Bravo Joe!
It’s hard to believe that there are so many posters in here that have the patience to reflect on films by Tarkovsky or Antonioni, but not Richard Kelly’s unique vision. Donnie Darko is the cinematic equivalent of a Rubix Cube; it’s extremely challenging, even to the point of frustration. However, it’s all in there (especially in the DC), and if you’ll just dedicate a little thought to it (ok, a lot of thought), the answers will come. Personally, I’ve seldom felt so rewarded for investing so much time into a film.
Don’t be afraid to over-analyze the shit out of Donnie Darko, or you’ll miss essential clues: from the phoenix (a bird that rises from fire and death) briefly glimpsed on the hood of Frank’s Trans-Am, to the miniscule variations of the scene where Donnie’s sister leaves the house and a horn honks from outside. The bulk of modern films have not equipped us to view movies that demand this much of our attention, so it’s understandable that a lot of people might dismiss this brilliantly-crafted puzzle as a failure.
Extraterrestrials, superheroes, and re-animated zombies await the adventurous.
…for the rest of you, I’d recommend tossing the DVD into the back of your closet with that unsolved Rubix Cube.
I found myself burping a lot when I first saw it. Very memorable.
Donnie Darko is… okay. Very Over-rated though. Alot of people usually try telling me my taste in films suck after I tell them that.
The theatrical version is good, the director’s cut is shit.
“Donnie Darko” is ok I guess, not the best film I’ve seen…but it has a nice vision…
What me shocks though is that I read that there will be a sequel … “s. Darko” … this won’t do “Donnie Darko” anny good …
Annyway I’m not a fan of Richard Kelly’s attitude …other films aren’t worth mentioning…
if you make one good song, then you still aren’t a singer
Yeah, I read that there’s going to be a sequel as well, and I’m quite confident that it is going to be an abomination. Apparently the only original cast member that will be in it will be Donnie’s little sister (I forget her name) and I guess the storyline is that she starts having visions of Frank as well. Definitely does not sound very promising. I can’t believe they would make another one-what a shame.
It’s pretty amusing how schizophrenic these comments are.
I really like DD. It, like Primer, is a nice little riff on time travel. But whereas Primer assembled it’s plot around multiple trips through time, DD is assembled around one large loop. It, like a lot of sci-fi, is only enjoyable if you let you imagination roll with it.
Also, I don’t mind films that don’t give you all the answers. The fact that there were so many unanswered questions at the end is not a problem for me. Thats what I enjoy about films like 2001, or most anything by David Lynch. It keeps my imagination working, something I don’t get from most of todays films that spoon feed you the plot.
One minor thing in particular I appreciated in DD was it’s portrayal of the American middle class family – they weren’t perfect, but they weren’t miserable like the family in American Beauty, a film I saw at about the same time. They are troubled, but essentially happy throughout the movie and the family scenes offer a nice solid base as a contrast to the unsettling nature of the rest of the film.
boring and hate the fact that I sat through it once.
Right up there with “Boondock Saints”, filed under “Over-hyped” and “Not That Good”.
well, it gave us Jake Gyllenhaal, right? It kind of set the mode for that likeable-slightly creepy thing he’s been doing ever since. He did it better in the Bubble Boy, in my opinion. It also proved that Echo & the Bunnymen’s “Killing Moon” is a damn catchy tune. But so did Gia.
I guess I think it’s a cool flick. But the worst thing you can do to it is overburden it with pretentious overinterpretation. It is what it is. It’s more demanding than The Fast and the Furious, but Jean-Luc Godard it ain’t.
Donnie Darko has two redeeming factors. First, it gets people talking about film. Unfortunately, for the teenage, middle-class audience which it seems to attract so well the conversation usually goes no further than “Have you seen Donnie Darko? No? Oh my god, you have to see that movie.” It gives you just enough tantalizing aspects, just enough humor, ambiguity, and visual spectacle to make people believe that this is a movie that’s something more than the usual box office fare. I’m sure some people revel in the many what-ifs presented, but I don’t. The filmmakers refuse to make any decisions, blindly believing that unknown = mystique = art. You could make the argument that the film is really supposed to tell us that nothing is exact; that life, love, and the “concept” of self will always be ambiguous. In that case there are other films which have dealt with the same ideas in a more professional and coherent fashion. But hey, people will like what they like, I wouldn’t dare call anyone wrong for liking it, I’m just trying to explain why I don’t.
The second redeeming factor is that the movie is bookended by two very good songs: “The Killing Moon” by Echo and the Bunnymen in the beginning and “Mad World” by Michael Andrews at the end.
Teeny hipster annoying movie
Gotta disagree with ya there, Mikey B. I fail to see a single frame of film where a very specific decision wasn’t made. And while it’s often looked upon as an abstract experiment, begging for various interpretations, I believe Donnie Darko is anything but. True, several themes can be extrapolated from the material, but there is very little room for ambiguous musings once the viewer understands how all the pieces fit together.
Could someone please tell me what the significance of Frank the Bunny is?
I like this movie for its atmosphere. Love it or hate it, sometimes you can’t help but get sucked into Donnie’s melancholy, and it was shot appropriately for it. It’s been a very long time since I’ve watched this movie but I own it, and it was one of the earlier movies that made me interested in cinema. I’ve never really understood the “superhero” explanation about it, but I always kind of understood it as being somewhat similar in plot (though not style) to Jacob’s Ladder: a character “survives” in memory past his actual death, which actually ends up fragmenting and destroying reality—wrapped up by the montage before he is actually in the room, where everyone who cries is someone whose lives would be better off if Donnie hadn’t lived past the accident.
Pseudo-intellectual? Eh, it has it’s bits. Over-rated? Gotta admit, I see too many of those countdown number hoodies to be able to take the movie all that seriously… but then again, the same “problem” is a problem of audience, not movie, which a reviewer or critic should remove themselves from. Otherwise I’d have to dislike Nightmare before Christmas, too, and I don’t want to, I like that movie. Pretentious? Well that term is bandied around here a lot, and I’d like for the people who use it to try, as a writing exercise, to go a month without using it and find some other way of expressing their dislike—but I am not in a position to ask that of them, as most of them have been here longer than I. I think Kelly achieved exactly the amount of intelligent craftsmanship he was aiming for, so no, the word pretentious doesn’t fit… though I haven’t seen the director’s cut, and have to admit that I don’t really want to. I like it raw-er.
I do agree, though, that “cellar door” doesn’t do it for me. Everytime I watch that scene I think to myself, “Mmmm, yeah, not buying it.”
Anyway,
someone else on this topic mentioned avoiding Southland Tales. Oh good God, yeah. That movie tried so hard to be so many different things, failed at all of them, and then tried to use the failure as a sort of kitsch to make it good again, and even failed at that. It was so painful to watch that I don’t even know how I stayed through it, but I do know why: I kept telling myself it was going to go somewhere and that it would add up to something. IT DIDN’T! WTF?! Definitely not exaggerating when I say one of the worst movies ever made, as I still feel my head splitting when I try to even describe how much he messed up. So Kelly’s career as a whole? Up in the air. We’ll see if he’s worth a damn later, so far it seems like he’s the type of guy who should keep away from big name actors and big budgets and be forced to make science fiction flicks with limited special effects. He might just simply operate better that way.
—PolarisDiB
I think this film is the 2001: A Space Odyssey for a new generation. The more you watch it, the better it gets, and the more meaning you find in it. At least that’s what it’s like for me.
Drew Barrymore is on it. That sure helps.
Surprised to see a lot of people saying DD is the 2001 of the “new generation”.
movie philosophy ? ive read some stuff about the weird philosophy made up by the director of this movie
any one knows where i could read some more? and understand somewhat better the film
Donnie Darko is an absolute masterpiece, it has so many subtle touches in it which is what makes it a stroke of genius.
I love Donnie Darko. I know alot of people hate on it because they say that it is pretentious with no real meaning. I would say they are wrong, but that does describe Southland tales to a T. The problem with the movie is that the message is so simple that it get’s over looked by most people that have seen it. The message of Darko was taken directly from a book by Philip K. Dick called “Flow my Tears, The Policeman said.” In fact Kelly even used the book’s title as a line in Southland Takes. There are a few pages in “Flow my Tears,…” that are used almost directly in Donnie Darko. It’s all about everyone die’s alone and the only good death is to die for someone else. Donnie died so all those people could have a better life(and some just continue living). If you remember that this idea is mentioned only very briefly in the movie but it is a a key moment and it’s pivotal to pick up on it. It loom’s for awhile cause Donnie’s told it then it’s not reveled to the audience(us) until latter in the film.
P.S. S. Darko and the Directors cut are both garbage. WTF is with that fan video on the DVD talk about obsessive stalker behavior.
I have only massively gotten into PKD well after watching DONNIE DARKO when it first came out. Now that I’ve read FLOW MY TEARS, I’d love to go back and watch it. And I have to see SOUTHLAND TALES too. Maybe Kelly can do an adaptation of VALIS.
I like how a lot of people in this thread are calling the film something for teeny bopper pseudo-intellectuals without even explaining what they mean. I think that’s a pretty easy term to apply to something that you may see nothing of value in while others think it’s excellent. At least give us a justification as to what you mean by pseudo-intellectual please.
I think the film is one of the 30 or 40 best of the decade probably. One of the problems that I think distracts people from appreciating the film is that they get so caught up by the supernatural elements of the film that they got lost in the complex plot and think that that’s all there is to it. I believe it was Amy Taubin (not 100% on this) that referred to this film as one that is fundamentally about human beings and I think that’s how it should be looked at. Yes, there is a great deal of sci-fi involved in the film’s plot, but at its core it’s a pretty incredibly moving story that looks at a young love, human sacrifice and some important questions regarding life and death. I don’t think that this is a pretentious attempt at profundity at all. I think it’s a very interesting look at our choices and their consequences on others. It also helps that the visuals are pretty remarkable (especially considering the budget) and it really put Gyllenhaal on the map, and deservedly so in my opinion.
If you’re able to brand us pseudo-intellectuals that easily, am I not in the same position to brand you a failed intellectual for being unable to perceive how deep the film is? Of course, I wouldn’t do that, because it’s an extremely arrogant thing to say, but I assume you’ll see that your logic is very easily flipped over and used against you. You can say that fans of the film pretend to see too much, and the fans of the film can say that you fail to understand the film by seeing too little.
“As I recall it wasn’t a notably stylish/artistic film and I remember being bored on second viewing. There are a lot of movies I’d far sooner watch. At least a movie like Dark City has some artistic value and illustrates something about the human condition.”
I’ll just have to go ahead and disagree that Donnie Darko wasn’t notably stylish. It had an understated surreal tone to the mundane suburban lifestyle. Throughout the film there was just something strangely “off” about the people and places you were seeing even before the sci-fi plot reveal. That sort of mood isn’t the easiest thing to build in a film like this and its suburban depiction never felt forced like American Beauty did at times.
It’s too bad Richard Kelly was such a one hit wonder because he really did have something going with Donnie Darko.
overrated as fuck
It feels like a film John Hughes could have made. I suspect people of sci-fi fans of my generation would like this.
I loved Donnie Darko. I can see why it’s a cult classic, it has humour, lots of it, it has segments that are very real and very poignant especially for me as a grandparent of a special kid that no one understands but who is bright, motivated and very very misunderstood. I was 50 something when I first saw it a couple of years ago and from the opening scene it had me, great storytelling, it has a certain rythym that really grabbed me. It has some great lines, I don’t want to get to scientific, but the whole premise of time travel and the way it was integrated into the story line was fairly awesome.
RASKOLNIKOV
People who don’t understand this movie haven’t seen it enough times. This film is the 2001: A Space Odyssey of a new generation. When 2001 opened, few understood it or appreciated it, then, after seeing it over and over again, the brilliance started to show, and all soon realized that Stanley Kubrick was decades ahead of his time. Same goes for Donnie Darko. If you could get past the quantam physics/surrealistic element of the film, you can see, quite clearly, the underlying, multilayered messages about individuality, conformity hyprocrisy and the sacrifices we must all deal with at some point in our lives, whether young or old, to reconcile our differences and the hardships we face. That’s it! That’s Donnie Darko, in a nutshell. Riddle is solved!