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?

The Thin Red Line (1998)

Based on the James Jones novel of the same name, this film depicting the Marine assault on Guadalcanal in 1942 is wonderful....

Up until the last hour.

Really, while director Terrence Malick is a cinematic genius, casting himself as the wily Captain Smith was the wrong choice. Seemingly in every frame during the last half of the movie, Malick shoves aside such veteran actors as Nick Nolte and Sean Penn to occupy the center of the action.

The trend continues in the most recent DVD special edition. Malick talks on five separate commentary tracks, striking in that he literally doesn't say the name of any other person involved in the production. Twenty hours worth of press interviews are also included, in which the director goes into great detail about his early life, including a game by game description of his career as a Little League pitcher.

Malick is famous for keeping his home phone number public and inviting anyone who "wants to just shoot the breeze" to call him up at random. Sadly, at some point, the director will have to learn to let his art do the talking and stop being so publicity mad.

Auto Focus (2002)

This otherwise excellent biopic on the notorious life of Hogan's Heros star Bob Crane shows how an ending coming out of left field totally derails a movie.

Ten minutes before the final credits, after Crane has been discovered to have been beaten to death in an Arizona hotel room, director Paul Schrader moves heaven and earth to link the homicide to former public school teacher Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch). There are a lot of confusing references to lakes and astrology signs, as well as a lengthy monologue about an unseen "painting party" that the star supposedly attended in 1962.

Who knows? Maybe the fault lies with the source material, the biography by Robert Graysmith. Still the last bit, where the wisecracking San Francisco detective and the nerdy cartoonist brandish some strange looking watch as final proof of their theory (I couldn't bear to rewatch to get the name) is simply too much.

Salt (2010)

An adaption gone totally wrong. Somewhere, Marc Kurlansky is weeping tears of bitter frustration...