Shaggy Dog Story: Difference between revisions
→Film: Adding example
(→Newspaper Comics: Added example) |
(→Film: Adding example) |
||
Line 142:
** Well, for the ''villains'', sure. They spend the entire movie manipulating and killing each other (as well as anyone who gets in the way) over the eponymous statue of a falcon which is covered in black enamel but secretly covered in jewels. At the end, they form an alliance and attain it... only to find it is a fake. For [[Humphrey Bogart|Sam]] [[Private Detective|Spade]], though, it's a grandslam: the falcon lured all these villains out of the woodwork, allowing him to work with them, getting him out from under the police's thumb, make money, and even {{spoiler|reveal his heroic colors by setting every last one of them up to go to jail, including the [[Femme Fatale]] who killed his partner.}}
* In ''[[Eyes Wide Shut]]'', Bill suspects that his wife is having an affair and gets himself embroiled in some dark sexual circles while trying to sow his own wild oats. It turns out that his situation was not nearly as dark as he thought it was, he decides against having sex with anyone after all, and his wife was never disloyal to him in the first place.
* Many examples in ''[[Indiana Jones]]'', where villains often discover that whatever [[Artifact of Doom]] they're trying to find doesn't work quite the way that thought it did:
** ''[[Raiders of the Lost Ark]]''. Indy and the Nazis spend the whole movie fighting over the eponymous [[MacGuffin]]. Then at the end, the Nazis get the Ark and open it only to be swept away by The [[Deus Ex Machina|Wrath Of God]]. As is often pointed out, Indy could have ''done nothing'' and the movie would have still ended the same way.
** In ''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade]]'', the [[Big Bad]] is an [[Immortality Seeker]] attempting to find the Holy Grail. The villain doesn't live long enough that the the immortality it bestows lasts only as long as the recipient remains in the vault where it is kept, and the Grail cannot safely be taken out of the vault.
** The villain in ''[[Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny]]'' {{spoiler|seeks the Antikythera Archimedes in order to to time-travel back to 1939, assassinate Adolf Hitler, and lead Germany to victory in World War II. He finds out too late that the fissure created by the device is "set" so that it can lead only to one year, 212 BC as Archimedes invented it in order to summon aid from the future during the Seige of Syracuse.}}
* In ''[[The Wizard of Oz (film)|The Wizard of Oz]]'', Dorothy had no reason to go on her whole adventure to find the Wizard and kill the Wicked Witch of the West. The only thing she needed to get home was right on her feet the entire time. As comedian Dennis Miller noted: "So Glenda appears at the end and says, 'You had the power to go home all along!' I always wanted Dorothy to look at her and say, 'Yeah, bitch? And you had the power to tell me that two hours ago!"<ref>This was caused by the scriptwriters combining two characters from the original book -- the Witch of the North and the Witch of the South -- into a single character without regard to plot logic.</ref>
* ''[[Burn After Reading]]'' ends with the CIA director and Palmer sitting in an office contemplating what the heck happened. The only thing they learned, they muse, is to not do it again, if only they knew what, if anything, they did to cause the whole thing in the first place.
| |||