Ambiguous movie (and TV) endings resolved.

November 12, 2009 8:43 AM

Ambiguous movie endings resolved. Some jokesters have put together imagined endings to some ambiguous film (and TV) endings. Much funnier and better executed than I expected.
posted by meadowlark lime (49 comments total)

It's ok to say "College Humor" staff instead of some jokesters (which also explains why the technicals are decent).
posted by cyphill at 8:48 AM on November 12, 2009

"College Humor": Funny from 15-30, moronic from 30-40, oxymoronic thereafter.
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 9:04 AM on November 12, 2009 [4 favorites]

Somewhere, Robert McKee is watching this video and saying, "See, I told you so!"
posted by ford and the prefects at 9:04 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

This hypothetically spoiled the endings for me.
posted by brain_drain at 9:09 AM on November 12, 2009

Well, I guess i never have to see The Graduate now.
posted by cmoj at 9:13 AM on November 12, 2009

Hah! Loved the ending to The Graduate, but the fake ending is a who' lot funnier.
posted by heyho at 9:15 AM on November 12, 2009

RHETT

(walks back to the door)

Aw, I can't stay mad at you, Scarlett. We'll talk everything out in the morning.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:18 AM on November 12, 2009 [4 favorites]

I was kind of disappointed they didn't address the ambiguous endings of movies like Top Gun, Saving Private Ryan, and the finale of Friends.


More sleepless nights ahead of me. Sigh.
posted by Atreides at 9:25 AM on November 12, 2009

Wasn't very funny, sorry.
posted by paisley henosis at 9:27 AM on November 12, 2009

Hah. My favorite was the No Country for Old Men one.
posted by Solon and Thanks at 9:30 AM on November 12, 2009

You know, I fucking hated the ending of No Country for Old Men. There, I said it. Just completely wrecked the previous two hours of my life. I hated it with the white-hot passion of a billion burning suns.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 9:33 AM on November 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

Some jokesters have put together imagined endings to some ambiguous film (and TV) endings.

Some jokesters? Are you sure it wasn't Ridley Scott?
posted by brain_drain at 9:38 AM on November 12, 2009

brain_drain: " Are you sure it wasn't Ridley Scott?"

GAFF

(sticks head around corner)

I wanted to let you know before you go on the lam that you're a replicant too. Sorry if the unicorn didn't make that clear. Good luck, Deckard.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:47 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

I also did not care for the ending of No Country for Old Men, and I'm no huge fan of tidy resolutions. For a few seconds I was actually convinced that the projectionist had forgotten the last reel. It just stopped. Not so much an open ending as a sudden absence of film.

The Wrestler's ending irked me because it a) was lame, and b) had that big band of black that forced the audience to sit there in the dark and suffer through Bruce Springsteen's latest grumble.

(I was disappointed not to see the classic 400 Blows freeze-frame lampooned here, but what can you do.)
posted by Sys Rq at 9:49 AM on November 12, 2009

I actually kinda prefer ambiguous endings. Or do I?
posted by davebush at 9:52 AM on November 12, 2009 [12 favorites]

The ending of NCFOM was perfect. Perfect.
posted by Joe Beese at 9:54 AM on November 12, 2009 [10 favorites]

I loved the ending of No Country. Then again, I also liked Ghostbusters 2.
posted by brundlefly at 10:02 AM on November 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

I also did not care for the ending of No Country for Old Men, and I'm no huge fan of tidy resolutions. For a few seconds I was actually convinced that the projectionist had forgotten the last reel. It just stopped. Not so much an open ending as a sudden absence of film.

The Wrestler's ending irked me because it a) was lame, and b) had that big band of black that forced the audience to sit there in the dark and suffer through Bruce Springsteen's latest grumble.

(I was disappointed not to see the classic 400 Blows freeze-frame lampooned here, but what can you do.)
posted by Sys Rq at 9:49 AM on November 12 [+] [!]

-You just were irked by two of the best endings in the last 5 years (Because they perfectly sum up point of the movie, yada, yada, yaday).
-The 400 Blows is one of my favorites too but there's noway that 1% of college humor's audience has seen it.
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 10:04 AM on November 12, 2009

-You just were irked by two of the best endings in the last 5 years (Because they perfectly sum up point of the movie, yada, yada, yaday).

"Sum up," force-feed: same thing, right?

-The 400 Blows is one of my favorites too but there's noway that 1% of college humor's audience has seen it.

God forbid that something with the word College in the title should expose anyone to anything new!
posted by Sys Rq at 10:07 AM on November 12, 2009

Flash Gordon (1980)

(Ming dies impaled by a spaceship, Flash gets the girl, the Hawkmen rock the house, everything is great.)

(Then Ming's power ring lights up; cue Ming's laughter echoing in background.)

Text on-screen: THE END?

(pause)

Text on-screen: ON REFLECTION A SEQUEL IS EXTREMELY UNLIKELY SO HOW ABOUT WE JUST FORGET THAT QUESTION MARK

(power ring dims; cue Ming gasping, death rattle in background)

Text on-screen: THE END.

(Cue credits.)
posted by brain_drain at 10:09 AM on November 12, 2009 [11 favorites]

I was completely enraptured by the ending of No Country for Old Men and my mind was not at all wandering during Tommy Lee Jones' speech and thinking that maybe what I'd like for dinner was a HAMBURGER.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 10:12 AM on November 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

-You just were irked by two of the best endings in the last 5 years (Because they perfectly sum up point of the movie, yada, yada, yaday).

"Sum up," force-feed: same thing, right?

-The 400 Blows is one of my favorites too but there's noway that 1% of college humor's audience has seen it.

God forbid that something with the word College in the title should expose anyone to anything new!
posted by Sys Rq at 10:07 AM on November 12 [+] [!]

Force feed? A joke video on a dumb website should be trying expose kids to something new? ... What? This is the point where I realize I have too much to do today and abstain from further discussion. Good day sir.
posted by Lacking Subtlety at 10:14 AM on November 12, 2009

The end of NCFOM is fantastic, but the absolute best ambiguous ending has to be Broken Flowers. I may have said this here before. So many times I have been watching some movie or other, and they get to this point of delicious resolution, where the character arcs are completed and the world of questions has been opened and you know exactly as much as you need to know about this story and you have nothing but ideas and wide-eyed wonder and I say end right there are I will love this film forever, and then the movie goes on for another twenty minutes so that it can end on some false note of 'everyone got exactly what they deserved all in the same scene isn't that nice' and it's a waste of everyone's time. Broken Flowers ended at precisely the moment that I told it to.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:24 AM on November 12, 2009 [3 favorites]

You know, I fucking hated the ending of No Country for Old Men. There, I said it. Just completely wrecked the previous two hours of my life. I hated it with the white-hot passion of a billion burning suns.

I was catching a bus home when I went to see it, and thought the last scene a little odd. In my bag I had my phone on silent, and had a look for it to see how long I had before the last bus left for home. I'd just put it back in my bag, looked up and the credits started rolling. I thought I'd missed something vital to understanding the ending, so I went again the following night. I so wish I hadn't.
posted by vbfg at 10:27 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

You know, I fucking hated the ending of No Country for Old Men. There, I said it. Just completely wrecked the previous two hours of my life. I hated it with the white-hot passion of a billion burning suns.

The first time I saw NCOM, I hated the ending; walked out of the theatre mad, and felt like it had robbed the first two hours of the movie away from me.

About the same time the next day, I loved the ending, having thought about it and the movie and other possible endings.

The only other movie that's ever had this effect on me was, bizarrely, Mars Attacks!, which I hated while I was watching it and then completely fell in love with 24 hours later after it'd sunk in a little.

The reverse happens a lot more: Drag Me To Hell, for instance, was fun when I was watching it, and I left the theatre thinking it was a good retro horror movie, but it just got stupider and stupider and stupider in the rear-view mirror.
posted by Shepherd at 10:45 AM on November 12, 2009

I don't remember anything significant about the ending to No Country For Old Men. Everything seemed to go as it should. I certainly wasn't expecting some heroic shootout between the sheriff and Chigurh or anything. The car accident out of nowhere was a nice reminder to Chigurh (even if he missed it) that he isn't chaos personified.
posted by ODiV at 10:50 AM on November 12, 2009

I hated the end of INFOCOM. But I loved Zork, so that's obvious.
posted by ooga_booga at 10:57 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Man, if you hated the ending of No Country, wait till you see their new one.
posted by Astro Zombie at 10:59 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Regarding Flash Gordon, I can imagine the meeting now.

Producer #1: So, we're going to do a camp-thing, like the 60's Batman franchise.

Producer #2: Yeah, but how can we get even campier than this script...

Producer #3: I wonder what Freddie Mercury is up to?
posted by mikelieman at 11:10 AM on November 12, 2009

You know what movie had a really ambiguous ending? Return of the King.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 11:14 AM on November 12, 2009 [5 favorites]

Force feed? A joke video on a dumb website should be trying expose kids to something new? ... What?

Eponysterical.
posted by srt19170 at 11:20 AM on November 12, 2009

Neon Genesis Evangelion anyone?
posted by hellojed at 11:23 AM on November 12, 2009

You know what movie had a really ambiguous ending? Return of the King.

I still cry at the "you bow to no one" bit, but holy cow, that movie had way too many endings. And I wouldn't have minded it that much if...

all...

the...

endings...

weren't...

in...

god...

damn...

slowwwwwwwww...

motion.
posted by kmz at 11:23 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

Confessions:

I never made it to the end of Lost in Translation.

I never made it to the theater for The Wrestler or No Country.

I thought that the text false ending above made it unnecessary for me to ever see Flash Gordon (not that I was in any danger).

I am in the demographic that is completely nonplussed by the content of the College Humor site.
posted by beelzbubba at 11:53 AM on November 12, 2009

I am in the demographic that is completely nonplussed by the content of the College Humor site.

You're confused and bewildered by it?
posted by kmz at 11:55 AM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

I'm not gonna bother reading TFA. College Humor, meh. I'm guessing Lost in Translation's whispers are there. If not it's a complete fail. But I don't really want to read their whisper subtitles. I want to read mefi's whisper subtitles. Help me out folks. It's a couple hours til five and I need entertainment to get me through the afternoon. Tell me what Bob Harris whispered in her ear.
posted by Babblesort at 12:07 PM on November 12, 2009

I like ambiguous endings better than standard ones, mainly because they usually leave the film more open to interpretation. One of my least favorite endings was the one for The Machinist, because it took what was a very surreal film and gave it the most simple and unambiguous explanation possible. That's one of the reasons that I like most of David Lynch's films, they tend to give the feeling that there is a puzzle to be solved but that the pieces don't all fit together.
posted by burnmp3s at 12:11 PM on November 12, 2009

Here's digg's whisper subtitles.
posted by ODiV at 12:12 PM on November 12, 2009

Force feed? A joke video on a dumb website should be trying expose kids to something new? ... What? This is the point where I realize I have too much to do today and abstain from further discussion. Good day sir.

See ya.

To clarify my above-stated positions, though: When a terrifically gripping film (or a mediocre, though novel, sob story) ends ambiguously, that's one thing. That's just dandy, in fact. When it instead ends with some old dude (be it Tommy Lee Jones or Bruce Springsteen) flat-out explaining the theme of the film, that is yucky. Yucky, I say! Throw in a cut to black, and it's a bit like someone reading you a story for a couple hours only to give up and walk away just when it's getting good.

Don't get me wrong; they were interesting and notable endings, to be sure. They just happened to also be bloody annoying.

As for exposure to new things: Some of us are fer it, while others, apparently, are agin it. Vive la that.
posted by Sys Rq at 12:18 PM on November 12, 2009

If there isn't a car chase, gunfight or pornography on the screen every three minutes fifteen seconds then my attention ... whatever.
Did the world end in Dr. Strangelove? You don't actually see nukes going off. And where were Bogie and Louis walking off too? And they weren't really in Chinatown at the end of the movie, so what does all that mean? And was Jack Lemmon really not a woman? Was Griffin Mills set up? Was Guido Anselmi a real guy or fictional or what?
posted by Smedleyman at 1:01 PM on November 12, 2009

Did the world end in Dr. Strangelove? You don't actually see nukes going off.

Um, I do if I have my eyes open and pointed at the screen for the last minute of the movie.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:07 PM on November 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

"Um, I do if I have my eyes open and pointed at the screen for the last minute of the movie."
Then it's too subtle.
posted by Smedleyman at 1:27 PM on November 12, 2009 [2 favorites]

I don't want to scroll all the way back up the page, so does anyone remember what movie brundlefly said they liked?
posted by Elmore at 1:28 PM on November 12, 2009

Smedleyman: Did the world end in Dr. Strangelove? You don't actually see nukes going off.

I assume you mean other than the part where there's a huge montage of nukes going off.
posted by shakespeherian at 1:30 PM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

I want to read mefi's whisper subtitles. Help me out folks. It's a couple hours til five and I need entertainment to get me through the afternoon. Tell me what Bob Harris whispered in her ear.

See previous. Plenty of interpretations in there.
posted by dogwalker at 1:54 PM on November 12, 2009

My favorite was when the Starchild eats the earth like a Cheerio.
posted by yeti at 2:12 PM on November 12, 2009

"I assume you mean other than the part where there's a huge montage of nukes going off."
Stock footage. And was that really Earth? We don't see the doomsday device detonated. And how was Dr. Strangelove able to walk? And why wasn't he thrown around by the seismic disturbances from the atomic blasts? Did they make it to the mines? They could have had a car chase with the Russian ambassador into the mines where they duck a huge rolling explosion from the doomsday device and they get away but the ambassador is burned by the shroud. Would have been really, really, really ironic. Big time.
posted by Smedleyman at 2:57 PM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]

It wasn't so much that Return of the King had an ambiguous ending, just that it had so many endings.
posted by bwg at 6:10 PM on November 12, 2009

YouTube makes asking these questions a thing of the past.

A Cubs-White Sox game has been scheduled for 12 March in Las Vegas. In the user comments for the mlb.com announcement, someone asked if anyone knew if March 12th is going to be a Friday.
posted by Stylus Happenstance at 7:58 PM on November 12, 2009 [1 favorite]