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Everybody hates it when they don't explain everything that happened by the time the movie is over. What we need at the end is not open-endedness but clarity, loose-end tying-up, closure. We need more movies like "Psycho" (unfortunately Simon Oakland has passed, but Larry King is still with us) and "Mulholland Dr." -- movies that take a little time to explain exactly what happened so we're not left feeling stupid all the way home. You know what they say: The difference between a comedy and a tragedy is where you end the story. Well, the same goes for the ending: The difference between a good ending and a bad ending is how good the ending is. Here are eleven of the most outrageously unsatisfactory ambiguous endings in movie history:

"Gone With the Wind" (1939) Scarlett O'Hara says, "I'll go home. And I'll think of some way to get him back. After all... tomorrow is another day." That's not the ending of a movie -- that's the beginning of act three! Put up or shut up, Scarlett. Clark Gable has just said the word "Damn" at you and that's it? If tomorrow is such another day, then bring it on!

"Casablanca" (1942) What do you mean Ingrid Bergman goes off with Paul Henreid and all Bogart's left with is the barest hint of a homosexual future with Claude Rains? At the end he puts her on a damn plane (something about how she doesn't amount to a hill of beans) and he and Rains walk off into the fog together as Bogart says, "Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." Whoa! What the hell happened then? What if "Brokeback Mountain" ended right after Heath Ledger threw up? What kind of ending would that be? And how does Peter Lorre figure into it?

Ten years after its release, there are still plenty of people who will not get David Fincher's "Fight Club" because they refuse to see what is in front of their eyes. They think it's about a cult of men who get together to punch each other, which is like saying "Citizen Kane" is about a sled. Fundamentally, it's an uncannily accurate depiction of depression and delusion -- capturing a uniquely (post-?)modern strain of anomie to which perhaps older baby boomers and their seniors find it difficult to connect because it's beyond their frame of reference. (I don't know -- that's just a hunch.)

"People get scared, not just of violence and mortality, but viewers are terrified of how they can no longer relate to the evolving culture," "Fight Club" author Chuck Palahniuk told Dennis Lim recently in the New York Times:

Some older audiences prefer darker material in conventional forms; they "really truly want nothing more than to watch Hilary Swank strive and suffer and eventually die -- beaten to a pulp, riddled with cancer, or smashed in a plane crash."

In that Times piece, Lim dubbed "Fight Club" "the defining cult movie of our time."

Back in 1999, I described it as "a grim fairy tale for adults, a consumerist revenge fantasy, a portrait of a disintegrating personality, and, for all its hyper-active stylization, an astonishingly vivid portrait of the berserk materialist wasteland in which (like it or not) billions of city dwellers live today." (It can also be seen, in retrospect, as a prescient 9/11 nightmare.)

Nobody has ever satisfactorily explained what is supposedly "ambiguous" about the ending of "No Country for Old Men," which has one of the most exquisitely judged denouements in movie history. ("A Serious Man," too.) So, what is it, precisely, that some folks need explained or resolved for them? The smartly funny video above imagines what would happen if "The Wrestler," "Lost in Translation," "NCFOM," "The Graduate" and "The Sopranos" gave the literal-minded exactly what they desire.

Stop by one of the most-loved movie blogs on the Intertubes and give Dennis your best! Several of us already have, as you can see when you get there...

See more ("Up in the Air," "Little Miss Sunshine," "Madea Goes to Jail") at The Auteurs, where Adrian Curry writes:

Two of my favorite posters of recent years, those for "Margot at the Wedding" (2007) and "Funny Games" U.S. (2008) both used versions of Helvetica to great effect. "Margot" used a stylish Neue Helvetica Thin in pink, with the actors' names in the same size and type as the title, while "Funny Games" uses an unusually small point size for a movie poster title to great effect.

See "Why the Helvetica is Trajan the movie font?" from 2007.

Remember last Independence Day when the (then-) governor of Alaska posed for a (psychologically) revealing photo spread in Runner's World Magazine? (Check out the whole photo spread series.) Back then, I posted the photo at right, which has now been recycled as the cover photo for this week's Newsweek magazine,¹ causing a ruckus. Sarah Palin, promoting the book ghostwritten with Lynn Vincent, posted on Facebook last night that she does not approve of the photo's re-use:

[The] profile for which this photo was taken was all about health and fitness -- a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation. The out-of-context Newsweek approach is sexist and oh-so-expected by now. If anyone can learn anything from it: it shows why you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, gender, or color of skin. The media will do anything to draw attention -- even if out of context.

It's so true. The darned media will just do just about anything to get attention, won't they? I mean, they practically bend over and show off their babies, they're so desperate for publicity! Last July, I was struck by the provocative red-white-and-blue overtones in this particular photo, and proposed "a fun exercise in critical thinking and visual interpretation." The carefully arranged, iconic image, I wrote:

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published here.)

(Finding and reposting many video essays lost when iKlipz went under. This one was originally published ,here.)

AMC's re-do of the classic British TV series "The Prisoner" gets under way Sunday night, following the conclusion of "Mad Men"'s third season last week. The new version stars Jim Caviezel as Number Six and Ian McKellen as Number Two. (The great Leo McKern played Number Two a couple times in the original series, and there were some other repeats as I recall, but generally there was a new Number Two each week.)

From the teasers it appears that the new version (tagline: "You Only Think You're Free") takes place in a desert suburb of Dubai rather than a quaint seaside village. (Actually, the new "Prisoner" was shot in Cape Town, South Africa, and Swakopmund, Namibia.) The big white bouncy billowy security devices are back. But I'm most interested in the opening credits sequence, because I became so enamored with the ritualistic nature of the earlier one, as you can see from the following obsessive video analysis originally published in 2008:

(Rescued and reposted months after the death of iKlipz caused all my video essays to disappear from the web. Originally published -- with more on "The Prisoner" here.)

Without making a big deal of it, New York Times critic A.O. Scott slyly slips several sharp observations about the role of movie critics into this paragraph from his review of "The Fantastic Mr. Fox":

Is it is a movie for children? This inevitable question depends on the assumption that children have uniform tastes and expectations. How can that be? And besides, the point of everything [director Wes] Anderson has ever done is that truth and beauty reside in the odd, the mismatched, the idiosyncratic. He makes that point in ways that are sometimes touching, sometimes annoying, but usually worth arguing about. Not everyone will like "Fantastic Mr. Fox"; and if everyone did it, would not be nearly as interesting as it is. There are some children -- some people -- who will embrace it with a special, strange intensity, as if it had been made for them alone.