Geoffrey Fletcher - 2009 Oscar Winner for Best Adapted Screenplay

The Oscars were held last night and lost amongst the brouhaha of Kathryn Bigelow becoming the first female to win Best Director - and only one of three or five to win best picture - and that for the second time in the history of the awards there was a black man nominated for best director was that a black screenwriter finally broke through to win a screenwriting Oscar.

Good Movie: Terrible Ending

A while back I lamented the overuse of the twist ending and the destructive power it has on films. Instead of filmmakers using artfully crafted twist endings to make their good movies great, now they are simply tacked on to all films – good, bad and ugly – as nothing more than a marketing ploy. As with everything, this circuitously lead me to contemplate the phenomenon of good movies with bad endings.

My first inclination was to simply list ten or twenty good movies ruined by bad endings, but that seemed too easy. Instead this notion of good movie/ bad ending got me thinking about what makes an ending so bad in the first place that you wind up hating the movie.

The Weird Racism of 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is considered a classic of both film and literature. The novella, written by Truman Capote, helped solidify his literary genius and was the last major work he completed before diving headlong into In Cold Blood. For its part, the movie provided Audrey Hepburn with one of her signature roles – maybe the signature role – and helped launch George Peppard on a trajectory that culminated in his portrayal of the inimitable Hannibal Smith in The A-Team.

Defending Junk - Bret Ratner Edition

I'm pretty notorious around my house for buying cheap DVD's. No, not those crappy $1 discs with the terrible photo-copied cover art you see at Sprawl-Mart offering old Howdy Doody episodes or other public-domain goodies. No, I mean discs that once were going for $20 or more – at least that was the cover-price – but now, thanks to overproduction or underselling, have found their way into a deep discount hell.