I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here before, but my sister’s gift for my birthday this year was a VCR/DVD recorder that I could use to transfer my tapes to a more durable, less bulky format (isn’t she a wonderful sibling?).
One side effect of this will be deleting movies that I taped off the air, didn’t like but didn’t want to tape over (i’ve tried that, and sometimes I screw up and tape over something else on the tape that I wanted to keep). And realizing some movies that I thought would be cool to have forever no longer appeal to me.
Which brings me to my tape of Something Wild.
This eighties film starts out delightfully as flaky free spirit Melanie Griffiths seduces respectable married man Jeff Daniels away from his family and job to go on a road trip with her. As the trip goes along, they’re getting more and more interested in each other, but they also discover neither of them has shown their real self—and when they learn more about each other, they’re not sure how to deal.
Nice set-up. But then, midway through the movie, Ray Liotta, as Griffiths’ sociopathic ex, enters the picture and winds up trying to kill them both. And the rest of the movie is an orgy of graphic, bloody violence as he tries, they fight back, they run, he comes after them …
Not only is this completely discordant with the rest of the film (and not in a good Wow, I Didn’t See That Coming! way), and way too bloody for my taste, it’s a cheat ending: Instead of a serious resolution of the relationship, all the problems get brushed aside as they apparently bond in the heat of battle. It’s Michael Meyers as deus ex.
I hate that. I hate movies that set up an interesting conflict and then just duck out with a pseudo resolution that avoids what was supposed to be the core of the story. For example:
•The Paper. One plot thread in this film involves Marisa Tomei worrying that once she has her baby, husband Michael Keaton will be too busy with his job to be the involved father he says he wants to be. The resolution? They have a baby, stand together beaming in the hospital room and … that’s it.
•Victor, Victoria. This film involves Julie Andrews passing herself off as a gay female impersonator in 1920s Paris. She loves the freedom posing as a man gives her, but when she and mobster James Garner becomes lovers, he’s horrified because everyone assumes he’s gay.
The solution? At the end, Andrews simply shows up in a dress sitting next to Garner watching Robert Preston’s comic musical number at the movie’s finish. No explanation how she reached that decision, whether she agonized, whether she’s going to try to carve out more freedom for herself as a woman, nothing.
This latter example, I suspect, falls into the movie reflex of giving female characters career goals, then forgetting about them as soon as they get a man (examples include Swing Shift, How To Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Sweet Home Alabama).

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