![]() Clarice gets the serial killer Buffalo Bill, but psychopath Hannibal escapes. Rocky loses the fight, but gets the girl and gains self-esteem. Or they get their goal, but lose something else. It’s where the hero doesn’t get their intended goal, but gains something greater. Ironic: Rocky, Toy Story 3, Silence of the Lambs:This is the core of many great endings. And yet a sad or down ending can be like a greek tragedy serving as a cautionary tale like Death of a Salesman (Don’t spend your life climbing the wrong ladder). Sometimes what’s stated is just the hard realities of life, other times leaning toward nihilism (life has no meaning) as director Ingmar Bergam once said,” We are trapped in the senseless illusion of human history and we realize at the end that all hope is gone.” (Often found in art house and foreign films). And in some cases with injustice or evil prevailing. Sad: The Perfect Storm, Chinatown, Buried: Down endings, often where a key protagonist dies. Happy: The Graduate, The Shawshank Redemption, It’s a Wonderful Life: Up endings where the guy gets the girl, there’s freedom in paradise, the shark’s killed, and/or order restored. (Maybe it doesn’t-maybe it’s more an example of a couple false endings.) First let me define what I mean by happy, sad, ironic and ambiguous endings: ![]() It’s the film that came to mind as a film with a mix of endings. In the Robert Zemeckis directed film Cast AwayTom Hanks stars as a Fed Ex executive who becomes a modern-day Robinson Crusoe when a plane crash leaves him stranded on a deserted island. Tarantino pulled it off and walked away with the Oscar for writing Django Unchained. So mixing things up can be good.īut it’s easier to mix genres than endings. Django Unchained is part historical drama, part western, part comedy, part action, part love story-part something else when Tarantino drops in the ’70s Jim Croce song in at a pivotal point in the film which he also directed. Quentin Tarantino’s vast film knowledge may make him the master of cross breeding genres. A good example would be The Rocky Horror Picture Show(1975) -it’s a horror film, a comedy, and a musical. Just as there are cross-genre movies, I believe there are a few movies that have mixed endings.įirst let’s recap the cross or mixed genre angle. ![]() ![]() In yesterday’s post Chaplin on ClichésI mentioned the only four choices to conclude your screenplay were “a happy ending, a sad ending, an ambiguous ending, or an ironic ending.” And while that’s true of probably 99.9% of all films I realized that there is another rarely used option. Two-time Oscar winning screenwriter William Goldman “A good ending must be decisive, set-up, and inevitable-but nonetheless unexpected.” ![]()
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