Jeff Wells

What films released over the last three or four years have had great endings? Maybe a few have and maybe none have — I’m asking. Nothing’s coming to mind but then again I’m packing and distracted. I’m driving to New Jersey tomorrow afternoon and flying to London late Saturday night — a 21-hour stopover enroute to Nice.

In the meantime, consider some all-timers that I posted on 2.22.21 — a truly terrible time in the history of this country…Covid, woke terror, widespread outrage in the wake of the 1.6 MAGA riot…three and one-third years ago:

The best endings are those in which the main characters are finally stuck with themselves and they know it…stuck with the yield of their hustling and bustling…left to ponder who they are deep down and to contemplate the terms “just desserts” and “fair shake”…alone with themselves (even if they’re a couple), facing an uncertain future, throwing their hands up, half-laughing and half-crying about their big scheme that didn’t work out, or because it did but led them to an unexpected place. Desire, deception and discovery.

Great endings, in short, are about acceptance of and submission to fate or dumb luck or, if you will, God’s grand plan. We got what we deserved, and we’ve only ourselves to blame.

The last five minutes of Only Angels Have Wings is one of the greatest ever, hands down.

The finale of Michael Ritchie‘s The Candidate sticks the landing.

The last shot of The Godfather, Part II — Michael Corleone engulfed by solitude and shadows — is a perfect finish.

A nominally “satisfying” ending in which good triumphs over evil but at the same time doesn’t really resonate and could even be called mediocre? The last two minutes of On The Waterfront.

The ending of Thelma and Louise is fatalistic romantic crap.

Another ending that doesn’t quite get it? The last shot of Stanley Kubrick‘s 2001: A Space Odyssey in which Keir Dullea‘s infant star child is gazing down upon earth. Also Sprach Zarathrusta tells you it’s an ending, but try to imagine it “working” without music.

On the other hand the ending of Kubrick’s The Killing is damn near perfect; ditto the ending of A Clockwork Orange — “I was cured, all right!” and therefore a healthy psychopath again!

Anyone will tell you how much they love the ending of Barry Lyndon, but it’s not how the movie ends as much as the aptness of the epiloque (“…they are all equal now”).

The best ending of an otherwise mediocre film? The long shadow at the conclusion of Nicholas Ray‘s King of Kings.

Many have praised the last-minute “uh-oh” ending of Mike Nichols‘ The Graduate because the happy ending when Ben and Elaine escape the church ceremony gives way to feelings of uncertainty, loneliness and anxiety. And melancholy is better than ecstasy. They don’t know what to do next. It’s an interesting ending but we all know what happened among audiences, of course. They pretty much ignored the “uh-oh” ending and told all their friends about the good parts, and that’s why The Graduate became a huge hit.

The ending of Planet of the Apes isn’t all that great when you think about it. It hasn’t been set up. The film takes place in areas that look like Nevada and SoCal’s Imperial Valley and Malibu Canyon, and yet we’re supposed to believe that this hilly, desert-like terrain is located somewhere on the East Coast near New York City, hence the fallen Statue of Liberty lying on a beach next to Zuma State Beach cliffs. An “oh, wow” ending that doesn’t make the least bit of geographical sense.

Movies that end with senior characters being burned to death are horrible — wicked sadism for the same of wicked sadism. Midsommar, of course. Both versions of The Wicker Man (’73 and ’06). Ken Russell‘s The Devils. Marlon Brando burned to a crisp at the ending of The Fugitive Kind.

The ending of The Wizard of Oz is perfect — cathartic but truly fulfilling. Ditto the last two minutes of Some Like It Hot.

One of the greatest endings ever? And the best ending of a nourish police thriller ever devised? Hand that trophy to the director and writer of Se7en — David Fincher and Andrew Kevin Walker.

Another great Fincher ending — Mark Zuckerberg + “Baby, You’re A Rich Man”.

One of the worst, most full-of-shit endings ever was delivered by True Romance.

One of the best was created for Eric Von Stroheim‘s Greed.

Billy Wilder delivered five great endings with Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Ace in the Hole, Stalag 17 and One, Two, Three.

I’m not sure if the ending of No Country For Old Men is my all-time favorite or not. Sometimes it is, and at other times I prefer the last shot of A Serious Man.

I gave a respectful thumbs-up to Matt Reeves‘ Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (’14), which opened two months shy of a decade ago. I didn’t love it quite as much as Rupert Wyatt‘s Rise of the Planet of The Apes, which opened 13 years ago but it was a fine, well-crafted, grade-A film as far as it went.

But I felt myself disengaging when Reeves’ War for the Planet of the Apes (’17) came along. The truth is that I got off the boat. And now Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is upon us.

I’m honestly debating whether it’s worth my time to see it later today. The first two were exemplary, but now the bloom is off the rose. I don’t mind the idea of seeing Kingdom, but I really don’t see how it matters one way or the other.

Okay, I’ll prpbably see it later today, mainly because of Freya Allan, the pretty lead actress.

13 years ago I went apeshit Rise of the Planet of The Apes, calling it “the best Apes flick ever made, and that includes the original.

“Rise is sharper, tighter, more emotional…lacking a Statue of Liberty finale, okay, but nonetheless with a ‘better’ story in a sense. And without the perfectly styled, Vidal Sassoon ape coifs that bothered me so in the Charlton Heston original. Not one orangutan had a single hair out of that place in that film, the reason being of course that the prosthetic makeup guys felt more compelled to represent the sartorial values of Beverly Hills, ape-appearance-wise, than the corresponding particulars in a world first imagined by French novelist Pierre Boulle.

“Rise is a gripping, compassionate, well-plotted sci-fi fantasy popcorn film — riveting, amusing at times, state-of-the-art CG, movingly acted by performance-capture guy Andy Serkis, etc. No, I’m not exaggerating. It has excitement, intrigue, humanity, empathy, soul. And the story is primarily an ape POV thing — the human actors are strictly backup, speaking the same kind of rote expository dialogue that James Arness, Joan Weldon and Edmund Gwenn spoke in Them!.

“And don’t listen to guys like Lewis Beale, who earlier this evening called Rise a “fun, not-intellectually-taxing summer entertainment.” C’mon…it’s much better than that! It’s a compassionate look at imprisonment and oppression, and a rousing saga of rebellion and revolution. And it all levitates courtesy of some of the best motion-capture CG I’ve ever seen.

“What could have been just another blah-blah origin story has been turned into a simian Spartacus….or more precisely the first act of Spartacus, which ends with the slaves breaking out of the gladiator school in Capua. That’s precisely how Rise concludes, so to speak.

“James Franco plays a nice-guy genetic scientist — intelligent, tactful, bland — who’s trying to find a cure for Alzheimer’s Disease by performing serum tests on apes. He soon realizes that a serum given to a chimp mother named “Bright Eyes” (remember who had that nickname before?) has been passed along to an orphaned baby chimp named Caesar. The little chimp soon proves to be a major-league achiever and learner. Franco also tries out the serum on his Alzheimer’s-afflicted dad (John Lithgow), and it’s Awakenings all over again. But Ceasar’s passion and curiosity leads to complications and the authorities seize and lock him up.

“This is when the Spartacus stuff kicks in. We’re not going to take this any more, fellow apes, and I’m the one to lead you guys out of this, because I’m smart and ballsy and a good strategic thinker. (Harry Potter costar Tom Felton plays roughly the same part that Charles McGraw played in Spartacus. Or the ‘Fritz’ role that Dwight Frye had in Frankenstein.)

“Franco hooks up with the beautiful Freida Pinto early on, but this is of no consequence as she has no extended dialogue scenes of any kind. As always, she’s very pretty. She obviously has to do more that just look great if she’s going to last. Her best chance at showing what she’s got will probably come with Michael Winterbottom‘s Trishna, an Indian-set adaptation of Thomas Hardy‘s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

“The apes are the soul and the spirit of the film. They’re fascinating, fully-emotional and fully-dimensional characters. Much of Rise is non-verbal, and appropriately so. Serkis, I should add, tends to over-emote at times. The facial expressions he gives to the young Ceasar — the lead ape protagonist — are just a tad too expressive for my taste, a wee bit too “actor”-ish. But I’ll probably be in the minority on this issue.”

…Glenn Powell, youngish but no spring chicken, is going to have to star in a movie that isn’t mechanized, prefabricated, power-pumped, big-studio bullshit.

No, I still haven’t seen Richard Linklater‘s Hit Man (Netflix, 6.7), which began screening eight months ago and still hasn’t opened.

You can’t just spew jizz-whizz all the time. Every now and then it’s really necessary to put some nutrition into the cereal bowl.

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And what happened to the sideburns?

When Elvis Presley died in August 1977, John Lennon was famously quoted as saying “Elvis died when he went into the army in ’58.” While it’s arguably true that Presley’s peak years were from ’55 to ’58 (a four-year run), Lennon unfairly dismissed Presley’s televised comeback special, which aired on 12.3.68. He reclaimed his essence that night.

“Retuuurn to sinduhh!”

It was reported this morning by Iranian cinema journalist Mansour Jahani that Mohammad Rasoulof, director of the forthcoming Cannes competition selection The Seed of the Sacred Fig, has been sentenced by the 29th branch of the Islamic Revolution Court of Iran to eight years in the slam.

Rasoulof (Manuscripts Don’t Burn, A Man of Integrity, There Is No Evil) will also be whipped, fined and have his property confiscated.

Babak Paknia, Rasoulof’s attorney, originally reported this on X. This ruling was recently confirmed in the 36th branch of the Court of Appeals. The case has been sent to enforcement.

Sacred Fig summary: “Iman, an investigating judge in the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, grapples with mistrust and paranoia as nationwide political protests intensify and his gun mysteriously disappears.”

HE to Rasoulof: Blow this pop stand, move to Paris, live in glorious exile. Don’t give those fuckers eight years of your life.

Posted on 3.15.18 — six years and change…feels like a lifetime ago…

Greg Berlanti‘s Love, Simon (20th Century Fox, 3.16) is definitely somewhat decent — an antiseptic, intensely suburban gay teen romance that’s also about coming out. It’s the first big-screen adaptation of a YA novel (Becky Albertalli‘s “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda”) that I’ve actually half-liked, and it is kind of a big cultural deal that Fox is releasing a gentle, emotionally pliant, same-sex love story in 2400 theatres.**

Love, Simon is smartly written (the screenplay authors are This Is Us showrunners Isaac Aptaker and Elizabeth Berger) and straight-friendly, but — here come the caveats — it feels like a professional sell-job. Like an advertisement for the way things ought to be in Young Gay Utopia. It feels too tidy, too TV-realm, too “produced” and not, you know, laid-back enough. (Like Call Me By Your Name, say — a totally settled, unforced vibe flick from start to finish.)

But Simon‘s heart and head are in the right places, and it’s a whole lot better than Kelly Craig‘s The Edge of Seventeen, which struck me as vaguely similar and which I hated with a passion when I saw it a couple of years ago.

Amiable, mild-mannered Simon (Nick Robinson) is a closeted high school senior living with his parents (Josh Duhamel, Jennifer Garner) and younger sister (Talitha Bateman) in a well-tended Atlanta suburb. But the realm is essentially a blend of Disney World and a 21st Century update of John Hughes Land — an affluent, multi-cultural, progressive-minded hamlet where almost everyone (except for one appalling sociopath, played by Logan Miller, who causes all the trouble) is cool about everything.

Although his parents and friends are fair-minded and accepting of whatever, Simon has decided to wait until college to announce that he’s gay. But then he falls into this anonymous online chat with another gay guy — a local kid who calls himself Blue. The movie is partly about guessing who Blue might be. It’s also about Miller’s batshit-insane character, Martin, who discovers Simon’s flirtation with Blue and uses this knowledge to blackmail him into helping him get together with one of Simon’s close friends (i.e., a girl). I was saying to myself “if this was Goodfellas Martin would get an ice pick in the back of the neck.”

Simon suspects (and we are led to presume) that Blue might be one of three guys — all good looking, one of a POC persuasion and the other two Caucasian, one dark-haired and one semi-blonde. They all seem like good candidates, but I was a bit disappointed when the real Blue was revealed. (Not my choice.) Simon, however, is ready to roll with all of these guys. He’ll fuck anyone or anything.

Want a better, less conventional ending? Simon is really attracted to A, vaguely attracted to B and not that attracted to C, and then Blue turns out to be C. And Simon says, “Aaah…okay…life is unfair. But it’s nice to know ya, brah. I like what you have to say.” And they become good friends.

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…who won’t stop saying, “Okay, so Trump cheated on his Eastern European trophy wife by fucking Stormy Daniels…that’s who Trump is, what he does, total animal…so what?

To the people trying to compare this Stormy Daniels case to Bill Clinton, you’re way off base.

This wasn’t about sex.
It’s not about hush money.
It’s about election interference, plain and simple, the same thing trump accuses everyone of.

Great explanation here. pic.twitter.com/Cxgr6KEupl

— BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ (@mmpadellan) May 7, 2024

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I’ve been saying this for years, but Zoomers are such a drag. Many of us revel in our loathing for them. The world has become a grimmer, more intimidating, far less beautiful and enjoyable place since Generation Z came of age. Not all of them, just the ayeholes.

I’m not saying all Zoomers are “bad” people, but a huge percentage seem like joyless mutants…a generation of fanatical Strelnikovs and DEI obsessives…identity politics, non-binary, ghastly clothing, trans obsesssions, they/them, cisgender, out of shape or obese, puberty blockers, gender dysphoria, hating on J. K. Rowling, identity music, sexual abstinence….if we were living in ancient Roman times and I was a king-shit emperor, I would feed these jokers to the lions in the Colisseum.

Just watch this Echo Chamberlain essay — “Gen Z: The Worst Generation.” It’s totally spot-on.

That said, Greta Scacchi (now 64) was (ahem) a formidable erotic presence when she costarred in Presumed Innocent…smokin’! And Harrison Ford was a decent, principled man with an erection, decades away from becoming Uncle Festus (white beard, avuncular vibe).