WARNING: THIS BLOG POST WILL RUIN THE ENDING OF GRAN TORINO, AND AT LEAST HALF A DOZEN OTHER MOVIES

Why is Hollywood killing its stars? Since mid-autumn, main characters have been dying at the climaxes of almost every single major motion picture I've paid good money to see in theatres. Often violently. Sometimes excruciatingly. It's like "The Happening" out there.

First I saw "Synecdoche, New York". This is a beautiful, challenging film. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the tragedy out, detail by detail, until its utterly rending end. I mean, this is an epic film. After two hours of brilliant cinema, he sits on a couch and dies. (Alas, the real tragedy is that the Academy didn't nominate it for one single award.)

I went to see "Seven Pounds" on a lark, mostly after reading a particularly intriguing review of it in the New York Times. My first response is that Columbia Pictures must have slipped A.O. Scott a basket of sweet-meats to goad him into drumming up unnecessary excitement for this unsurprising film. Shame on you Mr Scott, shame. (Though, in his defence, he does describe it as "the most transcendently, eye-poppingly, call-your-friend-ranting-in-the-middle-of-the-night-just-to-go-over-it-one-more-time crazily awful motion pictures ever made".) Within the first five minutes the lethal, climactic jellyfish is wheeled right in front of the camera. It's no metaphor: sooner or later, we're going to have to watch Will Smith take a cold bath with a hot Ctenophora, and die in venomous spasms. And then, we do.

With Will Smith's body still freshly chilled in my mind, I bought a ticket to "Valkyrie", in which Tom Cruise refuses to smile for two hours and is shot to bits.

Refusing to be upstaged, Clint Eastwood stands tall and becomes a stiff piece of swiss-cheese in the final minutes of "Gran Torino", taking one bullet for each year of his age from a trigger-happy Hmong gang. As if to remind us of the tragedy of the first shootout he's ever lost, Eastwood's own crackling voice croons the hokey credit song, an experience far more awkward for the audience than any of the folksy racial epithets he drops over the course of the movie.

Benicio del Toro as Che Guevara? Bolivian Firing squad. Harvey Milk? Assassinated. Biggie Smalls? Notoriously shot. Marley and Me? Marley, RIP. Benjamin Button (which I won't see), is just the most obvious film in the line-up, promising to kill its newborn Brad if you stay for three hours.

Let it be known that I go to movies for relief, so this has been a tough season.

The wet trail of blood pouring out of silver screens led me, most recently, into "The Wrestler". I've seen Mickey Rourke take it in "Sin City", and I knew that if push came to shove his padded hide could suffer whatever Darren Aronofsky was going to throw at it. He plays a wrestler named Ram, and in this movie his physical suffering is profound, grotesque and presaged brilliantly by Marisa Tomei, who during a lap dance lauds the suffering in another feel-good film, "Passion of the Christ".

I was ready for tragedy. Once it became clear that the film would end in a final showdown, I knew. When the heart-attack chimes rang in Rourke's ears, I knew. When he stood to take his final plunge, flexed every ruined muscle in his failed body, listened to the roar of his crowd, and jumped--I thought I knew. At least I'd been prepared this time. I even felt a twinge of redemption. But, I didn't get a dead Rourke. I didn't get anything. All I got was a black screen, and some couplets from the Boss about hopelessly amputated animals:

"Have you ever seen a one-legged dog, making his way down the street?"

No Bruce, I haven't. And I probably won't. Because that's absurd.

Movies take a long time to make. These pictures were all shot and edited well before stocks did their own "Hamlet", Act V. As a co-worker suggested recently, death is where films tend to find meaning, and with the Oscars close at hand it can't hurt to throw a little bit of meaning around. Still, it's made for a surprisingly high funerary pyre of A-list Hollywood stars.

If this is a trend (and I'm starting to hope it is), I'm buying tickets to "He's just not that into you" immediately.

~ COLIN BAKER

Picture credit: nyki_m (via Flickr)