scanners

The Eleven Worst Ambiguous Movie Endings

2009-11-21T19:32:43Z

Everybody hates it when they don't explain everything that happened by the time the movie is over. What we need at the end is not open-endedness but clarity, loose-end tying-up, closure. We need more movies like "Psycho" (unfortunately Simon Oakland has passed, but Larry King is still with us) and "Mulholland Dr." -- movies that take a little time to explain exactly what happened so we're not left feeling stupid all the way home. You know what they say: The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is where you end the story. Well, the same goes for the ending: The difference between a good ending and a bad ending is how good the ending is. Here are eleven of the most outrageously unsatisfactory ambiguous endings in movie history:

"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Scarlett O'Hara says, "I'll go home. And I'll think of some way to get him back. After all... tomorrow is another day." That's not the ending of a movie -- that's the beginning of act three! Put up or shut up, Scarlett. Clark Gable has just said the word "Damn" at you and that's it? If tomorrow is such another day, then bring it on!

"Casablanca" (1942) What do you mean Ingrid Bergman goes off with Paul Henreid and all Bogart's left with is the barest hint of a homosexual future with Claude Rains? At the end he puts her on a damn plane (something about how she doesn't amount to a hill of beans) and he and Rains walk off into the fog together as Bogart says, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Whoa! What the hell happened then? What if "Brokeback Mountain" ended right after Heath Ledger threw up? What kind of ending would that be? And how does Peter Lorre figure into it?

]]> "Do the Right Thing" (1989) What was the right thing? Who did it? What about Tawana Brawley? Shut up and stop playing mind games!

"Chinatown" (1974) If Mrs. Mulwray isn't going to pay Jake Gittes for all the work he did, who's he going to get the money from? Her dad? Does Noah Cross even know how much she owes Jake? You don't just walk away from a case like this. It's unprofessional.

"North By Northwest" (1959) Talk about leaving us hanging: How did they get off of Abraham Lincoln's nose, or whoever's face it was? I don't buy it. And when did Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint get married -- sometime in that dissolve? That was quick. Then -- whoosh! -- the train just goes into the tunnel and that's all she wrote? When does it come out of the tunnel? Ever?

"Zodiac" (2007) Well, Jake Gyllenhaal seemed pretty sure that was the guy, so why didn't they just settle it and arrest him and execute him? He was a Zodiac killer, wasn't he? Probably!

"The Godfather" (1972) Who thinks it's OK for one major character to tell another one a bald-faced lie and then just shut the door and make that the end of the movie? Nobody. Because it's not. No wonder they had to make two more sequels until Michael Corleone finally just keeled over and died of old age. That's an ending. It's not like we never thought Kay would figure out he was bullshitting her. How dumb do they think we are?

"Fargo" (1996) It didn't bother me so much the first time, but now that the USPS has issued "Forever Stamps," who's going to need Norm's 3-cent mallards anymore? What a big, fat bummer. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Especially when it's only 3 cents.

"The Wizard of Oz" (1939) Kansas to Oz I can understand, because it's Over the Rainbow, but how does a tornado take anybody from sepia to Technicolor? And why would you want to go back? Doesn't it seem awfully convenient that the farm hands looked like Dorothy's friends in Oz? Why doesn't somebody just say whether it was a dream or not? And when is Miss Gulch coming back to take Toto to be put down?

"Bonnie and Clyde" (1967) Then what?

"Some Like It Hot" (1959) Was Tony Curtis really Cary Grant? Was Jack Lemmon a man or a woman? I don't get it.

(This post is set entirely in Sarcastica Regular.)

(tip: Sarah Palin)

Fight Club at Ten: A Love Story

2009-11-19T03:23:22Z

Ten years after its release, there are still plenty of people who will not get David Fincher's "Fight Club" because they refuse to see what is in front of their eyes. They think it's about a cult of men who get together to punch each other, which is like saying "Citizen Kane" is about a sled. Fundamentally, it's an uncannily accurate depiction of depression and delusion -- capturing a uniquely (post-?)modern strain of anomie to which perhaps older baby boomers and their seniors find it difficult to connect because it's beyond their frame of reference. (I don't know -- that's just a hunch.)

"People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture," "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk told Dennis Lim recently in the New York Times:

Some older audiences prefer darker material in conventional forms; they "really truly want nothing more than to watch Hilary Swank strive and suffer and eventually die -- beaten to a pulp, riddled with cancer, or smashed in a plane crash."

In that Times piece, Lim dubbed "Fight Club" "the defining cult movie of our time."

Back in 1999, I described it as "a grim fairy tale for adults, a consumerist revenge fantasy, a portrait of a disintegrating personality, and, for all its hyper-active stylization, an astonishingly vivid portrait of the berserk materialist wasteland in which (like it or not) billions of city dwellers live today." (It can also be seen, in retrospect, as a prescient 9/11 nightmare.)

]]> Also from Lim's article:

"The critical reaction was polarized," said Edward Norton, who plays the film's nameless narrator, "but the negative half of that was as vituperative as anything I've ever been a part of."

In one of the more apoplectic slams, Rex Reed, writing in The New York Observer, called it "a film without a single redeeming quality, which may have to find its audience in hell." More than one critic condemned the movie as an incitement to violence; several likened it to fascist propaganda. ("It resurrects the Führer principle," one British critic declared.) On her talk show an appalled Rosie O'Donnell implored viewers not to see the movie and, for good measure, gave away its big twist.

And director David Fincher picked up on something I noticed when the film was first released: that "women picked up on the humor faster." Perhaps they understood certain inherent ironies about male behavior (or consumer capitalism?) that were too close to some men for them to see themselves. (Not unlike "Jack" and Tyler.)

It's amazing to think that a movie that dive-bombed at the box office, that Hollywood executives found so threatening some considered it unreleasable,¹ that so many critics beat up so viciously (the subject of my article here could be considered such an important and influential film only ten years later.

My take on the movie is condensed into a few minutes in the above clip. I see it as a classic romantic comedy, a late-20th-century love story in the anarchic spirit of "Brining Up Baby."² To quote Lim's piece again:

Reached by e-mail, [novelist Chuck] Palahniuk went further and called the film "the best date flick ever." "The 'Fight Club' generation is the first generation to whom sex and death seem synonymous," he said, pointing out that the "meet-cute" between the characters played by Mr. Norton and Helena Bonham Carter occurs in a support group for the terminally ill. Having grown up with an awareness of AIDS, younger readers and viewers, he added, "could identify with the implied marriage of sex and death; and once that fear was acknowledged those people could move forward and risk finding romantic love."

Or as Norton himself pithily observed in the DVD commentary, it's the story of a guy who had to destroy the world so he could have a relationship with a woman. Does modern love require anything less?

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. The one above was originally published here.)

* * * *

¹ From producer Art Linson's book, "What Just Happened?: Bitter Hollywood Tales from the Front Line":

What I hadn't anticipated was the dramatic response from those who were uncomfortable with it. They almost wanted to punish those responsible for this "heinous" act. I remember a couple months after the picture was released, I ran into Robbie Friedman, a high-ranking executive at Paramount Pictures, and a friend of mine. All he could do was shake his head.

"How could you," he asked.

"Huh?"

I was about to start with "Don't blame us producers, we're just the monkeys that do th dishes," or better yet, the more confrontational approach, "You stupid bastard, it's a brilliant movie and anyways, you must admit it's darkly funny," but by that time I'd already been down that road too many times.

² One film ends with the lovers holding hands and the collapse of a dinosaur skeleton, the death of the male protagonist's past life. The newer film ends with the lovers holding hands and the collapse of skyscraper skeletons, the death of the male protagonist's past life.

"Fight Club" has just been released in a 10th Anniversary "You Are Not Special" Edition:

Let's fix those "ambiguous" endings, shall we?

2009-11-18T23:59:31Z

Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained what is supposedly "ambiguous" about the ending of "No Country for Old Men," which has one of the most exquisitely judged denouements in movie history. ("A Serious Man," too.) So, what is it, precisely, that some folks need explained or resolved for them? The smartly funny video above imagines what would happen if "The Wrestler," "Lost in Translation," "NCFOM," "The Graduate" and "The Sopranos" gave the literal-minded exactly what they desire.

Happy 5th B-day, Sergio Leone and the Infield Fly Rule!

2009-11-18T23:01:32Z

Stop by one of the most-loved movie blogs on the Intertubes and give Dennis your best! Several of us already have, as you can see when you get there...

Helvetica is the movie font

2009-11-18T22:39:27Z

See more ("Up in the Air," "Little Miss Sunshine," "Madea Goes to Jail") at The Auteurs, where Adrian Curry writes:

Two of my favorite posters of recent years, those for "Margot at the Wedding" (2007) and "Funny Games" U.S. (2008) both used versions of Helvetica to great effect. "Margot" used a stylish Neue Helvetica Thin in pink, with the actors' names in the same size and type as the title, while "Funny Games" uses an unusually small point size for a movie poster title to great effect.

See "Why the Helvetica is Trajan the movie font?" from 2007.

Blow-up: Selling Sarah's shorts

2009-11-18T00:20:43Z

Remember last Independence Day when the (then-) governor of Alaska posed for a (psychologically) revealing photo spread in Runner's World Magazine? (Check out the whole photo spread series.) Back then, I posted the photo at right, which has now been recycled as the cover photo for this week's Newsweek magazine,¹ causing a ruckus. Sarah Palin, promoting the book ghostwritten with Lynn Vincent, posted on Facebook last night that she does not approve of the photo's re-use:

[The] profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness -- a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention -- even if out of context.

It's so true. The darned media will just do just about anything to get attention, won't they? I mean, they practically bend over and show off their babies, they're so desperate for publicity! Last July, I was struck by the provocative red-white-and-blue overtones in this particular photo, and proposed "a fun exercise in critical thinking and visual interpretation." The carefully arranged, iconic image, I wrote:

]]> represents a veritable firecracker-explosion of patriotic and political symbolism. (Likewise the use of familiar props in this photo and this one.) Given Palin's views and background, how would you interpret it?

The responses were intriguing. I suggested that if, say, Michelle Obama (or, for that matter, John McCain) had posed in the same outfit for such a photo, she/he would be criticized for showing such disrespect for the flag. What do you see in the photo? What are the messages it conveys about its subject? Do they change now that Palin has quit her job, is marketing a book, and the photo is on the cover of Newsweek?² Let me know what you see, and what you think about it.

Me, I've said all along that I see Sarah Palin as the most hilarious thing in American ~~politics~~ popular culture since, maybe, Billy Carter -- leaving Dan Quayle, Fanne Foxe, Monica Lewinski and Sanjaya (wasn't he a political figure?) eating her dust. She's another, funnier-than-usual reminder (as if we needed one) that our taste for ~~political~~ spectacle has not evolved far beyond circus barkers and freak shows. I wish Robert Altman were alive to see this. It feeds back into "Nashville," "Tanner '88," "Buffalo Bill"... This absurdly venal character seems to have walked right out of Altman's lifelong movie.

* * * *

¹ Runner's World has published the following explanation: "Runner's World did not provide Newsweek with the image. Instead, it was provided to Newsweek by the photographer's stock agency, without Runner's World's knowledge or permission."

² Newsweek's official response to Palin's charges of "sexism" (wait -- who posed for these pictures when she was in office?) was: "We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard." Better yet, does the image convey what she is saying. The answer to that is irrefutably "yes."

Has Sarah Palin ever uttered a single coherent thought that an adult could take seriously? That's the amazing thing: The answer is unequivocally "no."

The original photo, by Brian Adams:

Star Trek 2009: Pieces of flare! (Rescued, restored)

2009-11-17T23:19:17Z

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published here.)

Rescued, restored: My best of 2008

2009-11-17T05:14:58Z

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published ,here.)

The arrival of The Prisoner, then and now: "We Want Information!"

2009-11-13T04:42:44Z

AMC's re-do of the classic British TV series "The Prisoner" gets under way Sunday night, following the conclusion of "Mad Men"'s third season last week. The new version stars Jim Caviezel as Number Six and Ian McKellen as Number Two. (The great Leo McKern played Number Two a couple times in the original series, and there were some other repeats as I recall, but generally there was a new Number Two each week.)

From the teasers it appears that the new version (tagline: "You Only Think You're Free") takes place in a desert suburb of Dubai rather than a quaint seaside village. (Actually, the new "Prisoner" was shot in Cape Town, South Africa, and Swakopmund, Namibia.) The big white bouncy billowy security devices are back. But I'm most interested in the opening credits sequence, because I became so enamored with the ritualistic nature of the earlier one, as you can see from the following obsessive video analysis originally published in 2008:

(Rescued and reposted months after the death of iKlipz caused all my video essays to disappear from the web. Originally published -- with more on "The Prisoner" here.)

Hey, Mr. Fox: Who's the audience? Who cares?

2009-11-13T02:24:15Z

Without making a big deal of it, New York Times critic A.O. Scott slyly slips several sharp observations about the role of movie critics into this paragraph from his review of "The Fantastic Mr. Fox":

Is it is a movie for children? This inevitable question depends on the assumption that children have uniform tastes and expectations. How can that be? And besides, the point of everything [director Wes] Anderson has ever done is that truth and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth arguing about. Not everyone will like "Fantastic Mr. Fox"; and if everyone did it, would not be nearly as interesting as it is. There are some children -- some people -- who will embrace it with a special, strange intensity, as if it had been made for them alone.

]]> Those words could well have been written about Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers' "Where the Wild Things Are" a few weeks ago. And, in between "Wild Things" and "Mr. Fox," Scott published an interesting piece about what constitutes a "movie for children." He writes of sitting at the back of a theater showing "Wild Things":

The film had just opened to reviews that ranged from grouchy to ecstatic, and to quite a bit of hand wringing about its dark, sad, scary or otherwise non-child-appropriate content. There was a lot of speculation too about the size, composition and receptivity of the audience. Would children embrace it? Would adults be scared off? Who was this movie -- so melancholy in its whimsy, so rueful in its sentiment -- really meant for?

The answer, I believe, is probably more the concern of the studio marketing and accounting departments than of the critic. Of course it's wise for a reviewer writing for a general readership to address the consumer-report question of whether, in his/her judgement, the movie is addressing the same audience as, say, a beloved children's book. (Kids don't read reviews, but parents sometimes do.) But in terms of criticism, as Scott suggests, that observation ought to form the germ of a possible discussion about one aspect of the movie, not the Final Word.

Which brings up another question: How far can a critic responsibly go in claiming to speak for a by-no-means-homogeneous hypothetical audience (kids of a certain age? horror fans? animation aficionados? Jerry Lewis appreciators?) to which he¹ does or does not belong? Is it really desirable for a critic to offer an opinion -- based on a hunch or an educated guess -- about what persons in some other vaguely defined group will make of a particular picture? What's the point? I'd rather the critic speak for himself, tell me what he saw, not pretend to speak for me or anyone else. (Isn't that the definition of "presumptuous"?)² It's one thing for a critic to say "I rate this highly" or "I recommend this." But it's crossing the line to say "You should see (or not see) this." (To quote Principal Poop's heckler in "High School Madness": ""That's metaphysically absurd, man, how can I know what you hear?")

To me, a critic who makes explicit judgements he is not qualified to make is sidestepping his real responsibility. Don't come out and tell me you think I should "see it," "rent it," "wait for cable," "picket the theater" or "run away." I can make those decisions for myself. Just tell me about your experience, what you observed and what you make of it. (And, speaking as somebody who writes about movies, don't ask me to tell you if a movie is right for your kids. You live with them. I don't.)

It may seem pretty obvious to say, as AOS does, that "not everyone will like" a certain movie -- but he does so in the context of his "Mr. Fox" review to make a point similar to one Mark Harris wrote about a couple weeks ago ("Want to Start a Fight?"):

Anyone who has ever liked a film that most people hated has learned the hard way that it's much easier to tear a movie apart than to patiently explain why you loved it to people who didn't; you can end up feeling mocked and belittled just because a film touched you. And anyone who has ever hated a movie that everyone else liked knows the unpleasant sensation of being glowered at as if only some deficiency in your brain, heart, or soul could have prevented you from grabbing a seat on the Happy Train. We're about to begin the long march through Oscar season, a period that I fear will, this year, provide too few argument-starting films. When they come along, we should count ourselves lucky -- and I'm tempted to say we should play nice, except that such a bland little homily could not be less in the spirit of "Where the Wild Things Are." So instead I'll say, go wild! Have the fight, and encourage everybody else to have the fight too, or Hollywood will continue on its dull path of making nothing worth fighting over.

So, um, has anybody read the reviews for "Precious Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire"? I've only dabbled, trying to avoid reading very much in advance, but the thing won Sundance last January and now that it's being rolled out across the country (to boffo b.o. last weekend), I haven't been able to notice that certain kinds of critical hysteria are building. More on that later...

* * * *

¹ or she

Is it time for best movies of the decade already?

2009-11-12T07:23:54Z

Yes it is, I'm afraid. Or almost. Good grief, I know, it's not even Thanksgiving yet and they've already got the festive "Best Of" decorations up in the stores! And I know lots of critics who've been told by their editors to start working on their big '00s lists -- so, reluctantly, I've begun to ponder mine, as well. I haven't even taken a first stab at it but I can tell you this: It will probably not resemble the Top 100 list published a few days ago in the Times of London. Oh, sure, I can conceive of putting together some kind of list that includes "Crash" (#98), "Bowling for Columbine" (#77), "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" (#28), "Slumdog Millionaire" (#6) and the like -- but such a ranking would not be comprised of movies that I hold in high esteem. (Have any of the decades' movies plummeted in reputation more dramatically than "Columbine" and "Crash"?)

If you want to page through the Times' list, you can go ahead and start here. It's not all so bad. Meanwhile, here are the top 20 -- with links to things I've written about some of the titles:

]]> 1) "Caché" (Michael Haneke, 2005)
2) "The Bourne Supremacy" / "The Bourne Ultimatum" (Paul Greengrass, 2004 / 2007)
3) "No Country For Old Men" (Joel and Ethan Coen, 2007)
4) "Grizzly Man" (Werner Herzog, 2005)
5) "Team America: World Police" (Trey Parker, 2004)
6) "Slumdog Millionaire" (Danny Boyle, 2008)
7) "The Last King of Scotland" (Kevin Macdonald, 2006)
8) "Casino Royale" (Martin Campbell, 2006)
9) "The Queen" (Stephen Frears, 2006)
10) "Hunger" (Steve McQueen, 2008)
11) "Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" (Larry Charles, 2006)
12) "The Lives of Others" (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, 2006)
13) "This Is England" (Shane Meadows, 2007)
14) "4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days" (Cristian Mungiu, 2007)
15) "Downfall" (Oliver Hirschbiegel, 2004)
16) "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (Michel Gondry, 2004)
17) "Brokeback Mountain" (Ang Lee, 2005)
18) "Let the Right One In" (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
19) "United 93" (Paul Greengrass, 2006)
20) "Donnie Darko" (Richard Kelly, 2001)

PLUS: The Telegraph's "Decade-defining" 100 list here. ("Fahrenheit 9/11" is their top pick, followed by "Brokeback Mountain," "The Incredibles," "There Will Be Blood," "LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring," "Memento," "Borat," "Amores Perros," "Passion of the Christ," "Slumdog Millionaire"...)

Rescued, reposted: Best films of 2007: The movie

2009-11-11T23:15:35Z

WGA strike / Antonioni edition. (No dialog, no actors except the quick mug shots of Dylan personae from "I'm Not There.")

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published here.)

Veteran's Day: The skin beneath the uniform

2009-11-11T06:54:50Z

"When in uniform I have to be the exact same as everyone else, I need to look exactly like them."
-- a soldier in "Tattooed Under Fire"

As a person of ink (and I'm not just referring to the stuff that runs through my newspaperman veins, but to my eight tattoos -- so far), I know how intimately tattoos can project images of who you are (or were at the time of the tattooing) from the inside out. And how they conversely shape your identity through the incorporation of symbols, literally internalizing them under your skin. My tattoos are me, as much as any other part of my mind or body. They are physical memories, ideas made flesh. Beginning Wednesday (11/11/09), Veteran's Day, PBS stations will be showing a documentary about Fort Hood soldiers and their skin art called "Tattooed Under Fire." I haven't seen it in advance (my TiVo is set to record it tonight), but Mary Elizabeth Williams wrote at Salon.com just a few days ago:

"This is Fort Hood, and it goes on for miles and miles and miles." Director Nancy Schiesari's riveting documentary, "Tattooed Under Fire," about the River City parlor in Killeen, Texas, and the soldiers who patronize it, was already being hailed as one of the great unreleased films of the year when it finally got picked up to air this month on PBS. But in a grim piece of poetic timing, suddenly the world is looking to understand how the largest military base in the country could become the site of one its worst mass murders, an attack that left 13 dead and 30 injured.

Trailer and showtimes after the jump...

]]>

Click here to find out when "Tattooed Under Fire" is airing (on PBS stations) in your vicinity.

Jason Reitman's question pie

2009-11-11T02:21:19Z

Now engaged in a marathon publicity junket for his new film "Up in the Air," director Jason Reitman ("Juno," "Thank You For Smoking") has been flying around the country doing interviews. Lots of interviews. Gang-bang interviews (as they are known in the trade) and one-on-ones. Through the magic of Twitter, he published two pie charts listing the most-asked questions. (Thought experiment: Imagine being asked the same questions over and over for days or weeks and answering them so that you sound like you care what you're saying.)

Roger Ebert has posted his questions here. After the jump: The 11-20 most-asked questions, and my own Venn diagram!

]]>

(via @JasonReitman, @ebertchicago)

Barry Levinson on how to handle criticism

2009-11-10T23:52:46Z

In a reply to what he feels is a misleading (nay, delusional) review of his essay film "Poliwood" by New York Times TV critic Alessandra Stanley, Barry Levinson offers this sound advice:

To reiterate, criticism is a part of a filmmaker's journey. Any time you attempt to tackle a subject that is complicated, one is open to criticism. It comes with the territory. A WARNING: to any thin-skinned filmmaker, get out of this line of work quickly or you'll die a hemophiliac. But when one's work is used as fodder for a critic such as Ms. Stanley, then I feel I must speak up... and throw caution to the wind. [...]

The New York Times is known throughout the world as one of the leading newspapers in this country. It has excellent film criticism and book reviews. And a very strong op-ed page. Where Ms. Stanley fits into this strong lineup is questionable at best.

As a filmmaker, all you can expect is for your work to be examined for what it is....