Scanners

Opening Shots: ‘The Big Animal’

Jim Emerson

View image

I can’t think of another movie that makes me laugh and cry within the course of its opening shot. This is “The Big Animal” (2000), a feature directed by and starring Jerzy Stuhr, based on an early screenplay by Krzysztof Kieslowski. You may know Stuhr from Kieslowski’s first feature, “Camera Buff” (“Amator”), “Three Colors: White,” “Dekalog: 10” (“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods”) and other films by Andrzej Wajda, Krzysztof Zanussi and Angieszka Holland.

View image

This shot could serve as an introduction — perhaps an encapsulation — of a certain Polish sensibility dear to my heart that is both absurd and poignant. It begins in the fog — at least, we think it’s fog, but the way it’s blowing it looks more like smoke. Turns out it is smoke, from a pair of circus vans, and as they move past the camera and roll off into the distance, the right side of the frame clears and… there’s a camel standing there.

View image

Why is there a camel standing there? We don’t know. It appears to have been left behind for some reason. The image is comical, incongruous, absurd. But if you think about it, it’s rather sad. Poor camel. It just stands there. It looks around. It reverses direction. And just at the end of the shot, the two circus trucks in the background appear to be perched on top of its humps. (Camel fanciers will know that this is a Bactrian camel, not an Arabian dromedary, because it has two humps.)

View image

The mild existential shock of this opening image sets us up for the satire — of bureaucracy and toleration of individuality — that is to come. A man and his wife adopt the stray camel. At first, everyone is happy. A camel is a novelty in this village, and it becomes the man’s pride and joy. He is no longer ordinary, but exceptional. He has a camel!

But then man-made socio-political reality begins to set in. How do you license a camel? Surely pets must be licensed, but there is no such thing as a camel license (shades of Monty Python’s fish license sketch). A dog license is not sufficient — possibly even illegal — because, clearly, this creature is not a dog. It’s not a horse, either. But do you need a license for a horse?

And then there are the townspeople, who begin to wonder: “Why should this man get away with breaking the rules for a camel? Who does he think he is? Why does he need to stand out and flaunt his special status? Such things should not be allowed. Or should they not, at least, be properly taxed?”

Kieslowski’s screenplay, from the story “The Camel” by Kazimierz Orlos, was written in 1973 as a fable about life in the Soviet bloc. But the 1994 “Bart Gets an Elephant” episode of “The Simpsons,” where Homer exploits Stampy to pay the mammoth food bills, provides a capitalistic counterpoint. I love this “Big Animal.”

“The Big Animal” is available on DVD from our friends Amy Heller and Dennis Doros at Milestone Film & Video.

[This is a contribution to the Krzysztof Kieslowski Blog-a-Thon at Quiet Bubble.]

The shorter, the longer

Jim Emerson

Dark as night and nearly as long, Christopher Nolan’s new Batman movie feels like a beginning and something of an end. Pitched at the divide between art and industry, poetry and entertainment, it goes darker and deeper than any Hollywood movie of its comic-book kind…

— Manohla Dargis, New York Times

If [Director Christopher Nolan] occasionally stumbles upon an indelible image (aside from… a scene where the two-wheeled Batpod does a wall-assisted 180-degree turnaround gave me giddy shivers) it’s quickly subsumed by his more frequent tendency toward Cusinarted spectacle. The human drama in “Batman Begins” held my attentions, so I wasn’t so much bothered by the fact that its action scenes were murky, bordering on incoherent (this seemed intentional to some degree, even though I think it was, ultimately, a failed artistic choice).

— Keith Uhlich, The House Next Door

Nolan’s direction is so relentless that the climaxes never feel climactic. At the same time, I realize that relentlessness has been the formula for blockbusters since “Star Wars,” or at least “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and these blockbusters keep speeding up. They’ve probably just sped past me. In other words, relentlessness won’t be a problem for 99.9 percent of the audience. It is, in fact, what they came for.

— Erik Lundegaard, MSN.com

If “The Dark Knight” felt too long to you, or even if it didn’t, is it possible that it might have felt shorter if it were longer?

Up With Contempt!

Jim Emerson

Godard is a contemptuous artist, too. Forget “Le Mepris.” Ever see “Weekend”?

We heard a lot in 2006, as we do every year, about nasty filmmakers who were said to have viewed their characters (and, hence, their audiences) with contempt, or who “made fun of” them, or treated them with condescension, or who just don’t seem to like them very much. Across time, such charges have been leveled at Stanley Kubrick, Robert Altman, Christopher Guest, the Coen Bros., Todd Solondz, Sacha Baron Cohen, and many other artists — especially those whose work has tended toward the comic or caricaturish. And then there’s all of film noir to consider, a whole kind of moviemaking that does not view the human animal with kindness or affection.

In answer to specific allegations of of alleged contempt (such as Jonathan Rosenbaum’s characterization of Altman’s attitude toward Lady Pearl in “Nashville”), I have tried to explain why I think such charges are false, or at least misguided. It seems to me, in these cases, that the contempt being expressed is more likely to be that of the critic for the director or film (or reader) than that of the director for the character or the audience (unless we’re talking about a movie by, say, Alan Parker). But it’s impossible (and futile) to argue with a blanket statement like: “The Coens mock everybody. They’re laughing at the audience!” — meaning, of course: “They’re laughing at me!” (please read in the voice of Piper Laurie in “Carrie”). My response is: 1) that’s a rather vague aspersion; 2) if you got the joke you wouldn’t feel like you were being laughed at; and, 3) yeah, it’s true. Many forms of comedy — satire, parody, etc. — contain an element of mockery. Even contempt.

So, I’m here to speak up for contempt! (How very contrarian of me!)

The rich, powerful and pretentious are obvious (and ripe) targets for humor and derision. Their problem is that they’re just people, with flaws like everybody else, only magnified (and made more irritating and dangerous) by their position in society. They deserve to be knocked down a few notches. But you don’t have to be rich, powerful or pretentious to be a hypocrite, or a boor, or a twit, or an oaf, or a cretin. You don’t have to possess great wealth or celebrity or influence to be smug, stupid, petty, ignorant, pathetic, tasteless, crass, callous, crude, or just downright annoying — and, thus, worthy of comic derision. Such people really exist! I’ve seen them with my own eyes! What’s more, I’ve been them!

“Hey, look at those assholes over there. Ordinary f—-in’ people. I hate ’em.”

— Bud (Harry Dean Stanton), “Repo Man” (1984)

“Hell is other people.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, “No Exit” (1944)

I sometimes wonder if those who worry about expressions of contempt for characters (particularly “ordinary people”) in movies have ever had jobs in which they had to deal with the general public. Or have ever attended some kind of party or social function at which they have met some people they would rather not have met. Is this not part of the human experience? Don’t most people have some pretty awful qualities? Why should an artist be expected concentrate on their benign or “sympathetic” traits — or to come up with some kind of artificially “fair and balanced” view of them? Some people’s most interesting characteristic is that they are idiots. Or worse. Did you like “Seinfeld”? Those characters were despicable in every way. Some people thought that was why they were funny.

Is misanthropy not the most universal and understandable of all sins? For all our achievements and evolutionary refinements, we are a pretty damnable species. And, as the only one capable of (and perhaps unwittingly committed to) destroying all life on our own planet, we are also the richest, most powerful and pretentious. Don’t we deserve to have a laugh at ourselves — or, at least, at those idiots right over there?

P.S. I am reminded of the words of Luther Ingram and Mack Rice, as sung by the incomparable Mavis Staples (and, yes, I’m going through one of my periodic obsessive Stax phases, so get used to it):

Keep talkin’ ’bout the president won’t stop air pollution

Put your hand over your mouth when you cough, that’ll help the solution

Mavis means you. And she’s singing in the context of a Christian family gospel/soul group. Good gosh a’mighty, now — even the Staple Singers aren’t afraid to make the average person the butt of an occasional, rather contemptuous, joke. Amen to that.

The Marty Show

Jim Emerson

Martin Scorsese has an Oscar in his hand. It’s his Oscar.

For the first time in 30+ years, Roger Ebert watched the Oscars from home instead of from backstage. He writes about the experience here.

Meanwhile, I spent my Oscar night writing a deadline piece for the Chicago Sun-Times, which had to be filed about 45 minutes before the show was over. Here’s the (unedited) final version for the web:

The cops-and-mobsters thriller “The Departed,” which director Martin Scorsese described as the first movie he’s ever done with a plot, took the jackpot prize at the Academy Awards last night. For Scorsese, this was supposed to be a genre picture, not Oscar-bait like “The Aviator” and “Gangs of New York,” but it turns out that, even at the Oscars, sometimes you can come out ahead when you don’t look like you’re trying so hard.

Even though there were several “surprises” during the ceremonies, it still felt kind of like the Acada-“meh” Awards. Since none of the Best Picture nominees inspired much passion (don’t expect a “Crash”-lash” this year), and none stood out as a Timeless Achievement in Cinema, one winner was pretty much as good as another. And so, the Academy decided to spread the statuettes around.

Of course, the evening’s big disappointment was that Martin Scorsese did not join his fellow great directors — Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang — who never won an Oscar in competition. Instead, he joins Norman Taurog, John G. Avildson and Sam Mendes as one of the immortals whose name will always, from this moment on, be preceded by the term “Academy Award-winning” as if it were a prefix. (I kid.)

Now, future generations can look back at Oscar history and say… “What!?!? The director of “Taxi Driver,” “Raging Bull,” “King of Comedy” and “GoodFellas” won an Oscar for “The Departed”?!? Wasn’t that the inferior American remake of “Infernal Affairs”?” Well, look at it this way: John Ford, famous for great American Westerns like “Stagecoach,” “My Darling Clementine,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” “The Searchers” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” won four Oscars for direction, and not one of them was for a Western.

Rest of story at RogerEbert.com

Snakes on a … zzzzzzz

Jim Emerson

It’s about snakes. On a plane, bitch!

For many months we’ve been hearing about the “brilliant” high-concept of “Snakes on a Plane.” Hey, the whole premise is right there in the title! I guess after “Die Hard on a Plane” (“Die Hard 2”) and “Die Hard on a Boat” (“Under Seige”) and “Die Hard on Another Plane” (“Passenger 57”) and “Die Hard on a Bus” (“Speed”) and “Die Hard on Another Boat” (“Speed 2”) and “Die Hard on an Island” (that would be Manhattan, in “Die Hard with a Vengeance”), they decided “Die Hard on a Plane with Snakes” was just too complicated. So they shortened the title.

Next, we saw the stories about how they went back and shot some additional stuff to get the film an R rating, and to give Samuel L. Jackson the requisite old-school Schwarzenegger-ish punch lines, like: “I want these m—–f–king snakes off this m—–f–king plane!” (Isn’t this the same old joke as Dave Chappelle’s ad for Samuel Jackson beer?)

OK, we recognize the package, and we know exactly what’s in it. Jackson himself told Collider.com: “That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title. You either want to see that, or you don’t.” Well, maybe. It’s not so much that I don’t want to see it. It’s that the movie doesn’t open for two more months and I feel like I already have. I’m with my friend Leonard Maltin on this:

I would never steer anyone away from a movie who’s interested in seeing it; I don’t think that’s the function of a critic or reviewer. I hope people go and make up their own minds.

But I, for one, am already tired of the summer movie blockbuster season, when every film is built up as An Event. Can’t a movie just be a piece of entertainment? “Mission: Impossible III” was well-made and fun to watch, but it’s the cinematic equivalent of fast food: easily digested and just as easily forgotten. “Poseidon” had everything money can buy except characters worth caring about. “The Da Vinci Code” will be much talked-about for a few more days, I expect, and then gradually recede into memory, while really great thrillers like the Hitchcock classics will live on forever.

(To tell the truth, I haven’t much wanted to see “Miiii” or “Poseidon” or “The Da Vinci Code” or “X-Men: The Last Stand” or “The Omen” or “Cars” or “Pirates of the Caribbean: Whatever,” either — in part for the same reason: All are blatantly derivitave products, from other movies or best-selling books or comicbooks, and I felt like I’d already sat through them before they even opened. Don’t tell me these movies are Special Events. They are neither. They’re routine summer product.) Meanwhile, for people who love movies: It’s three more (long) months until the Toronto Film Festival….

Whose story is ‘Flight93’?

Jim Emerson

British filmmaker Paul Greengrass, as I’ve mentioned before, is surely the most accomplished action-thriller director around these days. “Bloody Sunday” and “The Bourne Supremacy” are evidence enough of that. This week, Greengrass’s “United 93,” about the September 11, 2001, flight now commemorated in a Pennsylvania field, opens the Tribeca Film Festival and then moves into theaters.

David Poland, over at “The Hot Blog,” saw the film recently and writes:

Make Popcorn Not Tea

Jim Emerson

Opening Shots: ‘La Femme Infidel’

Jim Emerson

View image

A fairy-tale home in a wooded setting. Two women sit an an outdoor table in the shade of some tall trees. The camera glides across the lawn silently (we can’t hear what they’re saying, just barely audible laughter) at an oblique angle that takes us closer to the women, but not directly toward them. A big black trunk passes startlingly across the screen in the foreground. Then a smaller trunk comes into the shot, mid-distance, and nicely frames the image. That’s all there is to the opening shot (which lasts less than 10 seconds), but to understand the context we have to consider the rest of the brief pre-titles sequence.

View image

The women are looking at photographs, scenes from a marriage. “Wasn’t he thin?” the older woman observes. “That was just before I met him,” says the younger woman. The older woman suggests the man, surely the husband of the younger woman, could stand to exercise more and lose some weight. The younger woman defends him and says he has lost a little. The older woman (we assume she’s the mother of the wife) says she hasn’t noticed. They look at another picture, a new mother holding her baby, and the younger woman remarks: “That was when Michel was born.”

View image

A boy runs into the scene carrying a bouquet of flowers, which he gives to his grandmother. Behind him is a man who walks over and stands behind his wife, resting his hand on her shoulder. A beautiful family tableaux. The sound fades. The image goes out of focus. Roll titles.

Take the Opening Shots Poll!

Jim Emerson

Here are some of the most popular choices we’ve published so far. The top vote-getters from this round will advance to the next! (I had to upgrade this thing — it only gave me 100 “views” a day, which were used up in about 15 minutes. Now we get 2,000 views per day…) Poll after the jump >>

Protect health insurers!

Jim Emerson

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Thomas Lennon: “… and I’m not being sarcastic, not at all.”

After the jump: Bill O’Reilly (really!) endorses the public option:

Ruptures: Three openings/closingsby Claude Chabrol (1930 – 2010)

Jim Emerson

Part 1

Claude Chabrol’s “La Rupture” (1970) begins in what could be a cave, with the quotation: “What utter darkness suddenly surrounds me?” The camera abruptly dollies to the right a short distance and the “cave” is revealed to have been a close-up of the bark of a tree. The movement pulls in a rustic-looking apartment building (which the DVD commentary explains is a fake French farmhouse, a suburban style popular at the time). The lens has been focused on the building in the distance the whole time; the camera has just moved around the obstacle of the old tree to show us what was “hidden” behind it. And that’s what the movie’s about, looking into the darkness beneath middle-class suburban life. This opening is, in its way, a less overtly surrealistic forerunner of the first sequence of David Lynch’s “Blue Velvet,” 16 years later. (Yet there’s still something disturbingly surreal about it, don’t you think?)

Looking at screens

Jim Emerson

What was I thinking?

David Poland sent me this funny picture (of me) that he took during a panel discussion at Roger Ebert’s Overlooked Film Festival in May, called “Not Playing at a Theatre Near You.” It is clear that I was lost in thought. What was I thinking? I’m pretty sure it was either: “How can I get more coffee here right now?” or “We’d better stop fussing about how ‘superior’ the ‘big-screen theatrical experience’ is and just accept the reality that: 1) more people watch more movies on smaller screens (even big HDTV ones) than go to theaters, in part because home screens and sound systems have improved, while audience etiquette and other aspects of the theatrical experience have deteriorated; 2) theatrical exhibition should be seen as a luxury, not a necessity, since economics prevent many of the best movies being made nowadays from getting the wildly expensive full theatrical release treatment; 3) even critics who tout ‘the big-screen experience’ often don’t see movies on big theater screens, or with audiences; they see them in small screening rooms with a handful of other critics, where the screens aren’t appreciably bigger than my 55-inch Sony HDTV — which, from where I sit, is about the size (and clarity) of your average movie screen to someone sitting in the back half of the auditorium; 4) there’s nothing wrong — or necessarily aesthetically inferior — about watching movies on a video screen (particularly a rear-projection one, which uses a xenon lamp not unlike a movie projector) in a comfortable room at home, and DVDs are far superior in quality to most of the beat-up 35mm art house prints and 16mm nontheatrical prints (many of them multi-generational dupes) with which those of us who grew up as cinephiles in the ’60s and ’70s had to content ourselves; 5) there should be nothing shameful about ‘straight-to-DVD’ releases; that’s a perfectly legitimate, and realistic, distribution strategy for the world we live in.”

Yes, I’m pretty sure it was that second thing I was thinking about. Because I seem to recall saying it out loud.

I was reminded of this when I came upon girish’s provocative posting about “Theater vs. Home” at his always-insightful and stimulating blog:

It is of course a happy truism that watching a movie in a theater is the inarguably ideal way to experience it. For a movie-lover, the theater is a sort of temple, and the experience touched with religiosity. You look up in hushed awe at the screen—in contrast, you look down at a TV screen, as Godard once noted—and the darkness dispatches all distraction, leaving only the light and sound emanating from the screen.

And then there’s the enveloping scale of the image, which you can regulate in relative terms by sitting closer or farther away from the screen. Cinephiles often have their favorite rows and vantage points (when I’m alone: usually fourth or fifth row center; when I’m with others: based upon a process of grumbling and negotiation). Most of all, you relinquish control over the movie by submitting to its (unbroken and continuous) terms, accepting its rules of temporality.

And yet, and yet….there’s a part of me that sees this hushed, worshipful submission to the terms dictated by the work of art as….a tad stifling.

TIFF: Woolly Bully

Jim Emerson

Attack of lamb.

The DNA of “Black Sheep,” the New Zealand silly, tepid horror-comedy (accent on the second; it’s not the least bit scary), traces back to “The Howling,” “The Birds,” “Night of the Living Dead” (and “Dawn of the Dead”) and “An American Werewolf in London” — with a spot of Lou Jacobi in “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex….” I don’t know that anybody in America would want to re-make a movie about genetically altered killer sheep (suggested titles: “Mutton Mutants” or “Baaaad Blood”), but I kept imagining what Joe Dante could have done with this premise. Rather, what Joe Dante (“Piranha,” “Gremlins,” “Homecoming,” the aforementioned “The Howling”) already has done with it.

An evil factory-farm sheep rancher named Angus (see, if it was an American movie it would have to be about beef) irresponsibly experiments with genetic engineering on the sheep farm he inherited from his father — mostly so that he can name a new breed of Frankensheep after his family bloodline: The Oldfield. His lamb-o-phobic brother returns to the farm to sell off his half of the business and quickly get as far away from those docile white fluff-pots as he can. Meanwhile, Angus’s horrid — and, as it turns out, rabidly carnivorous — mutant sheep are spread into the general population by a pair of idiotic eco-activists who have no clue about what genetic engineering is. (One: “This isn’t going to be like the salmon farm is it?” Other: “Those fish died free!”)

The Ultimate Review of “The Departed”

Jim Emerson

Bad, bad Jack, feasting on food and scenery.

UPDATE: Revisiting “The Departed.”

Everybody’s saying “The Departed” is Martin Scorsese’s best picture since “Casino” — or even “GoodFellas.” And some of the (over-)praise has struck me as pretty condescending to Scorsese: “Good boy. You stick to your mobsters now, won’t you?” I’ll go out on a limb and say I think it’s his best picture since “The Aviator.”

Adding almost an hour to the running time of “Infernal Affairs,” the film on which it’s based, “The Departed” does indeed fill in some of what one critic called the “ellipses” in the plot of the original film (and opens up at least as many other holes in the process). And yet, as others have also observed, Scorsese’s movies have never been driven by plot but character — and, in “The Departed,” the characters, performances, moral ambiguities, and even the filmmaking prowess itself (all the things we treasure in A Martin Scorsese Picture) are not as rich or developed as those of its 2000 Hong Kong predecessor, much less Scorsese’s own best and most personal work. (And let me add that this is not a knee-jerk response; I’m no big fan of Hong Kong action films. What I liked about “Infernal Affairs” was that there was more going on than in most of the HK crime movies or policiers I’ve seen, which I thought were bursting with empty action and little else.)

I’m going to write more about “The Departed” next week (to continue what I began in my MSN Movies essay, “GoodFellas and BadFellas”, but in the meantime, I’ve patched together some of the critical observations from others that made me go “Yes! That’s it!” — either because I felt the same way, or because they expressed something I hadn’t been able to formulate for myself in my initial thinking about the movie.

Meanwhile, after taking a look at these critical observations, please weigh in with comments of your own. (Just remember, it may take a while for comments to actually show up on the site.)

Coming to a bad end

Jim Emerson

View image The “Searchers” shot from the ending of “War of the Worlds.” Way more sentimental than John Ford’s.

Can a lousy ending really ruin an otherwise good movie? There was a time in Hollywood history when phony “happy endings” were de rigueur. Even if they felt tacked on, audiences understood that they were a convention — and, in many cases, knew not to take them seriously. So, for example, at the end of Nicholas Ray’s “Bigger Than Life” — a terrifying film about a father (James Mason) who goes berzerk with rage and disgust over his suffocatingly “normal” middle-class family life and comes to believe that his young son should be slain — the family is reunited around his hospital bed (oh, it was just too much cortisone!)… while a flashing light blinks ominously, as if telling the audience not to buy the false conclusion.

View image “The Magnificent Ambersons”: This is the happy ending?

Some have argued that the hollow ending shot by Robert Wise for Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons” ruins the movie. I don’t think so. It compromises the film somewhat (and I learned from the Criterion laserdisc how it was supposed to have ended in utter desolation), but those last few moments don’t negate all the true magnificence that has come before, do they? Watch the last shot: As Eugene (Joseph Cotten) narrates a happy ending that has taken place off-screen, he’s walking down the hospital hallway with Fanny (Agnes Moorehead, in maybe the greatest performance ever given by anyone in American movies), they each pass in and out of shadow at different times. He’s telling one story, but we’re hearing it through her. He’s talking about his love for her sister (the love she and her nephew Georgie have sabotaged), and we know Fanny’s always secretly loved Eugene. At the end of the shot, they are no longer even in the same frame. She moves into close-up, the camera pans over to him, then they both briefly enter the frame and pass by the camera into darkness. The whole image goes out of focus briefly as they disappear, and we’re left looking down an empty, sterile hallway with a red cross lamp at center right. If you’re paying any attention to the shot at all, it’s still not much of a happy ending! It’s an epilogue, an afterthought.

Likewise, the head-spinning ending of Fritz Lang’s classic “Woman in the Window” strikes some as contrived, but to me it feels inevitable. In the tradition of noir, a man (Edward G. Robinson) makes one small mistake, one impulsive deviation from his normal path, that leads inexorably to ruin. The movie takes you, step by step, down his road to ruin, until there’s No Way Out. Only then does Lang pull the rug out from under you. What’s important is the experience you’ve been through, not where the movie chooses to stop.

Lesser movies, like “Fatal Attraction,” can be more seriously damaged by studio-imposed endings. The movie is pretty good at balancing your sympathies up until its grotesquely overblown “the family that slays together stays together” slasher finale. You can feel that this wasn’t the way things were meant to go, and the DVD version now contains the original ending that didn’t test well with preview audiences, in which Glenn Close’s character committed suicide and Michael Douglas was arrested for her murder. It was more of a true film noir ending — even though there was still a deus ex machina twist when a taped suicide note is discovered.

More recently, Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” concluded with such a ridiculously upbeat happy-family ending (never mind that the world was pretty much destroyed) that it prompted hails of derisive laughter. (On the other hand, would it have been the mainstream blockbuster it was if it had ended in defeat and despair?) The movie sucked me in so deeply, that even when I started backing out of it (right about when things just miraculously — and arbitrarily — started turning around, about ten minutes from the end), I still believed the first 106 minutes of the movie, even if I rejected the last ten.

I had a similar problem with the ending of “Children of Men,” which (although still ambiguous and in no way assuring the survival of all of mankind) I thought was too sappy and sentimental. The sound of laughing and playing children over the final fade out nearly ruined the whole thing for me, because it was a film of such drive and momentum that I felt it really needed to go somewhere. And it didn’t. It tried to have it both ways — leaving some things unresolved while still leaving the audience with a feeling of optimism — and I didn’t think it worked. (Look for the “Bigger Than Life” blinking beacon in the final shots.) But, again, it didn’t make me feel that the entire experience had been negated.

Off-hand, I can think of one movie with an ending so horribly manipulated that it really did destroy everything that came before, and that’s Roger Donaldson’s “No Way Out” (1987), with Kevin Costner and Gene Hackman. This was a case where I remember feeling that the final “twist” actually did make mincemeat out of the whole picture. When the final piece of information drops into place, nothing that had happened previously made any sense.

What are movies that have been ruined — or nearly ruined– for you by bad endings? What about movies with bad endings that you were willing to overlook because the rest of the movie was so good?