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© Copyright 2009 DVD Snapshot. All Rights Reserved.
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Tales From The Fourth Wall
- Commentary by Phil Edwards
The Beginning Of The End
 My first column for the new and improved DVD Snapshot. What to write, what to write? Always a tricksy little thing to decide on so as this is a new beginning I think I will write about the end.
The end of a film is what the previous journey through celluloid has been gearing up to. Without the end the beginning and middle would have nothing to do. You would go 'tut', roll your eyes and leave the cinema feeling cheated or apathetic to the whole thing.
The end would be nothing without the beginning and middle. Together they can, if all working together properly, make a thing of breathtaking beauty, gut punching horror, or unadulterated joy.
The ending of John Carpenter’s The Thing can be viewed in so many different ways. Are they both human? Is one of them a copy or are they both copies? Don’t Look Now where Donald Sutherland catches up with the child in the red coat. Audrey Tautou watching her true love paint at the end of A Very Long Engagement. Lando and Chewie heading off to find Han. The door slowly closing on the monster that Michael Corleone has become.
If the end is bad it can sink everything that has gone before, but if it is good, it can lift the mediocre hour and a half you have previously sat through. Those in the latter camp are Reign of Fire which promised Dragon Apocalypse in all the posters but was curiously dragon free for most of the proceedings until they fight one big dragon at the end. On a similar vein is the old Dragonslayer film that is duller than dishwater until Cage from Ally McBeal finally faces Vermithrax Pejorative and we get ten minutes of awesomeness.
Terminator 3 could be the perfect example. The horror of Arnie in star shaped sunglasses, a ineffectual John Conner and lack lustre action is lifted when you realise there was nothing they could do to change anything and the calls start coming through to the bunker.
Then there are those endings that make you go "What the hell have I just watched?" These are the best endings. The ones that make you pay to see it again on the next showing or hit play as soon as it has stopped. When you get one of those endings your brain goes into reverse and your intellect goes "Ahhh! I like what they did there...now how did they do it?"
You know the films I am talking about - Donnie Darko, Fight Club, Memento, The Usual Suspects, Mulholland Drive, Old Boy, Jacob’s Ladder and Lost Highway to name but a few - the ending of these films makes everything you thought you knew redundant and means you have to watch it again just to get your head straight. Sure, some of them are of the “It was all a dream” line of story telling, but they do it so well you wish you had thought of it yourself.
The strange thing with Donnie Darko is that the director’s cut explained everything but took away everything cool about the original.
You will catch yourself saying things like "Marla Singer wasn't that bad," "Keyser Soze could be all of them or none of them," but on most occasions you will simply utter the words “David Lynch” while slowly shaking your head to make the rabbit headed people disappear.
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 Phil Edwards
Born to a race of Warrior Critics and given the secret name of Phil, our intrepid columnist wandered the wild tundra for many years. Through meditation and a strange fungal brew he realized that there were Watchers on the other side of reality shouting "Get on with it."
Stepping through to the other side he joined the likes of Deadpool, Psycho Pirate, Ferris Bueller, Zack Morris and those people from that Woody Allen film that the Last Action Hero ripped off. He had broken the fourth wall and in doing so set out to change the perceptions of all those who followed him.
To those not in the know, he tells them that he runs the hugely entertaining and occasionaly funny Live for Films website from his top secret HQ in Liverpool, England.
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