I'm Blogcritic of the Day!

Oh man, now I gotta clean the place up, post something new, say something witty, or post heretofore unseen photos of a famous person naked.

Just finished writing David Edelstein of Slate.com regarding his list of movies with bad endings. Edlestein is the only movie reviewers whom I don't mind reading before I see the movie, and one of the few I read all the way through. (Liz Penn is another.)

Anyway, he's got the classic bad ending on every list -- Hitchcock's Suspicion, in which you can almost hear Hitchcock being ordered by the studio heads to redeem Cary Grant by the end, at any costs -- but there's one bad ending I think Edelstein missed, from a small but (so I thought at the time) interesting movie that just turned to shit in the last ten minutes.

Here's what I wrote Edelstein:

Everybody Wins (1990)-- Karel Reisz/Arthur Miller/Debra Winger thing.

Unfortunately, all that I remember is that Winger turns in a great performance and the ending was really, really shitty -- one that just seemed completely at odds with the movie.

I double-checked my bad memory with the original reviews on rottentomatoes:

"By the film's end, all common sense has fled." --Vincent Canby, NYT

"Everybody Wins" should have been titled "Death of a Playwright." -- Rita Kempley, Washington Post

"... the audience -- at least, the one I saw this with -- just shakes its collective head. When the movie ended (with no apparent solution), there was a collective pause before a splutter of nervous laughter and bewildered mutterings." -- Desson Howe, Washington Post

I guess on second thought though this may be one of those movies that are too lousy to count in any ranking such as yours.

To his immense credit, he writes back: "I was unsatisfied, too, by the ending, but I thought the movie overall made artistic sense."