Musings On Five Great Movie Endings

1. Better Off Dead
Despite coming up with a long list of Max Fishers and Veronica Sawyers, my all-time favorite high school protagonist is still John Cusack's Lane Meyer. Getting dumped in high school is enough to make one alienated and cynical. But getting dumped for Roy Stalin (for the record, probably the greatest high school antagonist ever!) is plenty to make a guy feel suicidal. We all love these movies for their happy endings. But this one leaves us with Lane and his french girlfriend driving the coolest camaro imaginable into an oblivion of cars on a California freeway (see also 'Valley Girl'), a make out session on home plate at Dodger Stadium, and a rocketship ride of 80's new wave heaven in the form of The Wildest Dream's 'With One Look' (which, incidentally, climaxes with the indoor launching of an actual rocket ship). This will forever be remembered as the quintessential "dreams can come true" ending for downtrodden, adolescent-stricken cynics out there.
2.In The Mood For Love
Wong Kar Wai is the king of making repetition a form of cinematic hypnosis. Maybe the best example of this comes with his use of the same aching, squeeze-the-life-out-of-the-strings song that permeates throughout his 2000 masterpiece. Time is a central theme throughout all of his films and here he uses the same score to mark how it changes these peoples' lives and how they're affecting each other. In a move of subtle brilliance, he saves the only other piece until the tail end of the film, to show us how time has broken this man's heart.
It is now four years after Mr. Chow has been betrayed by his wife and rejected by the woman he found solace in. Maybe to show us the enormous and ever-changing world around him, Wong Kar Wai opens the end segment with a french television clip of the then-president arriving in Cambodia to hundreds of thousands of it's welcoming subjects. This suddenly gives way to the silent ruins of Angkor Wat where Mr. Chow is staring into one of great temple's walls. As he leans his mouth into a hole there, we are flooded with a melancholy, cello-based piece that plays over tracking shots of the temple walls. Maybe these crumbling, ancient walls are like the feelings and secrets he's finally purging himself of: remnants of a time he can neither go back to or let go of. Whatever Wong Kar Wai is trying to say about Mr. Chow's buried secrets and the place he's burying them in, the waltz-like score and tracking shots of the temple are an epic curtain close to a beautiful fim.
3. Heat
'Heat' is a near three-hour epic that proudly boasted the first-ever, and highly anticipated on-screen rivalry between Al Pacino and Robert DeNiro. This is already hard to live up to without a notable cast and a script based on actual events. But director Michael Mann more than lives up to his ambitions here as he delivers a definitive picture of the cops and robbers genre. His brilliance is how he manages to insinuate us into the lives of the players on both sides of the law; cross-cutting us back and forth so that we feel what everyone has to lose and question what they have to gain.
The ending (maybe my favorite of all time) leaves all the other players behind and just gives us the final, bare-bones showdown between the two leads. After all the surveillance, car chases, and automatic weapons gunfire; the hunt is reduced to a footchase through the back lots and runways of LAX which ends in a runway field power station. The finale is loaded with iconic imagery: Pacino shuffling thorough the weeds of the airport runway field, gun drawn, the twinkling lights of the airport in the background; the pair holding hands in a symbolic show of sportsmanship; and that last shot of the pair as the runway lights buzz behind them. The only thing that could have made the scene possibly better would be to consider that there would be no way we would hear the gunshots over the roar of jet engines a few yards above them. But as soon as Moby's 'God Moving Over The Face The Waters' fades in, we know this is finally the end and are mourning the demise of our protagonist. It takes a lot for a film and its lead to make us side with a cold, calculating criminal; but that's why DeNiro (in maybe his last great performance) is DeNiro. The ending borrows heavily from 'Bullitt'. But 'Bullit' didn't have a fraction of the intelligence and its overall feel wasn't nearly as profound.
4. Sixteen Candles
The main criteria for any teenage, romantic comedy is a happy ending. I dare you to come up with an example to the contrary. John Hughes was a master of this. Whether it was Judd Nelson's fist in 'The Breakfast Club' or John Candy's face in 'Planes, Trains and Automobiles', the warm feelings in his films always felt warmest with what he left us with. I think the best example of this would be 'Sixteen Candles'. There's never any need to doubt that Sam and Jake are going to end up together somehow, but Hughes was hip enough to make it as romantic and cool as possible. Standing solemnly on the steps outside the church where her sister was just (drunkenly) married, our hero suddenly appears leaning against his porsche across the street. The masterstroke: the second he comes into view, The Thompson Twins's 'If You Were Here' kicks in. Jake Ryan is so smooth here that he convinces Sam to ditch her sister's reception to come help him clean up his trashed house. I'm not sure if this will foreshadow their relationship in the future, but the last image of the two of them kissing over the birthday cake, sitting cross-legged on top of his dining table always feels like one of the great last shots in a movie ever.
5. Donnie Darko
This one is an example of perfect music - perfect score. perfect soundtrack. Amazingly, the Tears For Fears cover of 'Mad World' worked. Michael Andrews's quivering, Michael Stipe-y voice fit beautifully into the lush, piano-driven cover that plays over Richard Kelly's ending montage. Here he imagines every 'teen-angst' ridden youths' "they'll all be sorry when I'm dead" daydream as we see the aftermath of Donnie's demise. But all the music gets left behind for the tail end.
Riding past the scene, Gretchen learns of Donnie's death from a young neighbor. Though she never knew him in this 'new world', she's can't stop staring at the scene and feels compelled to wave at his grief-stricken mother. She waves back, in moment of unexplained recognition; and we're left quietly feeling the effects of our protagonist's time travel.

Redemption Song

I felt I was destined to walk out of the theater after the first five minutes of 'Juno'. Like Quentin Tarantino before him, Wes Anderson's following and praise have only been matched by a sleiu of imitators. Some good. Some bad. The formula is simple:
High school outsiders who are faced with an obstacle/goal to overcome/achieve, from which they will learn a lesson on the hardships of growing up.
Ambiguous clothing make dating the period difficult/fun ("timeless")
Quirky, pop soundtrack
Non-sequitors
Funny, colorful background characters
"Cool" adults are there to guide them in their lesson learning. Sometimes by making mistakes of their own.
'Juno' opens with a rather rock-looking teenage girl drinking a ginormous jug of Sunny Delight (which I guess, in my absence, has officially been renamed the popular nickname - Sunny D) and staring at a comfy looking recliner that is mysteriously placed on the lawn. After a deadpan silence, we're met with a deadpan narrator: 'It all started with a chair. This is the most beautiful furniture set I've ever seen". The movie begins. The next scene finds our protagonist, Juno, at the local corner store to buy yet another home pregnancy test. Though Rainn Wilson (maybe my favorite comic character actor out there today) is the cruel checkout clerk, the scene is so loaded with rhyming jokes that it's hard to feel the film isn't trying too hard to come of as "Wes Anderson-hip" as it makes a cool/odd goof of a 16-year old girl discovering she's pregnant. And when we meet the father-to-be, he's wearing a running suit that - you guessed it - could've come straight out of the '70's.
Luckily, I stayed. For all of it's quirky-hip familiarities, 'Juno' eventually starts to feel natural. The pop score is paced and unfamiliar enough that it doesn't kill you with coolness or accompanying montages . We're not bombarded with non-sequitors that try too hard to make the movie feel offbeat. And 'Juno' hosts an ace up its sleeve in the form of Ellen Page. As our protagonist, she carries the film with almost endless grace. It's safe to say that just about all teenage girls would be devastated by learning they're pregnant. But Page makes Juno's roll-with-the-punches approach to the situation so much easier to swallow. Though she occasionally tries too hard to be tough and irreverent, Page still creates a classic teen movie icon.
For all the anticipation of Roe vs. Wade-style lessons, the pregnancy is merely a means to tell a fine tale about growing up; whether it's Juno dealing with the repercussions of her own selfishness or Mark never wanting to let go of his youth. Though we may be getting a little tired of the hip, indie dramedy; it's still a relief to see a movie that can make us smile about the things that force us to grow up.