REPO MAN (1984)



Mike18xx, the nice fellah who posted the clip above, notes in his YouTube comments that “Seeing the ending won’t actually ‘spoil’ the film if you haven’t seen it before,” which is absolutely true. The plot of Alex Cox’s first, best film (involving aliens, car thieves, secret government shenanigans and the search for a very special 1964 Chevy Malibu -- what Mike18xx rightly calls the best McGuffin in film history) isn’t nearly as important as the overall vibe, a pleasant reminder of a more innocent pop culture moment when punk and indie weren’t just corporate flavors and Emilio Estevez was actually kinda badass (although, judging by a recent feud unwittingly instigated by our own Scott Von Doviak, it seems both Cox and the Mighty Duck still have at least a little piss left in their vinegar). Plus, like all the best endings, Repo Man features an effective curtain call of characters and themes, as well as a memorable epigraph for my own particular hipster doofus generation: “The life of a repo man is always intense.” (AO)

ZABRISKIE POINT (1970)



Love him or hate him -- and there are plenty of cinephiles in both camps -- it’s hard to deny that nobody could end a movie quite like Michelangelo Antonioni. With plenty of wonderful conclusions in his work, it was hard to confine ourselves to just one Antonioni film (or even two, as we ended up doing), but ultimately we couldn’t possibly overlook the finale of this, his most critically-savaged work. Taken as a whole, Zabriskie Point is a scattershot vision of late-sixties America -- sometimes visionary, sometimes ponderous, often both. But even if you aren’t a fan of the movie, the ending packs a wallop. Sure, it’s somewhat obvious what Antonioni’s up to here, blowing up a gaudy “modern” house that has intruded on the natural majesty of the desert, even showing the explosion from multiple angles for extra emphasis. But it’s how he does it that turns the scene from sledgehammer symbolism to transcendent cinema (besides, this is relatively subtle compared to Antonioni’s other proposed ending, which involved an airplane writing “Fuck You, America” across the sky). As Antonioni shifts the film into some of the slowest slow-motion the cinema has ever seen in order to capture the explosions in exhaustive detail, he manages to exact his cinematic revenge on consumer culture -- watch as he blows up a television, a refrigerator, even a loaf of Wonder Bread -- while simultaneously transforming the destruction into something beautiful, with an assist from a modified version of Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe, Eugene.”  For lack of a better phrase, it’s pure cinema. And if that’s not good enough for you, there’s the notion that even a director as art-damaged as Antonioni knows sometimes his hardened audiences just want to watch stuff blow up real good. (PC)

PLANET OF THE APES (1968) & BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970)



Sorry to ruin it for you, but the planet of the apes? It was Earth all along! Charlton Heston sure feels silly now. But not as silly as he’ll feel when he finds himself the prisoner of underground mutants in the sequel. Now he’s really had enough, and it’s hard to blame him for overreacting. I’ve told this story before, but one more time before they turn out the lights: Having had quite enough of talking apes and telepathic mole-people, Heston unleashes a mighty cry of "You bloody bastards!" and plunges onto the detonator with his dying breath. And you can pry it from his cold, dead hands, if you can find them, which you can't because, indeed, the planet explodes. Or as the abrupt final line of narration has it: "In one of the countless billions of galaxies in the universe, lies a medium-sized star, and one of its satellites, a green and insignificant planet, is now dead." Hey, thanks for coming to the show, ladies and gentlemen! Drive home safely! It's an ending that provokes laughter in your modern sophisticated audience, much to the bafflement of a gentleman who was sitting behind me at a revival house screening some years ago. "I dunno what everyone's laughing at," he muttered. "It's gonna happen." (SVD)

WEEKEND (1967)



By the end of the ‘60s, it was clear to everyone that Jean-Luc Godard was through fucking around. He was using cinema less as a means of communication and more as a weapon, but how deadly serious he was about deploying that weapon didn’t become clear until the final scenes of his dizzying film Weekend. The circumstances are brutal enough; the bourgeois couple we’ve followed throughout the film, cheated of their inheritance, resort to murder and end up in cahoots with a pack of radical revolutionaries with a taste for human flesh. But throughout Weekend, Godard was operating on a higher level: it’s full of meta-reference, and the director makes no bones about his characters being tuned into their own artificiality at every juncture. He planned it not as a mere statement, but as a command: this art form, he said, is dead; leave the theatre not to discuss it, but to seize and tear down. It was a powerful message, and a prescient one a year before Paris exploded into a nearly miraculous revolution. But even in that atmosphere, only Godard would have had the balls to give Weekend its famous ending: a simple title card reading “END OF CINEMA/END OF WORLD.” (LP)

THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY (1966)



Spaghetti Westerns, particularly Leone's, aren't concerned with Western realism, but the myth of the West, which they blow up like Greco-Roman gods. This might be the most iconic and expressionist movie ending outside of, y'know, German Expressionism. The clip above starts after Tuco and Blondie find the graveyard, with the camera spinning through the graves as Tuco races through the rows, looking for the right name. Then Blondie forces him to dig. Angel Eyes appears and there's the first double-cross: the grave Tuco is digging up has bones rather than money in it. The Mexican standoff. The second and third double-cross: Tuco's gun is empty and Blondie didn't write anything on the rock. Tuco digs at the right grave, but as soon as he strikes the gold, there's the fourth double-cross: Blondie has hung a noose over his head while he was working. The camera stays with Tuco as Blondie rides away, and we all watch him disappear, thinking, "wait, that one is The Good?" But he returns and frees Tuco, calling back to an earlier scene of camaraderie between them. It sounds like a story from The Odyssey even as I describe it here. If there had been such a thing as a Mexican standoff when Homer was writing, I'm certain that Odysseus would have found himself at one point of the triangle, one step ahead of the others. (HC)

Click Here For Part One, Two, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven & Twelve

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Hayden Childs