I’ll be in my trailer (with the geeks).

Hey y’all…sorry for the paucity of updates this week. I’ve been helping some friends of mine finish their film school projects (I’ve put up a few pics from each in my Flickr thread), which has meant getting up at 6am and shooting all day, in addition to my usual academic and freelance obligations well into the wee hours of the night. The upshot is (a) film-acting is much harder than I thought it’d be, since it involves waiting around for long stretches between short bursts of being in character, and (b) I’ve gotten very little sleep over the past week or so, and thus have been too tired at the end of the day to do anything other than plop down in front of the TV and watch some more brilliant episodes of Freaks & Geeks.

Speaking of which…

  • I think I’m developing a moderate crush on Lindsey Weir, particularly in her brief Mathlete incarnation.
  • My sophomore year of high school, I used to play Warhammer (A better-than-average D&D knockoff) on Saturday afternoons with a party that basically broke down half-freak, half-geek (I count myself along the latter — my closest analogue probably would be Sam the baby-faced fanboy, with perhaps some Lindsey and a dollop of Ken.) At any rate, one of these guys (and I really hope he doesn’t read this blog) was the spitting image of Harris (Stephen Lea Sheppard)…the hair, the proto-‘stache, everything. It’s creepy.
  • I know it’s way too late to bring the show back, but could we at least get a Bill Haverchuck spinoff TV movie or something? That guy is funny on a stick.

His Darko Materials.

“I can do anything I want. And so can you.” So, with or without Frank the Bunny, I went to catch Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut Friday afternoon. While still very enjoyable, a lot of the fun of the film (reviewed earlier here) is in not knowing what exactly you’re in for, so the movie admittedly does lose a step after another viewing. And, like the official website, the Director’s Cut has a Midichlorian problem…elements of the film that are better left unexplained are now laid over with pages from Grandma Death’s time travel tome. As a result, some of the more memorable scenes (particularly the “Mad World” montage at the end) suffer. Still, if you haven’t seen DD (or, like me, saw it only on DVD), it’s a genre-bending marvel that’s definitely worth checking out on the big screen. (The film now also includes the deleted scenes from the DVD, such as the excised Watership Down subplot, and several shots of a 2001-esque eyeball, as seen in the trailer.)

Rabbit Redux.

Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko, the heartwarming tale of a boy and his demon bunny-friend from the future, will be re-released this summer with a new sound mix and 21 minutes of extra footage. (I assume most of this footage is the deleted scenes on the DVD.) Yeah, I’d go see it in the theater.

Mad World.


Over a long day of movie watching yesterday, I caught one of life’s strange yet serendipitously appropriate double features, The 25th Hour and Donnie Darko. While at first glance very different, both were excellent films dealing with some eerily similar themes – the fickleness of catastrophe and the fleeting nature of our relationships, for example – and involved similar protagonists, grappling with a fixed future, pondering choices made and opportunities lost. Together, they evoked a reflective melancholy that even xXx (really dumb, almost Gymkata-esque in its leaps of logic sometimes, but Vin Diesel is an out-and-out star, and he makes this tired stuff occasionally seem fresher than over in the Bond franchise) and Mean Machine (a disappointing and needless Lock Stock futbol update of The Longest Yard) couldn’t break.

I should probably say up front that I’m biased toward Spike Lee – With few exceptions, I’ve liked almost every one of his movies (and I also think he’s been on a roll of late, what with He Got Game, Summer of Sam, and Bamboozled.) As with Oliver Stone, I think people’s problems with Lee’s politics have unfairly undermined the reputation of a great director, so much so that he even has trouble getting funding for his pictures, which is ludicrous. A lot of critics seem to be faulting Spike for inserting 9/11 into this film, arguing that is was either ham-handed or unnecessary. I couldn’t disagree more. Not only did it make thematic sense (for example, when Monty [Ed Norton] Brogan’s friends steel themselves to have a blast on his last night and pretend “nothing is wrong”), but it perfectly captured the feeling of life in New York after the fall. Everyone’s trying to go on with their business and pretend to move on, and yet everywhere you look there are grim reminders of that day’s events, and somehow it’s all you end up talking about. And the last fifteen minutes of the film, which tread a very fine line between hokey and surprisingly touching, are a haunting representation of what was lost that day (and, Lee seems to suggest, what could be lost if further attacks necessitate a New York diaspora.) In effect, this is Lee’s ode to NYC’s magic and resilience, and I think there were very few other filmmakers that could have pulled this off. (And even fewer could have gotten so many nuances right, from the myriad details of Norton’s over-hyped mirror rant to Barry Pepper’s jackass of a boss having courtside Knicks tix.)

Speaking of which, all the performances are noteworthy, with Barry Pepper as a stand-out – he may have successfully shed the opprobium of Battlefield Earth with this performance. (As the schlub tied up in sexual knots, Phillip Seymour Hoffman has been down this road a couple of times now, but it still only seems like he’s repeating himself half the time.) The film has some problems, of course (the not-so-gripping denouement of the Pepper-Hoffman story seems ripped from another Norton movie – you’ll know what I mean when you see it), but well worth seeing if you get a chance.

Which brings us to Donnie Darko. It’s probably unfair to a film as unique and consistently surprising as Darko to force a comparison with 25th Hour, but that’s the way the day went (to say nothing of Farscape 4.12, which also felt strangely apropos, being about trying to avert death on the Challenger on an ’80’s Halloween night.) At any rate, a lot of blogs out there adore this film, and I now see what the fuss was about. Again, this movie also had problems (Drew Barrymore was noticeably worse than everyone else in the film, the Jim Cunningham sidestory was funny but a bit pat, and the payoff doesn’t quite live up to the riveting setup), but that’s missing the forest for the trees. All in all, this is a marvelously genre-bending film with wonderful anchoring performances by the Gyllenhaals. I think I liked this movie much more for not knowing a lot about it going in, so I won’t mention the particulars here. But it’s definitely worth seeing. Extra points for the soundtrack, which with “Head over Heels,” “Love will Tear Us Apart,” and “Under the Milky Way” (and the reworked “Mad World“- a nice surprise), reminded me more of my own high school experience than any other film I can remember. (The Dukakis era setting helped, since that was my own eighth grade year.)

All in all, two very rewarding film experiences. I was reminded of the night in high school when (while working at Blockbuster) I saw Glengarry Glen Ross, Reservoir Dogs, One False Move, and A Midnight Clear all for the first time on the same night. I love it when movie nights take on strange subtexts of their own (To force one, in a weird way, xXx and Mean Machine both dealt with the fear-of-prison undergirding The 25th Hour), and the two standout films last night have lent a rich and bittersweet minor key to the weekend.