Discuss דוני דארקו
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Now I get it
posted by DRDMovieMusingsSTAFFMOD on October 29, 2023 at 6:51 PM
For ever, I've avoided this movie, presuming it'd put images in my head that I just didn't want in there.
I've had to hold out against so many people who'd ask me, "Have you seen Donnie Darko?" Which, invariably, was followed by "You've got to see Donnie Darko."
In return, I would ask questions like "Have you seen it? Did you like it? What's it about?" and the answers were always vague.
And now I know why – having finally sat through it, I now know they couldn't explain it simply because this movie makes no sense.
Fans may clutch their pearls, aghast at the notion that I might have audacity to utter such sacrilege. But here we are.
Maybe I'm just not smart enough to grasp the story. Maybe I'm lazy and don't want to put in any work to understand it. There was lots of tangents in this movie that would have, and could have, made for great story. Midwest, surburban restlessness. Teen angst. Conservatism and hypocrisy. DD sidestepped them in order to pursue... whatever the hell this was.
I like deep-thought movies. I like theme. And character arcs. And symbolism. And art. I like to read, too, and I appreciate the differences between literature, theatre, and film - while they are all media for telling a story, they use different tools and methods for telling stories that ought not be confused or conflated.
Gyllenhaal seems like these kinds of scripts. He's done other off-beat, cerebral movies – Enemy quickly comes to mind. Nightcrawler is another. Prisoners yet another. I think he was excellent in Zodiac, so I know my reaction here isn't anything personal against him.
But, in this, I may have met my match. If it is a good story that is well-portrayed, it flew far above my head.
Reply by rooprect
on October 30, 2023 at 9:38 AM
Been a while since I saw it, but I remember having a reaction of "oh ok, that was kinda interesting but I'll probably forget it". Which I apparently did, because I don't remember a thing about it today.
It did have a huge cult following, so my guess is it resonated with a certain audience somehow. I think it was one of the early 'intelligent' thrillers (intelligent relative to Friday the 13th bloodbath stuff) which put it in the new genre of puzzler thrillers like Pi (1998), The Sixth Sense (1999) and Memento (2000). Maybe that's the appeal, not necessarily that it was clever but that it caught the wave of a new style. Dark and deliberately confusing.
I always meant to watch it again, maybe even check out the sequel, but now I'm thinking nah. That whole breed of movie doesn't appeal to me anymore, you know the whole Christopher Nolan/Darren Aranofsky/M Night Shyamalan thing. It was all new and exciting at the time, I'll give it that.
One thing worth mentioning is that the Directors cut is supposedly much, much better. Roger Ebert gave the initial film a low rating but bumped it up in his review of the DC.