Happy Endings
Jan. 16th, 2007 02:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forsythI don't really complain about happy endings in movies. Sometimes, I'll complain about lame or "typical Hollywood" endings, when the ending's so out of sync with the rest of the film or its theme or something. But, honestly, I like happy endings. The hero gets their love. The bad guys get caught. What was wrong at the beginning of the movie, or broken along the way, is set right. Or at least right-ish. People can change, even redeem themselves. I like that in my stories. Maybe I'm an optimist, maybe I'm a sheltered American, maybe I'm one of a dozen other things. I don't know. I don't think it matters.
This comes to mind because I just finished watching Sixteen Blocks. It was a good movie, I thought. A lot less action-ey than I'd expected, a lot more suspense. But it was really good. I really liked it. On the DVD, they have an alternate ending, that isn't completely sad, or a complete loss or anything, but I didn't like it as much. I guess in some ways it fit better, since it tied together with the characters initial opinions about whether or not people can change. But by doing that, it undercut what I got as one of the themes of the whole movie, which was that people can change.
But in the end, it was a satisfying movie I'm glad I saw, and it's probably silly of me to be trying to read too many deep themes into an action movie at almost three in the morning.
This comes to mind because I just finished watching Sixteen Blocks. It was a good movie, I thought. A lot less action-ey than I'd expected, a lot more suspense. But it was really good. I really liked it. On the DVD, they have an alternate ending, that isn't completely sad, or a complete loss or anything, but I didn't like it as much. I guess in some ways it fit better, since it tied together with the characters initial opinions about whether or not people can change. But by doing that, it undercut what I got as one of the themes of the whole movie, which was that people can change.
But in the end, it was a satisfying movie I'm glad I saw, and it's probably silly of me to be trying to read too many deep themes into an action movie at almost three in the morning.
