I watched this movie for the first time today. Teen angst plus time travel. Is it mental illness or supernatural? I like films that make me think and this one did. Yes, cool cinematography. Yes, great music. (Mad World is one of my all time favorite songs) Good casting and decent acting. Interesting storyline. The Rabbit was majorly creepy and will probably give me bad dreams. I loved that the fear/love preaching brainswasher turns out to be a scumbag. Donnie Darko kept me interested from begining til end. Now does someone want to explain it to me? lol
felt exactly the same about it. But I was told you should watch it on weed, then you´ll understand. lol
Never tried. Maybe I should.
My understanding was that basically dude is given a chance to see his future as if he didn’t die but is unable to change his fate you should see the second one its even more confusing
Donnie Darko is Richard Kelly’s first movie. Kelly is one of the best writer/directors of his generation. With only three movies in his resume, he has established himself as an avant-garde, daring and visionary filmmaker. His specialty is making bizarre, complex and uncompromising sci-fi movies about the subjects such as the apocalypse, afterlife, conspiracies, etc. If you’re into these subjects, you’ll understand his movies and enjoy them very much; otherwise you may get confused.
If you think Donnie Darko is weird, then you should check out his latest movie The Box. Donnie Darko pales in comparison to The Box which is based on a short story by Richard Matheson about a couple whose lives are falling apart: The husband (James Marsden), a NASA researcher is about to get laid off, and the wife (Cameron Diaz) is under constant pressure at the school where she works as a teacher. Things change when a stranger with a mutilated face (Frank Langella) shows up on their doorstep and makes them an offer: He gives them a wooden box which contains a button, and tells them if they push the button, two things will happen: First, somewhere, somebody they don’t know will die; and second, they will receive a payment of one million dollars. They have 24 hours to decide. Do you want to know what’s the connection between the black magic, NASA underground tunnels, radio signals from Mars and the afterlife? Then watch The Box. Be warned and be prepared: This movie will blow your mind.
If a stranger with a mutilated face shows up at my doorstop with a wooden box, I say fuck the box, I’m calling the cops… and the bomb squad.
“One million dollars”. Isn’t that Austin Prowler’s , I mean Powers’ line?
The following is Roger Ebert’s review of Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut which was released on DVD in 2004. Ebert gives the movie 3 out of 5 stars:
‘Pay close attention,’ warns the web site for ‘Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut,’ because ‘You could miss something.’ Damn, I missed it. I’m no closer to being able to explain the film’s events than I was after seeing the 2001 version, which was about 20 minutes shorter. The difference is, that doesn’t bother me so much. The movie remains impenetrable to logical analysis, but now I ask myself: What logical analysis would explain the presence of 6-foot-tall rabbit with what looks like the head of a science-fiction insect?
The director’s cut adds footage that enriches and extends the material but doesn’t alter its tone. It adds footnotes that count down to a deadline, but without explaining the nature of the deadline or the usefulness of the countdown (I think it comes from an omniscient narrator who, despite his omniscience, sure does keep a lot to himself). What we have, in both versions, is a film of paradox that seems to involve either time travel or parallel universes. Having seen in The Butterfly Effect how a film might try to explain literally the effects of temporal travel, I am more content to accept this version of the Darko backward and abysm of time.
Let it be said that writer-director Richard Kelly’s first film engages us so intriguingly that we desire an explanation. It opens with Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) sprawled at dawn in the middle of a remote road next to his bicycle. Just sleeping, he explains. He’s out of his house a lot at night, apparently on the advice of the rabbit, which is named Frank. It’s good advice, since Donnie returns home to find that the engine of a jet airliner has fallen from the skies into his bedroom. The strange thing is, the government has no record of a plane losing its engine.
Given the eerie national mood after 9/11, this detail did not much recommend the film to audiences when it opened on Oct. 26, 2001. The film, a success at Sundance 2001, opened and closed in a wink, grossing only about $500,000 and inspiring some negative reviews (Insufferable, lumpy and dolorous, infatuated with an aura of hand-me-down gloom. – Elvis Mitchell, New York Times). But it gathered a band of admirers, became a hit on DVD and at midnight shows, and is now returning to theaters.
More than one critic said the movie was set in John Hughes country, that 1980s suburban land of teenage angst and awkward love. Certainly Gyllenhaal is convincing in his convoluted relationship with Gretchen (Jena Malone), the new girl in town who walks into the English class of Ms. Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore), asks where she should sit, and is told as only Drew Barrymore could tell her, ‘Sit next to the boy you think is the cutest.’ When she chooses Donnie, we can see why Gyllenhaal was once considered to play Spider-Man; he’s got the look of a guy whose inner demons wall him off from girlfriends.
Donnie’s suburb is green and leafy, and his home life happy. His mother (Mary McDonnell) is filled with warmth and love, and his father (Holmes Osborne) is not the standard monster of dad-hating Hollywood formulas. At school, Ms. Pomeroy is a good enough teacher to get herself fired. And the parent-teacher conference involving Donnie’s run-in with the gym teacher is one of those scenes where parents try to look properly appalled at their son’s behavior while it’s all they can do to keep from laughing.
Then there’s Frank, who is definitely not from Hughesland. He shows Donnie how to look into the future, and even gives him the power to visualize other people as they follow their timelines (a timeline resembles a rope of coiling water, like the effect in The Abyss). And there is the case of the wizened old lady known as Grandma Death, who lives down the street and once wrote a book titled The Philosophy of Time Travel, which hinted or warned or predicted or intuited something ominous, I think, although I have no idea what it might have been.
The details of daily life are exactly right. We believe Donnie as a teenager who did not ask to be haunted by doubts and demons and is bearing up as best he can. He lives in a real world; apart, to be sure, from the rabbit and the timelines. Richard Kelly shows that he could make a straightforward movie about these characters, but Donnie Darko has no desire to be straightforward. I wrote in my original review: ‘The movie builds twists on top of turns until the plot wheel revolves one time too many, and we’re left scratching our heads. We don’t demand answers at the end, but we want some kind of closure; Keyser Soze may not explain everything in ‘The Usual Suspects,’ but it feels like he does.
In that 2001 review, I found a lot to admire and enjoy in Donnie Darko, including the director’s control of tone and the freshness of the characters. My objection was that you couldn’t understand the movie, which seemed to have parts on order. With the director’s cut, I knew going in that I wouldn’t understand it, so perhaps I was able to accept it in a different way. I ignored logic and responded to tone, and liked it more. There may have been another factor at work: As I grow weary of films like The Princess Diaries 2, which follow their formulas with relentless fidelity to cliche and stereotype, I feel gratitude to directors who make something new.
Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut is alive, original and intriguing. It’s about a character who has no explanation for what is happening in his life, and is set in a world that cannot account for prescient rabbits named Frank. I think, after all, I am happier that the movie doesn’t have closure. What kind of closure could there be? Frank takes off the insect head and reveals Drew Barrymore, who in a classroom flashback, explains the plot and brings in Grandma Death as a resource person?
Close, Jeremy, but no cigar. The stranger in The Box tells the couple if they tend to contact the police or talk to anybody the deal is off. I bet if he ever shows up on your doorstep he will tell you the same. Man, you must watch this movie if you still haven’t, you’ll get a kick out of it.
By the way, *one million dollars* is also a line from Austin Powers; back then Mike Myers was still funny.
On another note, I don’t know how many people here watched this week’s 24, but the torture sequence in that episode was one of the most graphic and intense scenes ever depicted in a TV series. Jack Bauer has become death incarnate, and I drink to him.
I have Donnie Darko but have never watched it. After seeing the LIB post I decided to put it on, but Lucky, who was here, said she tried watching it once and it made no sense to her, so, since it was late anyway, I put on another movie I’ve also never actually seen yet, Eddie and the Cruisers. Very Morrisonesque with references to Jim as well as Rimbaud. I have a book which compares The Doors lead singer and his writings to Rimbaud.
Yeah, I just said that. I’ve never been much of a fan of any of the Austin Powers movies.
Who gets tortured, Jack, or does he do the torturing? If it’s the latter, that’s neo-con Amerika all the way, for ya. There’s no need to torture people for information. All you have to do is the research and think a little bit to realize it’s all a Hegelian, Machiavellian, Satanic scam orchestrated to keep us all at war and destroy each other for the controller’s profit (and perhaps pleasure).
To quote book 3 of 3 of the “Handbook for a New Paradgim” series, “It would appear that humanity is no different than the animals that are demonically used as test subjects for the ‘good of humanity'”.
Btw, have you noticed, Colonel, that American heros names are always Jack or John, followed by a one or two syllable non ethnic last name? Very original.
Btw, for the few who may resonate with and find this strange stuff of interest, here are the three volumes of the “Handbook for the New Paradigm”, complete on pdf, free of charge:
http://curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=1594401
In 24 classic tradition, it’s Jack Bauer who does the torturing in the latest episode, and this is his best torture scene yet. You can watch the full episode here:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/146590/24-1200-pm—100-pm#s-p1-so-i0
The torture scene starts about 34 minutes into the episode, and is close to 10 minutes long. Here is what happens, but if you’re going to watch the episode, then don’t read the following paragraph:
***Spoiler Alert***
Jack Bauer captures the assassin who killed Renee Walker, FBI agent and Jack Bauer’s friend. Jack is determined to get to the people who ordered the killing, so starts interrogating the assassin. First Jack beats the assassin to a bloody pulp, then punches a hole in his chest beneath his heart, pours chemicals into the wound and burns it with a blow torch; the assassin does not cooperate. Eventually Jack decides to check the assassin’s phone for clues, and finds out he had swallowed his phone’s SIM card. So jack sticks his fist inside the hole on the assassin’s chest, and while he’s still alive, pulls out the SIM card through his guts.
***End of Spoiler Alert***
24’s torture scenes have always been controversial and notorious, but this one tops them all and as I mentioned before, it’s one of the most graphic and intense scenes ever depicted in a TV series.
Yes Jeremy, I noticed that about American hero’s names. What’s more interesting about the name Jack Bauer, is that it has the same initials as James Bond and Jason Bourne: JB. Coincidence or design? You decide.
and they’re all probably best to watch while drinking Jim Beam.
Ah yes, watching Jack Bauer torturing a scumbag to death while drinking Jim Beam. Nothing can beat that. Cheers.