Warning, spoiler alert! Truly awful movie endings.

I've sat through a lot of awful movies. (not to name names, but Swimfan anyone?) But what bugs me the most is sitting through an amazing, or even decent, movie, only to be mindraped at the end by a truly awful ending.

Examples? 30 Days of Night, American History X, The Life Before Her Eyes, Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, Grease 2. (Actually, Grease 2 was a pretty horrible movie to start with, but it's luau-themed ending deserved a dis-honorable mention.)

30 Days of Night:
As far as vampire movies go, this one was actually ok at the beginning. Torched cellphones, mutilated wolves, and thirty days of pitch darkness in the lonely reaches of Alaska? Bring it on. Even when the sickly pale and hollow-eyed things (I had to go on Wikipedia afterwards to find out they were actually supposed to be vampires) burst onto the scene, I was still cruising along (mostly to stare at Josh Hartnett * angels sing *), when the girl ruins everything.

I believe her name's Stella, and she's the estranged wife of Hartnett's character, Eben. She runs like a toad and subsequently gets trapped under a truck, and risks freezing to death. Granted, she does have a little girl with her as well who she's trying to save, but that doesn't give her an excuse to have survived twenty-nine days from the vampires just to get stuck under a truck. Eben, being the good person he is, decides to save her. He injects himself with vampire blood and goes to take out the evil vampires, creating a distraction long enough for Stella and the little girl to stumble their way to the safe house.

The fight scene is ok, with a super-vamped Eben punching a hole through the vampire leader's head (super-vampy-cool), but just when you thought everything was going to be ok, the sun comes up, the remaining vampires run away, and HARTNETT/EBEN disintegrates.

WHAT?

Yeah. He DISINTEGRATES.

I spent two hours of my life just to watch the only reason I even started watching the movie radially cremate. Needless to say, I was not pleased.

American History X:
This was a tough film to watch. Anyone who's seen Fight Club knows that Edward Norton only picks the good roles. In Down in the Valley, he was a pedophile/psychopath. In American History X, he plays a reformed skinhead. We the audience get flashbacks of his white supremacist, Nazi-saluting days, then his present-day jail happenings.

We are shown his crime, his pathetic jail sentence, his falling-in with "neo-Nazis", his falling-out with them, his subsequent rape by them, his healing process (both physically and mentally), and his relationship with the black jailmate who later becomes, his friend. There's a lot more to this gut-searching film, but the basic jist is that Norton is a reformed man when he gets out.

His little brother, on the other hand, has been sucked into Norton's past life. His brother's a blatant skinhead, and he antagonizes a black classmate. Stuff happens, Norton manages to make a dent in his brother's racism, and they both tear down the posters and Hitler flags on the walls of their room.

Everything seems to make a turn for the better. But life doesn't happen that way, and neither does the film. His brother goes to school one day, and is shot by the equally young black classmate.

It's a torturous, very real film. In real life, emotions don't magically go away overnight. People do change, but people also don't. The sad, awful truth was that a lot of the anger and bigotry and racism that these kids felt were passed on from their surroundings. The black student kills because precedents indicate that Norton's brother will. Norton's brother resorts to his life because that's what his older brother, Norton, did. Norton did because of his anger. Grown-up figures in Norton's life abused that anger, and taught him to direct it racially.

There was hope in this film, when Norton emerged from jail anger-free. But life doesn't work that way. The ending of the film reflected it.

Instead of being labeled "a truly awful ending", I think the better appellation would be "a truly real ending to a tough, amazing movie that Cindy's happy-ending-moviegoing self refused to accept."

The Life Before Her Eyes:
I didn't understand this movie at all. I think that it attempted to dramatize the events surrounding a Columbine-like school shooting, but instead of respectfully retelling the tragic event, it cannibalized it. I kept waiting for the ending to clear the confusion up, but it never happened. The ending was more confusing, and I had to Wikipedia it afterwards.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back:
Han Solo gets frozen in carbonite. 'nuff said.

CRUSHING. ABSOLUTELY CRUSHING.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

This is why I don't watch football.

Be kind, rewind, s'il vous plaît.

Angst, Teens, and Perfect Blogging. Bonus points if you understand the reference! haha so corny

I enjoy good things: books that are written well, music that bursts into tiny fireworks, movies that make me laugh (or more often cry), food that smells as good as it looks as good as it tastes, people that drift about my memories, etc. A piece of writing, let's say a blog post, that rushes off the page, would fit in this category as well.

Which is why five years ago (timecheck?), I subscribed to a stranger's Xanga.

Sooo embarrassing. and creeper. But hear me out.

The Xanga was typical teenage angst...but bumped up to a diabolical "iwanttofuckingpissonthisshitcalled life" kind of mania. Its author alternated between angry rants about his trashy mother to little condescending games with the readers. Scroll down! He said, and after ten scrolls of white space, at the very bottom of the page was a few choice words for whatever sucker was stupid enough to do it. His layout was from kickgrass.whatever (net? com? I dunremember), and his vocabulary consisted mainly of four letter words bolded, capitalized, and repeated.

I thought all of it was totally badass.

It took me a while to subscribe. I remember sitting in front of the computer...thinking...sucking my thumb...tapping my feet...like this decision was life or death. When I finally clicked the button, I felt a sense of "this is it!" I thought that by subscribing to such a bold explosion of emotion and feeling and...really, bullshit, I could become more like the author and let my own inner headbasher out. Me and the author would become buddies: we would flip off babies and smoke pot behind his trailer and kick dirt at his mom.

A couple of weeks later, when I realized that he wasn't ever going to post anything else, when I myself had stopped posting to Xanga, I stopped going on the website altogether. I had nothing to say so strongly that an impressionable tween would stop, twiddle his thumbs, and anxiously subscribe. Even if I did, I didn't know how to write it.

Happiness is a Warm Puppy

Seriously, no copyright infringement intended. Just a proclamation of my amitié towards Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and swapping heads.

Why yes, I do have a blog.

After posting a few Facebook wall posts and putting up a Youtube video in my earlier, frivolously careless days, I've come to realize that things posted to the Internet are really, forever lost and exposed. The comments you make on a OMG! picture. The websites you delete off your history feed. The gchats, the uploaded pictures, etc. All roam free in this very public domain.

I've not had anything bite me in the butt yet. But I'm paranoid.

After restricting my Facebook privacy stats to Alcatraz standards, I proceeded to try to delete my Gaia account (which, to the chagrin of my awful, lazier side, will take longer than the click of a button).

And that's where I stopped to think. Registration is often mandatory to access the better portions of websites, and I've done it so many times now that I'm sure that anyone with access to these registrations could compile a tidy summary of my "private" exploits. It doesn't matter that I've not always entered the correct zip code or last name: my email ties me to all of them.

So unless I have a sudden change of heart and go "Into the Wild", I'm linked forever to my very public Internet life. The ubiquity of this scares me, but empowers me as well. Because where better to promote whatever image you want to promote than the Internet? On this massive web of liens and links, a con artist can become a deviantARTISTE, a graying senator can become an Argentinian hunk of love, a bird enthusiast can become an Anglophilic-rapper...and a girl can become a blogger. How riche.