My rewind button seems to be stuck

Friday night at the theater, I made a joke (actually, I paraphrased a joke from a comedian I heard years ago) about how Jaws played backwards becomes a movie about a shark that keeps throwing up people until they re-open the beach. I got to thinking about that today and took a good look at my DVD collection and wondered about what they'd be like in reverse.

Here are some of my favorites:

American Beauty: After a quick recovery from a gunshot wound to the head, Kevin Spacey dresses a teenage girl, smokes a lot of pot, lets his body go out of shape and eventually settles into a mundane existance where his wife calls the shots. All the while, his daughter hates him.

Batman Begins: Batman realizes that fighting crime is futile and gives up, saving his parents in the process.

A Beautiful Mind: A genius goes from crazy to just sorta creepy.

The Day the Earth Stood Still: An alien life form sent to earth to save us realizes that we're doomed and leaves us alone to detroy ourselves.

Star Wars: A kid in a space ship conjures up a giant moon-like space craft out of thin air in order to rebuild a planet, and in return, he's sent back to the farm.

Ocean's Eleven: Eleven guys cover their tracks after sneaking a bunch of money into another guy's vault, and George Clooney endsup back in jail as a result.

Sleepy Hollow: In an ironic twist, a headless guy proves to be quite good at re-attaching other people's heads.

Fight Club: Brad Pitt and Edward Norton get sick of beating the crap out of one another and drift apart soon afterwards.


The thing I found weird was that a lot of these movies are basically the same backwards:

Back to the Future: Marty still gets stuck in 1955 and has to get back to 1985, only this time he gets back by driving in reverse out of a barn.

Contact: Aliens still may or may not exist, and it still ends with a chick talking to her father.

Before Sunrise: They're still strangers, they still talk a lot, and they still go their separate ways.

Garden State: Zach Braff still doen't really know what's going on around him.

Memento: 'Nuff Said.