only does McEwan (and Wright & co.) implicate the audience (who wants ever-so-much to believe in Briony's alternate version of events), he implicates himself (and all introverted, constantly-observing creator types) in the tale's indictment of its author-protagonist. That is, his livelihood is maintained precisely by transforming real-life-observations into lies (fiction), inventing false worlds filled with fabricated histories, manipulating reader emotions to assure our commitment to the narrative -- and all in the service of some self-selected theme or emotional revelation or whatnot.
Sounds pretty self-indulgent and exploitative to me....
Or look at it this way: Briony's crime and (so-called) atonement are of one-and-the-same form: they each represent an over-writing (or re-writing) of lives and events based on her own perceptions and desires. Young Briony transforms her misreading of events into "truth" (what she wants to believe and, perhaps, does believe), and old Briony transforms her various yearnings, regrets and guilt-inspired fantasies into "fiction" (what she wishes were true, what she desires most deeply, what she wants so badly to believe but, this time, knows is a lie). If that isn't irony (intentional irony on the part of McEwan), then I don't know what is.
I can see where the frustration lies (assuming one perceives the whole film as a cynical bait-and-switch meant to "swindle" the audience), but I wonder how much of this upset is justified and how much is just disgruntlement that anyone would dare to complicate viewer enjoyment. And disgruntlement interrupts and/or interferes with the pursuit of the larger implications at play (instead of inquisitiveness, which invites such pursuit), so we end up with a lot of embittered cranks (instead of curious viewers) all loudly voicing their disdain...
...which is what made me so snarky in the first place.
I'll at least acknowledge that the novel works better than the film (since the layers stack more neatly when confined to the written word), and that perhaps some familiarity with the conceit helps to unpack the film's thematic riches (whether on a second viewing or after reading the source, etc.), but this does nothing to dissuade me from the belief that Wright's film is not hampered by a lousy ending, that the ending is in fact the key to the whole piece, and that it's a pretty great film, not a flawed one.
And in all that verbiage I forgot to mention that a new assault has begun against one of my other '07 favourites: Danny Boyle's Sunshine.
Will the madness never end!
(Better to save that defense for another day, though. There's only so much righteous anger a thread can take...)
I agree with you about Funny Games, I think I had the same reaction. I might have even asked my friend if the TV was talking to him, because it sure wasn't talking to me.
I disagree about Mystic River. Those two are tough men in a tough world, guns and shooting are part of their lives. Kevin Bacon is gonna get Sean Penn now, that's it and that's how he let him know. How can you be so sure he would never do something like that? I'm not from that world so I just accepted it.
I don't think one shot can ruin a movie in general, but it can for a particular audience member.
Thanks for the refresher on "Scarface", but I still feel like it's a very distracting and showy moment. That may be a silly comment for a De Palma movie, but I've never gotten over it.
Also, in response to all the "Star Wars" attacks, I am baffled that time has not softened people's views of Episodes 1-3. Other than the horrendous Space Cow scene in Episode 2 I have come to love and enjoy the prequels and accepted them as an extension of a mythos and story that I love dearly.
On a more specific note, I always felt like Obi_Wan turned off his light saber and allowed Vader to kill him. It was kind of like a big FU to Vader, like you can't kill me even if you kill me thing. As a kid, connecting that moment to the ghost of Jedi's past moment at the end of Episode 6 was mind blowing.
It is funny how a moment that is so great for discussion, say the Munich sex scene, can be understood as annoying yet not take me out of the movie at all. The first time I saw the movie I hated the scene where they shoot the naked woman with bike pump blow guns. I still don't understand why they choose those weapons, but Jim Emerson's essay on that moment completely flipped my emotional reaction to it. It tied in to the wonderfully beautiful part in "The New World" when she touches Christian Bale's rough wool farmers coat, admitting her pragmatic love for him and the physical barrier she felt towards him.
It's great to discuss moments, that's what makes a movie for me.
re: 'breaking the wave'... for me, the whole point of the final scene is for the filmmaker to ask the audience to have the same kind of faith that emily watson's character had throughout the flick (she was right afterall, wasn't she)?
but then, i also loved the endings of 'high tension' and 'being there'.
The first title that came to mind was also SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It's a nearly perfect war movie if you skip the first and last sequences. But despite his technical virtuosity, Spielberg has always been handicapped (and often crippled) by a frustrating inability to leave any lilly ungilded. Same with SCHINDLER's LIST. Skip the "I didn't do enough!" B.S. and it would actually deserve most of the praise heaped upon it. Oh well.
Another one:
DEEP COVER: I really like this one, but every time Lawrence Fishburne's character starts indulging in "street poetry" (or whatever the hell it is) I gringe so bad I want to crawl under my seat. Again, eliminate that one aspect and the movie would be much improved.
One more from the original "Star Wars"... when Vader and Tarkin are discussing the results of Leia's interrogation, Vader's body language frequently doesn't match his words at all. He finishes one particular line (I think it's "I told you she would never consciously betray the rebellion"), then starts shaking his fist a few seconds later, while he isn't saying anything.
I assume that they just did a bad job dubbing James Earl Jones in, but it's "wrong" enough to make me scratch my head.
So are lines like:
Luke: "Hey, he happens to be a great man."
Han: "Yeah, great at getting us into trouble!"
Vader: "When we last met, I was but a student, but now I am the master."
Obi-Wan: "Only a master of evil, Darth."
For all the veneration the original SW trilogy (rightly) gets, there are some real howlers in there.
In 1939, Russell Maloney of The New Yorker gave a bad review to "The Wizard of Oz" based on one line of dialogue:
http://twitpic.com/7fjeq
Also of interest, the very end shows the fleeting pointlessness of celebrity (was Bert Lahr such a big name back then?). It makes me wonder how Tom Cruise's movies will be looked upon 60 years from now.
When it comes to one shot (or an entire sequence) ruining an entire movie, the revised ending of "Fatal Attraction" comes to mind.
The filmmakers choosing to go the typical "Friday the 13th" route instead of sticking with an earlier scene which indicated that the character played by Glenn Close was suicidal, almost ruined it for me.
I understand that the test audiences did not like the original ending. Although I understand that the much more successful ending was done for creative and marketing purposes, in my opinion, it does not mean that the change was necessarily for the better.
Admittedly it's more of a guilty pleasure than great filmmaking, but there is a shot in "The Hunt for Red October" that always takes me right out of the movie. Near the very end, when the Russian ambassador confesses that another submarine is missing, and Richard Jordan's character says, "Andrei, don't tell me you've lost ANOTHER submarine." Cut to the Russian ambassador's ridiculously sheepish expression. I find myself waiting for the muted trombone "wah, waaahh..." (or any other sound effect lifted from a Tex Avery cartoon). Perhaps the smug condescension is supposed to pave the way for Alec Baldwin's dewey-eyed patriotic bonding which follows, but it always feels completely out of place to me. Great concept for a blog discussion, by the way.
I think for a scene or shot to ruin a movie it would have to effect the characters, themes or emotional impact of a movie in an important way. But I can't off the top of my head think of an example of that. Although I can think of many scenes that have annoyed or bothered me in otherwise good movies.I dislike the scene near the very end of Schindlers List where Schindler breaks down. I didn't think it was necessary and it seemed kind of manipulative. I don't hate Schindlers list because of that scene and still think it was a great movie but it bugs me.
One more for Saving Private Ryan. In the final battle scene, when they are in the last throws of saving the bridge, there is a quick shot of Ryan curled up into a ball with his hands around his knees (or over his head?) and rocking back and forth whimpering like a little child. I know he is meant to be human and faliable and questioning and all that, but at this crucial moment, when all his band of brothers need him most, why show this? The whole movie is too captivating for this to ruin it for me but that shot always makes me cringe.
For everyone confused at Obi Wan's seemingly-failing lightsaber in Star Wars (I'm assuming you're talking about a point somewhere mid-fight, not the end when Vader slashes Obi Wan's robes) - his lightsaber doesn't fail, and neither were they trying to indicate it was 'failing'. Look at the perspective of where the lightsaber is pointing - it's pointing directly at the camera or very close to that, and therefore you get a head-on view of it, which in this case turns out to be a understandingly confusing pinpoint of light instead of the standard side of the lightsaber.
The Private Ryan scene, at the end of the movie, (the final battle scene on the bridge) where James Ryan is curled up sobbing makes me really scratch my head...I have searched on line 4ever for some kind of explanation....he wanted to earn it...he wanted to be told he was a good man....but like Steve C. said....at the most critical part of the whole movie, they show Private James Francis Ryan crying like a baby while everyone around him is being killed....I have said a thousand times of that scene...What a coward!!!..that would haunt me and question myself for the rest of my life....I have seen the movie many times...and I asked was Tom Hanks sort of dreaming from the tank blast (he was foggy) I have never been able to figure out that scene....he froze...he was crying like a little baby...this is the brave young soldier they sent home....this is the heroic character of the movie...no way!!!!....someone help me with this part of the movie....makes no sense...