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Title: Donnie Darko |
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Release Date: 2001, 2004 (Director’s Cut) |
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Nationality and Language: USA, English |
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Running time: 142 min |
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MPAA Rating: R |
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Distributor and Production Company: New Market Films; Pandora/Darko |
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Director; Writer: Richard Kelly |
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Producer: |
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Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Mary McDonnell, Holmes Osborne, Drew Barrymoore, Daveigh Chase, Patrick Swayze, Katherine Ross, Noal Wyle |
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Technical: Panavision |
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Relevance to DOASKDOTELL site: |
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Review:
Originally released in late 2001 but hampered by 9/11 (since the central catastrophe in this film is a piece of a spacecraft crashing into a house), it has been re-released in an expanded version in 2004. This is another one of those end-of-life/alternative universe fables that you interpret in more than one way. The central problem is the tragic accidental death of a gifted if troubled teenager (Donnie, Jake Gyllenhaal) in his own bedroom. So, the last four weeks of his life are replayed in a time warp, with worm holes, out-of-body experiences, talking to monsters that look like rabbits, tornadoes, and an interesting English teacher who gets fired for teaching a story “The Destruction” by Graham Greene. (Watership Down by Richard Adams is more acceptable fare! – hence the rabbits.) A babyfaced Gyllenhaal is quite charismatic in the role. I have some technical gripes—why use Virginia license plates when filming in the L.A. area?
The film does have a David Lynch/Twin Peaks kind of feel, but less pronounced than in the real kahuna.
For a particularly provocative photo of Jake, see http://www.ew.com/ew/allabout/photos/0,9930,6529_11_0_,00.html (you must be logged on to AOL or else subscribe to EW.com first). These actors mature quickly once they reach their twenties.
Southland Tales (2007, Samuel Goldwyn / Destination, dir. Richard Kelly, R, 144 min) expresses a curious concept for an apocalypse film. The opening is July 4, 2005 in Abilene, Texas, a small city 140 miles west of Ft. Worth on I-20. Families at July 4 parties suddenly hear a huge sonic boom, and see the ultimate firework, a mushroom cloud. Later we will learn that El Paso was also hit. It’s not clear at first why these cities were singled out in the film or comic book that the film mentions (I’ll have to look around for info on it). Also, since that year has passed, we are left with a “parallel world” explanation that, as we soon learn, fits the rest of the film in the “Southland,” that is, LA, the land of Blue Cross “South.” It’s 2008, July 4 again, and we have a mood that recalls Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days” (1995). Except that it is far weirder. The government has clamped down, reinstating the draft, reinforcing the Patriot Act, requiring permits to cross state lines, and the government has taken over the Internet (does that shut down bloggers?) and has a super wiretapping system called USIdent. The US is fighting in Iran, Syria and North Korea as well as Iraq (maybe the filmmakers knew about the nuclear factory that Israel just attacked in Syria). Still, people in the “South” get to be weird, most of all around Venice and the beach communities. There are severe gasoline shortages now, but there is a lot of hope for an ocean based energy source called “fluid karma.” The 2008 election is all the rage. There is this aspiring screenwriter Boxer Santoros (Dwayne Johnson) whose chest is covered with fractal tattoos, and he is trying to sell a script called “The Power.” A soldier returning from Iraq (Pct Roland Taverner) (Sean William Scott) is playing double agent as a cop himself and running from the cops. Does he have a twin, or does he have a split identity? We gradually realize that some of the movie is taking place inside Boxer’s script, and that the apocalypse that has overtaken the country was imagined in someone’s mind and when written down and disseminated (perhaps on the Internet) a few years back, it became reality. This is a play on the old “implicit content” problem. Justin Timberlake appears as Private Pilot Abilene (the same as the Texas city), scarred, and we gradually realize he is imaginary, but he acts as an assassin (rather like Pie O Pah in Clive Barker’s Imajica). His forearms are shaved (still); I wonder if Justin will ever get his ‘Nsync look back.
This film is fascinating to watch – it is rather David Lynch like (with dwarf and distorted characters working for the government aka Boxer’s screenplay). It lacks the tension, however, to make us believe in or care about the happenings the way we should.
The Box (2009, Warner Bros., dir. Richard Kelly, story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson, PG-13) In 1976, a NASA Mars engineer and his wife are confronted by a moral dilemma when tested by a mysterious disfigured man who leaves a box and a puzzle. James Marsden never looked younger, and Cameron Diaz is a true Richmond southern belle, quick to press the wrong buttons.
Peaceful Warrior (2006, Lions Gate, dir. Victor Salva, based on The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, novel by Dan Millman, 1980) is both a feel-good comeback sports movie, and a story about weird spiritual interventions. College-age gymnast Dan Millman (Scott Mechlowicz) seems like a tremendously energetic and articulate kid most of the time. In the opening scene, he falls from the rings and an artificial leg shatters, and we are relieved that this is a dream. It is a foreshadowing, but not literal. He starts meeting Socrates (that sounds like a name for a cat, but it is played by veteran Nick Nolte) and talking to himself through this man. He imagines he is almost superman. Yet Socrates encourages him to “be here now,” for the moment, to prune out anything that keeps him from his goals. An hour through the movie he is critically injured in a motorcycle accident. (Why is such a sensible kid riding a bike aggressively, weaving in traffic?) His thigh is shattered, although it gets repaired with a steel pin. (The actually history took place in the 1960s, and I don’t know if orthopedic surgery could have done this then; I had an acetabular hip fracture from a fall in 1998 and was successfully restored with an experimental titanium pelvic plate.) Dan, who had been ravished upon by his girl friend (Amy Smart), starts to change, even showing just a little chest hair now in a few scenes. He swims and runs his way back to health, after some imaginary challenges (as one on the Berkeley Tower that reminds one of “Vertigo”). Then he just must get his way back into the Olympics. Considering that “warrior” has a sociological meaning, is the name of this movie an oxymoron? Millman became a lifelong proponent of the self-help movement, with Tony Robbins. Paul Wesley (aka Wasilewski), who is the hero in Fallen, appears a Trevor, a very supportive gymnastics team member.
American artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney has produced a video series called “Cremaster,” and I viewed “Cremaster 4” (42 minutes) at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. This piece has the otherworldly Celtic weirdness of a David Lynch film (Eraserhead comes to mind). It chronicles a young man’s journey through the womb to birth while becoming aware of the activity in the world above him (in this case, motorbike racing on the Isle of Man), and there are plenty of androgynous images of beings in various stages of development, with pieces of sexuality emerging, literally, as in Alien. Some of the other characters look intermediate in gender even when shirtless (and that means smooth, and more). Well, what actors have to go through and do to their own bodies, even to be in their own films. Anyway, lets hope this little work—with its logic like a rem-sleep dream-- makes its way up to the art houses. (Sometimes Cremaster is misspelled as Crewmaster.) Universal/Beacon goes out on the limb of forced corporate “creativity” in this messy comedy about “family values” where Nicolas Cage’s entry into a different life for the movie’s long Chopinesque “middle section” sounds more like a rhetorical device that needs no story-telling explanation. Is it really just a dream? Anyway, the idea that one has to “choose” between a Wall Street career as a single person and a suburban tire salesman with enough “time” to raise a family seems a bit trite, at least the way it is treated here. (A choice between “art” and “family” might seem more real.) But the Sinfonia Domestica scenes are quite amusins, as when Cage has to deal with pooh and urine from a naked baby boy whose immaturity is fully displayed on camera. Mulholland Falls (1996, MGM, dir. Lee Tamahori) should not be confused with the Lynch film, above. But it bears a certain similarity, an engaging mystery, this time set in the 1950s. A special anti-gangster squad of the LAPD investigates the murder of a young woman, and keeps turning up links to a government plot involving nuclear weapons testing.
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