I started watching it Sunday night but the DVD player started skipping at 1 hour-20 minutes in so I took it on the road with me and just finished watching it last night. Can I just say on behalf of everyone, “WTF!?!?” It was a decent movie. It had its moments. I was wrong about guessing who Frank was. Even after the movie theatre scene I still thought it was Donnie from the future or a schizo personality. It’s not often movies can fool me so I was impressed by my own mental lazyness on this one. Knowing it was done by a first-time-director it was great! So, I watched it and thought, “Wow, that was pretty cool. I’ve got to ask Freddy if he’s seen it.” So it was good enough to pass on to a friend.
UNTIL, I listened to the commentary track. It was the director, Richard Kelly, and Kevin Smith. Kevin had nothing to do with the film, they just had him there as someone to talk with. “First-time director makes it big” and all that. I thought it was cool. I used to be a huge Kevin Smith fan so I was looking forward to listening to the audio commentary. All I heard was 2 hours of Kevin Smith licking the director’s ass. Between slurps, Richard Kelly was going on and on about the symbolism and all the “subtle” clues he dropped through the movie. Subtle-my-ASS! It was blatant and lame but as a whole it was forgivable, until he starts talking about how clever he is as a film-maker. “Did you get where the music synched-up with how that character was feeling?” Yeah, I saw that, I was hoping it was an accident because it was pretty freaking cheesy!
Now I couldn’t get around it, all the cheesyness was multiplied by the fact that this guy thought he was being soooo smooth. The director’s cut, the director’s commentary has ruined this movie. It was horrible to hear because I liked the movie! After I heard all of this, I looked it up on line and found that there is a huge fan-base like Kevin just kissing this guy’s ass. I don’t get it.
Good film, bad hype. It wasn’t the “amazingly insightful work of art” people make it out to be. It was just a solidly good flick.
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