We want our good guys to win. It’s a pretty simple human mechanic. We tend to love (or at least sympathize with) our movie protagonists, and typically want them to succeed in their heroic endeavors. We want them to stop the bad guy. We want them to turn off the doomsday device. And even though the vast bulk of typical Hollywood melodramas end with the good guys triumphant and the bad guys defeated, we never get tired of that ending. For many film-goers, it’s this exact predictable catharsis – the triumph of good over evil – that keeps us coming back to movies time and time again.
Something that’s often vitally missing from this formula, however, is the celebration afterwards. The good guy or good guys can have the single most cathartic and spectacular showdown/battle/confrontation with the forces that have been opposing them throughout the flick, and yet movies tend to rarely feature a scene of outright celebration; a scene wherein the good guys are seen finally free of their conflict, and hunkering down for a self-congratulatory sundae, finally at peace and outright happy to have been victorious. I guess seeing our heroes in a position of celebration isn’t as interesting as their struggle.
Occasionally, though, we do get to see an honest-to-goodness celebration on screen. We finally do get to have a wonderful and celebratory moment with our heroes or heroines as they smile, hug, and offer congratulations. Indeed, a few films put a joyous and noisy button on their movies with such moments. Such moments as…
The champagne toasts at the end of several of the L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies movies (dir. Andy Sidaris, 1988 – 1998)
The L.E.T.H.A.L. Ladies movies (12 in all) were written about extensively in the pages of CraveOnline last year, and the author pointed out that most of these films – if not all of them – featured a finale with a lot of explosions, a big fight scene between a hot blonde bikini model and a beefy evil crimelord, all followed by a victorious pumping of the fist. The film would end cool down in a final scene wherein all the film’s characters would gather ’round, usually on the stern of a yacht or in a hot tub, to drink glasses of champagne, and talk about their victory. Often one of the titular Ladies (Hope Marie Carlton) would announce that she had managed to make off with some of the bad guy’s loot. These sweet final scenes really made this long string of ultra-cheesy cheesecake-heavy action pictures seem warm and celebratory rather than merely exploitative. Of course they were the best kind of exploitation movies, but that doesn’t mean that can’t be a party too.
Jungle Love from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (dir. Kevin Smith, 2001)
Kevin Smith was, I think, trying to bring these characters to a graceful close when he made his 2001 comedy epic Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. His two eponymous stoners (played by Jason Mewes and himself), often relegated to supporting roles in his other movies, were finally given the star treatment wherein they trekked to Hollywood to confront the execs who would have exploited their dubious image for, uh, a movie about them. Throughout the film, Jay lets drop that the two of them were highly inspired by Morris Day and The Time, the soul/funk band that served as Prince’s rivals in Purple Rain. After Jay and Silent Bob managed to undo all the story’s malfeasance, they decided to celebrate… by singing Jungle Love with Morris Day and the muthaf*ckin’ Time. The finale feels like a capper on Kevin Smith’s entire generational epoch of shenanigans. Smith would eventually include his characters in future projects, bot for a while there, it was the millennial party to end them all.
The entirety of Rocky II(dir. Sylvester Stallone, 1979)
John G. Avildsen’s Rocky is perhaps the single most famous – not to mention the most imitated – sports movie of all time. The underdog struggling to succeed, the heartening romance, the gritty setting, and the Big Fight finale all existed before Rocky, but this Academy Award winner is what codified them for generations to come. There are, however, five sequels to the film, all of which are increasingly silly (well, the silliness probably crests with Rocky IV). Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), if you’ll recall, did not actually win The Big Fight at the end of the first film, having beaten his foe to a split decision. But we went the distance, so it was still a triumph. Rocky II, however, picks up right where the first left off, and depicts in heavy detail just how Rocky celebrates. The bulk of the film, then, is devoted to how Rocky spends the money he earned in the first film, and how successful he becomes. He buys a car. He buys a tiger jacket. He proposes to his girlfriend. The first half of Rocky II is essentially the celebration of Rocky I. There’s another big fight, of course, and this time Rocky wins! It’s a much more victorious and celebratory version of the first film.
“Jai Ho” from Slumdog Millionaire (dir. Danny Boyle, 2008)
This was Hollywood’s first earnest attempt to make a proper Bollywood movie. Bollywood movies, for those not in the know, are movies produced in the prolific Bombay studios in India, and are typically very long, very melodramatic, and almost always feature and extended song-and-dance number somewhere in them. Danny Boyle, not to be outdone, ended his own Academy Award-winning Indian epic with a celebratory dance. The film’s hero (Dev Patel) had already won his millions on a gameshow, and he was already reunited with his long-love ladylove (Freida Pinto), so the only way to celebrate all that outpouring of love and money was to dance. And dance they did. Up until that point, Slumdog Millionaire was a mere Indian melodrama with good performances and a clever premise. When the dancing began, the film finally flowered into a proper Bollywood flick that might even be compared to examples of the genuine article.
