I saw the film Broken Flowers at the weekend, and I was really confused by the ending. It was as if they just got fed up or the budget ran out or something. They just leave the guy there standing in the road with the camera panning round him, very nice but I want to know what happened about all the stuff you spent the whole movie building up to!

Anyone else have this problem? Or with other films?

That's the new Jim Jarjarbinksmush film isn't it? He is notorious for not concluding his stories. Don't worry, you didn't miss anything, he just didn't bother giving it an ending. I think the idea is a critique of narrative, but it really just makes for irritating films.

I watched Gosford Park on a plane going to America. The credits started rolling and I still didn't have a clue what the plot was supposed to be about. I don't think a plane is a very good place to try and watch a period drama! That said, I only watched it because everything else I was interested in had finished so I probably wasn't in a very receptive frame of mind due to generally finding period dramas intensely boring. Still, that's the only film I can remember not understanding what had happened at the end.

On the Dodgeball DVD in the extra's section there's an alternate ending, if you listen to the commentary it turns out to be the original ending which was scrapped because the test audience didn't like the way it ended. Basically the bad guys won, the director was saying how he felt it was the "artisically correct" way to end the film and he even quit he felt so strongly about it. There's even a quite funny bit at the end of the credits where Ben Stiller's (now obese) character bitching about what's wrong with the American cinema, not being able to handle and complexity...he then dances to the Milkshake song with his big fake man boobs...go figure.

In any case, I might have missed something there, but since when was a Ben Stiller movie about art?

Ha! I loved the endings of dogeball. I so wanted the good guys to loose. Even if they did have the guy from Serenity as a pirate. Yarr!

You think those endings were weird? Watch the final episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion. You watch all the series up until then. Got it so far? Got all the plot twists and nuances?

Right.

Now through all that out of the window. Do it. Wipe your memory and start again because everything that has come before no longer makes any sense.

It's like the guy who created suddenly decided that life no longer has any meaning and is trying to make your brain ooze out of your ear.

Infact I think he WAS suicidal at the time.

Never watch it while drunk or stoned or it. will. break. you.

Two movies that should have been good, A.I. and Millenium Man were both terrible because they had no real ending, they just, went on for too long then didn't really give you the feeling of any ending.

A.I. wasn't quite as bad as I expected it to be. The soppy ending was a bit contrived but I liked the way it was set up.

Now, the TV series Twin Peaks, that was a really mean way to end things!

When I went to see the last Star Wars I wasnt really expecting a great movie, in fact, I was expecting a horrible one. It was alright.... had the potential for some sort of good comments about.... till Luke/Darth screamed "Nooooooooooooooooooooooo!"

I was laughing for the next week

The Tim Burton remake of Planet of the Apes had a similar effect on my friends and I. It was doing just about okay until the last twenty minutes when it lurched from an okay ending to a bad one, to a really bad one, to an abysmal one. We were all doing very badly at stopping ourselves from laughing very hard through the last ten or fifteen minutes. I personally couldn't contain a burst of laughter when the monkey landed. In the mode of Comicbook Guy: Worst. Remake. Ever.

You and my brother might get along fairly well, as long as you stuck to talking about how horrible Planet of the Apes was. Every time I talk about a Tim Burton movie he stares at me and says "No you will not go see that!" and I say "Yes I will! Why wouldnt I?" "Tim Burton." "Yes, he's awesome" "Planet. Of. The. Apes." And to that I can never reply because I was a youngin' when I saw the remake and never got around to watching it when I could acctually follow a plot....

My brother is never going to forgive Tim Burton for screwing that one up.

Well, he has a fair point there, but Burton has made some of the most interesting Hollywood movies of the last twenty years so I'll forgive him... Just. How could he possibly have screwed it up so badly? I guess that's what happens when an arthouse-mentality director gets put in charge of a blockbuster. I just hope it was studio interference.

Return of the King was the exact opposite. It felt as though there were five or six endings, and some of them faded to black in between. Lots of people got out of their seats for the many endings and then had to sit down when I saw it in the theater. It's still a great movie, but that was funny.

Yeah, the last half an hour was just dragging it out. And to top it all off it was full of crying hobbits. Crying hobbits. Is there anything more annoying than crying hobbits?

STRAWBERRIES AND CREAM, MR FRODO! STRAWBERRIES AND CREAM!

Yeah, I laughed at the strawberries and cream bit a little at the theater and it gets funnier every time I see it. It's all sentimental the first few times and then some bits of it seem hilarious on the fourth viewing. Every time my friends are together and all the hobbits are laughing and crying with on the bed after Frodo wakes up, we all start yelling "Hobbit threesome!" It's not very mature and we scared someone's parents with it, but it's just become our silly little tradition. The LOTR movies are usually the only things we can all agree to watch, so we've seen them quite a lot.
Gollum chanting gibberish in that filthy loincloth is more annoying than the crying hobbits, but not by much. Does anyone else think that Frodo looks very womanish when he's smiling just before he gets on the ship at the end?
To get back to the topic, 2001: A Space Odyssey never really had a coherent ending and I couldn't understand the plot at all. It just seemed like a massive drug-induced hallucination to me.

That was the big failing of the film - the ending only makes sense if you've read the book. It seems like Kubrick and Clarke really didn't consider that some people watching it might not have read it...