Different from this one?
Oops, looks like I had missed that one.
How’s the commentaries (if there are any) for:
No Country For Old Men
Juno
Babel
Borat
Batmin Begins
?
The commentary on the TV series Burn Notice is frequently hysterical. You also get the impressions that
-Sharon Gless is really nice/intelligent
-Gabrielle Anwar is really wild/can be hard to work with
-Jeffrey Donovan is really gay
-Bruce Campbell is really cool
though I’ve no idea how accurate any of the above are.
Both The Usual Suspects and LA Confidential have very interesting commentaries.
I enjoyed “She’s the One.” Ed Burns commentary is like a quick lesson in making an independent movie.
I liked the commentaries for Firefly, particularly the episodes where they had a cast member with a crew member, so we got to hear both sides of the story.
Earl Brown and Sean Bridgers, who played Dan Dority and Johnny Burns (Al’s GEM lieutenants) on DEADWOOD, gave some really good commentary on the DEADWOOD DVD in which Dan has his fight-to-the-death with Hearst’s bodyguard.
FIDDLER ON THE ROOF has some interesting commentary, the least of it being from Topol (possibly a language barrier since English isn’t his first or second language) but the best being from Norman Jewison (who isn’t Jewish, incidentally, though the name makes people assume he is). Interesting bits learned on it are that Olympia Dukakis went into premature labor when her husband, Louis Zorich who played the Constable (and later Paul’s father on MAD ABOUT YOU) was thrown from his horse (Zorich, Dukakis, and the baby all came through fine), or that Lazar Wolf was played by a high school acting teacher with almost no film experience and he and Topol couldn’t stand each other (not sure why), which added to their dislike of each other in the film, and that Topol’s gray hairs (he was in his late 30s at the time) were pulled each day from the beards of Jewison, Zorich, and other graying actors and crew. Also, Molly Picon (“the Helen Hayes of Yiddish Theatre”) was a hoot to work with but, due to age, was having problems remembering her lines, so you’ll sometimes see her looking over shoulders to read cue cards or well placed scripts, and it was from the commentary that I learned why all of the women wear such obvious wigs (to the orthodox Jews, a wig counted as keeping your hair covered and thus they were worn at most formal occasions, but these women being poor they would have been of the mass produced variety).
In the everyone-gets-trashed, train wreck category both Mallratsand Cannibal! The Musical* have very funny ones. Each of them has someone pass out by the end of the movie too, Jason Mewes and Dian Bachar; probably not really a surprise with either of those two. The Cannibal! is my favorite though, of course, Parker & Stone can really do no wrong.
Not a commentary but the “what they really said” audio track for Kung Pow: Enter the Fistis a fun one. It is a mix of the original Chinese and bizarre nonsequiturs(in English) before the actual script was dubbed in.
Shpadoinkle!
-T
- From Raguleader’s I wonder if there are any Cannibal! cross references in the Dr. Horrible commentary?