The TV Addict 

10. Don’t Look Now
The final scenes of DON’T LOOK BACK culminate in a series of events that one can immediately and instinctively sense are building to something horribly tragic, but we can’t do anything about it, nor can we look away. There’s a frightening inevitability to it all (aided by Donald Sutherland’s eerie prophetic vision), a sense that everything that has happened in the film has just been one domino bumping into another until the final one falls. That final domino, of course, being the demise of Sutherland, whose guilt and grief over the death of his daughter unexpectedly leads him to his shocking death.

9. The Descent (Original Ending)
All of her friends dead, we watch as Sarah (Shauna MacDonald) finally succeed in finding her way out of the cave full of creepy monsters. She makes it to her car and drives off. Just as we think she’s home-free, there’s a flash of a bloodied friend left behind in the cave, and suddenly we cut back to the cave. Sarah never left. It was all a dream that finally broke her sanity. We’re left with her hallucinating the presence of her dead daughter, muttering to herself while the darkness closes in around her, the distant cries of the creatures echoing across the walls. Will she killed by them, or become one of them? Who knows.

8. Old Boy
The main character finds out that he was manipulated to willfully (but unknowingly) commit incest with his own daughter. When he finds this out, he begs like a dog, then cuts his tongue out and offers it to the orchestrator of this horrific mess as a symbol of the silence he wishes him to keep. It goes on from there, but really, do you need anything more than that to justify the placement of this film on the list?

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Though bleak endings have long had their occasional place in cinema, it seems like lately a fair amount of film endings are taking a turn for the darker. So to “celebrate” that fact, I tapped into my inner nihilist, dusted away the cobwebs in my film memory, and tried to recall the movie endings that knocked the happiness right out of me, leaving me emotionally gutted and staring dumb-founded and in complete disbelief at the screen as the credits rolled.

Needless to say, there is a degree of subjectivity in terms of what one finds depressing and bleak, so inevitably you may think there are better choices, or a different order required, or even films not listed here that I haven’t seen but deserve a spot. So, as always, feel free to post your own lists or additions below and let me know what y’all think.

Of course, HUGE SPOILERS AHEAD (!!!!!), so if you haven’t seen any of these films, you should do your best to look away if you don’t want their endings ruined.

15. Layer Cake
As will become clear throughout most of the list, a lot of times the quickest way to achieve a bleak film ending is to simply kill or severely wound one or several main characters. In the case of LAYER CAKE, this approach works so well because as our hero is walking down the steps of a swanky country club, grinning at his own cleverness and perseverance (and we’re grinning right with him), he gets unexpectedly shot in the stomach. As he lies bleeding on the stairs, his eyes turn towards us, almost asking us the question we’re asking ourselves but can’t answer: will he live or die?

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Following the sheer excitement the recent WALL-E trailer generated in me, I found myself wondering what my favorite Pixar films are. So, I let my mind take me back to all eight of Pixar’s feature-length films and decided to order them in terms of my preference. It was no easy task, given that all of their films are excellent, leaving some choices really up to personal preference. Regardless, below you’ll find what I came up with.

More importantly though, be sure to post your own ranking of Pixar’s films below.

8. CARS
Something was just missing from this one. The story wasn’t very fresh or exciting, the characters (except for Mater) were just not quintessentially Pixar, and the film just seemed to be missing the big heart we’ve come to expect from Pixar. Personally, I think a big part of it was the fact that it’s hard to get much emotional expression of out of windshields functioning as eyes. The only thing I really adored about this film was this.

7. A BUG’S LIFE
I know this has always been an early favorite in Pixar’s canon, but it’s just never done much for me. Yes, it’s a great little underdog story, with a classic case of humorous mistaken identity (via the circus performers), but what was at stake just never seemed dramatic enough for me to become invested in the story and shed my indifference.

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Love Actually
For some reason – based on entries so far, and others to come –a lot of my romantic moments seem to involve unrequited love or tragically doomed love. I suppose it’s partially because, in its own way, unrequited and doomed love could be argued to be the purest forms of love, precisely because they are never fully realized. They burn all the more fierce for it. The sweetness and power of unrequited love is obviously on display here in Mark’s entirely silent declaration of his love via note cards for no other reason than at Christmas time one tells the truth, and without expecting any reciprocation what so ever.

Once
I enjoy this sequence so much because I think it’s one of the sweetest metaphors for a blossoming relationship. That may represent a lack of creativity on my part, but that’s a discussion for another day. I mean, think about it, what more perfectly represents a relationship better than this? Two people meet, unsure of how they will work together, unable to be in sync or in tune. Delicately they begin to get to know each other, feeling each other out, determining what strengths the other person has, what makes them good and worth being with. As they go along further, they begin to sync in with each other, not just working well together, but improving each other in the process, until they are perfectly harmonizing, and – to elicit a corny turn of phrase – making beautiful music together.

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In honor of Valentine’s Day, the “holiday” that makes significant others prove their love by paying inordinate amounts of money, and makes single people depressed out of their minds by being constantly reminded of what they don’t have, I thought I’d sit back and embarrassingly expose myself for the gooey, hopeless romantic that I am by recounting my own personal favorite romantic movie moments.

Of course given that I’ve only seen so many films, and that other people have different opinions than my own, please feel free and post away about what your own favorite romantic movie moments are. In the mean time, here are my own in alphabetical order (I was too lazy to number them).

P.S.: Before you bombard me with me complaints that The Notebook or The Way We Were are not on this list, bear in mind that I haven’t actually seen it. That being said, you may now proceed to bombard me with complaints that I haven’t seen The Notebook or The Way We Were.

Amélie
After waiting the entire film for our lovely, adorable heroine to get together with the object of her affection, we don’t get your clichéd grand declaration of love, followed by a slobbery tonsil-hockey kiss accompanied with a rousing score. Instead, we get not a word spoken, not a note of music played, just Amélie’s and Nino’s delicate, sweet, soft, deep and passionate kisses. Probably the most romantic, sexiest kissing scene I’ve ever seen. Turns my heart into putty every time.

Beauty and the Beast (1991)
It’s perhaps odd to have a Disney movie on this list, but honestly, have you watched this scene? It’s not just the fact that scene elicits that old adage “if you love someone, set them free,” but takes it further in that the Beast is willing to give up the only chance he’ll ever have to restore his humanity for the sake of Belle’s happiness and what matters most to her: her father. Why does the Beast do this? Because, as he whispers at the end with what little energy his broken heart can muster, he loves her. Who knew what scary looking gigantic monster could teach us a thing or two about love?

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