Last Stand

I think that as long as I'm making futile stands against things, I might as well make a futile Gandamak-like stand against alternative endings in movies. Alternative endings used to be pretty rare in movies - the movie was what it was and that was that - but now I see ads for DVDs that gush about having three or four alternative endings. I'm not so sure I like that idea. Let me cite one example.

The movie Clerks isn't really meant for me, I don't think. I find Jay irritating as high-strength ammonia, and even when he isn't in the movie (which isn't nearly long enough, if you ask me) I find the movie mumbly and meaningless. It was recommended to me by someone who was almost my age, so we weren't having a generation divide. Mostly we were having a rum divide, in that he'd consumed most of a bottle of rum and I hadn't. But anyway. Right at the end of the movie some guy comes in, pulls a gun, and shoots Dante (the clerk of title fame) dead in his shoes. And I remember thinking "Wow, that's a bleak and cynical end to a bleak and cynical movie..." And I thought about it no more, until I had a conversation with someone much later about the movie and he assured me that Dante was alive and well and had never been shot.

It turns out there are two distinct endings, and by this gimmick Kevin Smith got me to spend more of my time and mental effort discussing his movie than I had ever intended. And my associate and I had very different impressions of the movie because we'd seen different endings, and in the end we were never able to agree on anything because we couldn't even agree on whether the main character (I guess Dante is the main character) is alive or dead.

I really wish directors would make one ending, the ending that the script or their artistic vision called for, and stopped pandering by filming different endings. It seems dishonest to make different endings designed to appeal to different audiences - one ending for the suburban theater-going set, a different ending for the family-night DVD-viewing set, and a third dark and violent ending for the late-nite DVD-viewing set. The director gets to appease the MPAA while simultaneously titillating the sebaceous fanboys, and I think that's cheating - not that anyone listens to me.

On the other hand, I'm torn on the notion of "director's cuts" of old movies, where a director goes back and re-edits an old movie. They usually say that the re-edit was done to bring the movie more fully into line with the director's original vision, though sometimes I darkly suspect that they re-edit movies just so they can sell a bunch of DVDs... This is different from the practice of making alternative endings because the movie generally retains the same ending as before; what changes is the stuff that lies between the opening credits and the ending. Like the Star Wars movies, where the additions are mostly bad or at least irrelevant CGI additions to the backgrounds and wide shots. Alien had a bit more work done to it, but the overall story didn't change; we just got a chance to see what became of Dallas (and we also lost stuff that I liked, like the dreamily dystopic corridor shots. But the most notable are probably Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings movies, where the extended versions of the movies contain whole scenes and characters that do not occur in the theatrical versions. I think I like that. If I liked the original movie, the chances are that I'm going to like seeing more of it. But I'm torn, just because it's fun to be torn.