What I've Learned Watching Only the Ends of Movies

    I recently started working in a movie theater, and the main part of my job involves cleaning up theaters after everyone's left. We do have a little schedule that tells when the movies are supposed to end, but it is nearly always fast, so when I arrive at the theater, the final moments of the film are still playing out, and I get to sit in the front row if I'm lucky and see what is happening.
     The problem is, more times than not, I haven't seen the rest of the movie, and I thought that this would be a problem, not knowing what's going on, but I found with astounding clarity that endings are actually very, very simple.
     After spending two hours with the characters and the story, you bring a lot to the ending and it is a far richer experience, but when broken down to its bones, an ending is actually that. It is the simplest statement of the theme of the movie, in case you didn't get it the first time.
      The ending of 'Late Night' could've been predicted from the trailer (in fact, a scene from the ending WAS in the trailer), but it's Emma Thompson apologizing to Mindy Kaling and the two work together to create a successful show with a diverse team. I know from stopping in the theater a few times that the movie is far more complicated than that, but before the end arrives, all that is resolved so that the real connection and conflict of the movie can stand alone.
     The end of 'The Dead Don't Die' honestly annoyed me because I was actually going to see that one. It ends with Bill Murray and Adam Driver sitting in a police car as zombies bang on their windows. Adam Driver repeats that "this is all going to end badly," and Murray asks how he's so sure of this. Driver responds, "I read the script." I don't know if this is the first fourth wall break in the movie, but it feels like it, and it feels like the writer didn't know the answer to that question until he was faced with it and put down the first easy go-around that he could find. The two men then "give it their best shot" and go kill zombies with deadpan expressions: stopping to say, "Oh hi Bobby," before slicing Bobby's head off. The zombies eventually take them down, but even that take down is unsatisfying because there was no downward spiral that led to their loss. They were doing great and then, suddenly, they stopped trying. It feels like less like an ending and more like a weak fade out when they realized the movie was too long.
    The final shots of 'The Last Black Man in San Francisco' are the simplest of them all: it is the main character simply existing as a black man in San Francisco. He goes to work, he scares a couple at an open house, and he rows a boat across the bay. This is the quintessential example of "it is what you bring to it." There's a moment where he's standing directly in front of an old woman and she completely looks over him to admire the crown molding; even I can get that this means something, but that meaning would be so much more clear if I had everything that led to it.
     Realizing that 'Toy Story 4' had been spoiled for me by the mid-credits scenes was honestly traumatizing, but I still want to see the rest of the movie to see what led to it. But when it exists only as itself, it is the simplest theme of the whole series: doing your best to take care of kids and toys, to infinity and beyond.