Films - To Conclude or Not to Conclude

I am so sick of watching films without tidy conclusions. There I am, watching a movie, thinking to myself:

"This is a little dull but I'm sure the climax will be dramatic", "Well, nothing original so far but I can't wait for the twist" or "Please show me ten minutes of pure entertainment to make up for me having to sit through an hour of this sentimental waffle."

and then the screen starts to fade to black and I'm thinking "No! Don't end there!"

If my reluctance to see title credits was based on being so delighted with a film's content that I was disappointed that our partnership had to terminate, then I could handle it. All good things have to come to an end after all. But why oh why, is that end so often an abrupt stoppage mid-plot?

Do production companies run out of money? Do actors die before shooting their final scenes? Does the producer say "No, nobody will watch a 93 minute film so let's cut out the vital last minutes and let the viewer assume an ending to suit his own taste."

Why stop there? Why allow me to make up my own ending when I could make up my own middle as well? Why not let me write my own entire story? No wait, that's what I do when I'm writing, not when I'm hiring a dvd.

There's nothing that irritates me more than realising it's 2 o'clock in the morning and I can't sleep because I'm not sure whether the film I just watched really was crap and badly concluded or was a cracker that I completely failed to understand. This is followed by the inevitable mid-night googling to work out whether or not I missed an obvious point and a struggle to uncover exactly what it was that I missed. Usually this search just leads me to uncover page upon page of unanswered questions, posed by viewers who are just as confused as I am.

Of course there are rare occasions when a writer or director deliberately leaving one or two questions unanswered, is thought provoking without being frustrating, but I fear that the few legitimate examples have lead others abuse the technique.

I have enough trouble writing tidy conclusions for my own fiction, why should I have to come up with them for paid artists too?

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