Dear Writers of Movie Confessions, There's nothing I hate more than a movie confession. Why do they even exist? Who do they really appease in the movie? The characters? The writers? The audience? No One. Because half the time they're made to a bunch of secondary characters who have no idea what's going on, but they're made none the less, in what I can only assume is the writer's idiotic and very misguided belief, that confessing all your sins in public to a bunch of strangers or acquaintances, is penance for having committed them in the first place. Why do you writers feel the need to add these little 'moral of the story' scenes? Didn't the entire movie up to that point, show how the actions of the characters lead to their inevitable downfall? Why throw in a big confession? Are audiences that stupid that they can't figure out where the character went morally wrong without having it spelt out for them fifteen minutes before the end of the movie? Or is it just me? Am I putting too much into this? Is it just my personal bias against confessions and moralizing that makes me dislike these scenes so much? Let's go back to the beginning, where my movie confession phobia started shall we? 1987 Can't Buy Me Love. Patrick Dempsey as a sweet, yet very nerdy guy who is, as always, in love with the beautiful and popular head cheerleader type girl. She crashes her parents car, he gives her the money to repair it, but only if she pretends to be his girlfriend. Of course, because this is a standard cliche movie, the beautiful girl eventually falls for him, but suddenly there's that scene near the end, where the burden of how this all came to be becomes too much for teenage consciences. Which leads to the dreaded confession where all is revealed. A situation between two people, which for some ridiculous reason, cannot be handled without first revealing it to a crowd, who will do no more than make things worse by looking shamefully on one, while looking pitifully at the other. Do we really need this sort of character humiliation in order to know that using nefarious means to get something is wrong? Do we really need to watch as a pitiful teenage boy walks down the corridors of his highschool as everyone stares at him in disgust and ridicule? No of course not. We can understand the character's shame and self disgust just by looking at him. We don't need it spelled out. Humiliating the character does nothing but take away from the movie. Perhaps writers think it adds to our appreciation of the hero. That because of his shame, we'll somehow sympathize even more. Well let me tell you, if the audience can't sympathize for the lead character without him being humiliated by a farce of a confession fifteen minutes before the end of the movie, then they have a much bigger problem. So if any of you writers are reading take note. I don't need to see a young kid humiliated in front of a bunch of people at the end of a movie to prove a stupid moral point that he can't buy popularity or love. I don't need to see Jennifer Aniston confessing to her boss and a bunch of people who were barely in the movie, that she paid a guy to pretend to be her fiance to get a job. I don't need to see LL Cool J apologizing to Gabrielle Union at his fake funeral that he had initially gone out with her because the guys had paid him to. Same to you Heath Ledger and you Freddie Prinze Jr. Save your confessions for your deathbeds if need be. Just don't bring it on my screen. And although there was a similar confession in Cruel Intentions, it at least served a purpose in the movie. The confession, via Sebastian's journal, served to out Sarah Michelle Gellar's hateful Kathryn's devious manipulation of her innocent and some not so innocent acquaintances. So here's a tip writers. If you're going to humiliate and shame the character, at least do it in a way that later proves useful to the story. Don't just do it because you think you need to be the moral compass for the thousands of individuals out there who watched your movie and in your view, can't tell the difference between right and wrong. We're not as stupid or as oblivious as you seem to think we are. Not so much love, Jyoti