Let Me In (2010)

Not to jump on the bandwagon but like everyone else, I thought Let Me In was a fairly poor remake of the original Swedish film. With some adaptations, it’s the story as a whole that get lost or is otherwise a poor execution of it.

However, with this movie, what we got was a sad case of a screenplay being literally badly translated into English… particularly near the end.

No one at the studio can explain why this happened (rumor has it that the work was farmed out to a company in Mumbai) but apparently nobody noticed all through the filming. Or the editing. Or during the several test screenings.

Such inattention led to such gems, such as during the scene when the police detective played by Elias Koteas confronts Owen, the young child who has been protecting his vampire friend:

Detective: More the eater of blood, now gone!?

Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee): Run the west, back and around the rainbow!

Often, the dialogue does not match that of the first screenplay, replaced by sheer gibberish, like in what was surely intended to be a touching scene between the lonely boy and the vampire.

Owen: Hurt, the internal organ that pumps blood throughout the circulatory system, because you lack the people about?

Vampire (Chloe Moretz): Finish this section on Monday.

And of course - not to lay it on - but really, didn’t anyone notice the action inexplicably shifting several reels from the end… from the suburbs of New Mexico to the outskirts of Stockholm?

Sure, movie making is hard. But even when done by mistake, these were several twists too far!

Nowhere Boy (2009)

"Mate," A teenage John Lennon tells his friend Pete Best at the end of this bio-pic. "We're going to be famous. We're going to be rich. And we're going to do it TOGETHER."

Thereupon, John "borrows" twenty pounds from the drummer (which later researchers discover was never repaid) and drives off in his friend's car (which most later researchers record was returned with an almost empty gas tank.)

You know, I like irony too but sometimes you can heap it on too thickly (and cruelly as well.)

Heaven's Gate (1980)

Too short.

Seriously, Mr. Cimino, if you're going to make a sweeping epic about the battle to control the future of the American West, you might not want to truncate the ending. And don't rush the build-up either.

Sure, you reportedly only had 19 days on a Burbank backlot to recreate 1875 Montana but I practically blinked and the film was over.

Dracula (1992)

Not a spectacularly bad ending but I thought tracking Dracula down to the Houses of Parliament in London seemed a bit weird. (Though I live in England and the audience around me loved it, laughing and cheering...)

Julie and Julia (2009)

I usually prefer not to reveal details about my personal life in this blog but this is a special case - one that shows how the concept of a "twist too far" can also apply "off" the silver screen.

I saw this film last year and enjoyed it thoroughly. What a delightful movie! But when the lights came up, my wife of fifteen years turned to me - with a look of staunch resolution on her face -and informed me that she'd been having an affair.

Apparently, seeing Julie and Julia had been the immediate catalyst for her deciding that she "didn't want to live a lie" anymore. In her pursuit of her true self, she moved out, divorced me and sold the movie rights to her own blog (which she had quit her job to write full time, a move that I had fully supported.)

So, while I still have fond members of those two or so hours, which I like to laughingly refer to as my "final minutes of innocence," this was the "shock" ending that pretty much spoiled the whole thing for me.

Eddie and the Cruisers (1983)

After a pretty original screenplay for most of the way, the film turns a little too surreal at the end. I mean, Eddie Wilson (Michael Pare) in Paris, with Ameila Earhart and Jim Morrison?

Even with the foreshadowing early on, it came across as a ripoff of the early Bertolucci.

Inception (2010)

I'm sorry. The rest of the film worked for me except for the end, where Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) frames an innocent man for a crime he didn't commit. I mean, haven't we seen this before?