I’m a sucker for commentaries on films and tv shows. It’s one of the reasons I use to buy laserdiscs long, long ago. I’d even listen to a commentary for a film I didn’t particularly like.
Now with DVDs and the ability to add a commentary to almost any show, you’d think I’d be in heaven. But that’s not the case. Most of the time the director or actors or whoever just sit and bull-shucks around. Even worse, they don’t say anything for long stretches.
Am I the only one that feels this way? Any commentaries that stick out as being overly good or bad?
The Lord of the Rings trilogy with Peter Jackson and gang are really well done. The Star Wars ones with Lucas are good but not as great as I was hoping, even though just about anything that Carrie Fisher had to say was great. She just didn’t get enough talk time.
If I had to recommend just one to listen to, it would be The Limey with director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs. Very informative and interesting. And there are times Dobbs would come down on Soderbergh so hard about some of his decisions, he’d be speechless. Plus it’s a great film to boot.
I watched Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with all three comentary’s; all of which were good, if not great. Hunter S Thompson’s commentary was done with two girls in the recording booth with him, who asked him good questions and got some quality conversation with him going. The Good Doctor talked quite a bit about what bits of Fear and Loathing actually happened, what he thought of the movie, ranted about Nixon, and occasionaly deteriorated into the level of a dumb beast and started screaming and howling at the top of his lungs for a considerable amount of time.
Terry Gilliam’s commentary was just as good, if not better than Hunter’s. He dissected the story in ways I’ve never thought possible, and really made a lot of what was said in done in Fear and Loathing seem almost meaningfull. Gilliam’s is also the funniest commentary, and was often laugh out loud funny. He really put his heart and soul into a story that he understood very well, and wanted to tell the viewer all about the adaptation. Good stuff.
The commentary with Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Torro, and a producer was a mixed bag, but worth keeping on at least once for background noise. Some of Depps commentary about living with Hunter for two months was very interesting, as was Benicio’s account of all the little things he said and did to recapture Oscar Acosta’s frightening demeanor, but a lot of it was annoying “I improvised in this scene. I’m so talented.” drek.
I haven’t listened to a lot of commentary. Fight Club had a good commentary. Any Kevin Smith movie has great commentary. I’ll second the LOTR.
IMHO, any commentary where they are all sitting in the same room and talking is good. The bad ones that I’ve heard are just quotes recorded and spliced in.
The Usual Suspects has a great commentary by director Bryan Singer and screenwriter Chris McQuarrie. The commentaries on the various Buffy and Angel sets are usually pretty good with a few excellent ones (most of Whedon’s solo commentaries, Petrie’s commentaries, some others). All the commentaries on the Firefly set (of which there are several) are good. The Futurama commentaries are always funny and many are very informative as well.
The commentary track for Dungeons & Dragons stands out in my memory as a really bad one. The star and director chortle their way through it like a couple of stoned college kids.
I have the Red Dwarf sets, and the commentary tracks on it are so boring, I had to turn them off. I didn’t get much insight into anything, and there was a lot of “oh yeah, that was great!!” That said, I haven’t heard all of the commentaries on all the discs, so some of it might be interesting. But I doubt it.
My favorites, and the only ones I can listen to over and over again, are the commentaries for This Is Spinal Tap and the Futurama sets. The Tap commentary is done in character and is hilarious. It’s like watching a sequel. The Futurama ones are by funny, smart geeks who like each other and love their show. They get funnier as the sets progress, although by the fourth one they also get more bitter as they realize the show is getting shafted by Fox.
The commentary for The Princess Bride was terrible. Boring as hell with a lot of “um… I don’t remember this part” and “I don’t know what I was thinking here…”.
The special edition (20th anniversary) DVD of This Is Spinal Tap has a commentary track done in character by the band members. The conceit is that the band members got back together 20 years later to watch the movie again and provide commentary, and so you hear stuff about their current lives and what they’re up to, their observations on how the filmmakers exaggerated parts or edited scenes to make them seem different than what “really” happened, and so forth. Very funny, it adds another level to an already great “mockumentary.”
Firefly. They have commentary for about half the episodes, and only two people per episode, but they keep switching them around so you get different perspectives without a mass jumble of voices with six different people all trying to say something.
Looks up at Kaspar Hauser’s post Dammit, beaten to the punch!
Um… need to add more signal amidst my noise…
El Mariachi was a rapid-fire “how to make a film on the cheap” workshop by Robert Rodriguez. Still interesting if you like the nuts-and-bolts info but don’t have a lot of technical film knowledge. Comments like how to get a particular shot, they put one of the major actors (the guy who played Azul) in a borrowed wheelchair and had him hold the camera, then rolled the chair around as needed.
These are the worse. You have a box set of a really great show and you think that the commentary is going to be great and funny, but all they end up doing is either sitting around with nothing to say or just doing something obnoxious. Or slapping each other on the back saying how great they are. I feel that Curb Your Enthusiasm does all three. Too bad, it’s such a great show.
After Spinal Tap, one might assume that the mockumentaries Christopher Guest has done with Eugene Levy would have good commentaries, especially since they’re all excellent movies.
Nope. Suck. They’re almost totally silent; it’s basically just Guest and Levy watching the movie. Every 20 minutes or so Levy tries to make some observation or ask Guest a directing question to liven it up, and Guest invariably responds in a few monosyllables and then it’s all quiet again.
The first Conan movie. Oh lord, my friend and I actually take it as a testament to our endurance that we lasted through 15 minutes of the commentary. It’s the director actually giving out a few interresting tidbits about the story or the filming, and Arnie giving such gems as, “This was funny! It was a scene with a horse!” :smack:
I think I’ve said this before in a similar thread, but I love the in-character commentary from Jonah: A Veggietale Movie. My older kids and I would rather watch that than the original - animated characters riffing on making the movie - where the locations were, running into other animated characters in the laundromat, talking about their acting and directorial inspirations. Very funny.
I enjoy commentaries by film critics on classic films. The critics often go into a lot of detail about how shots were composed and framed, how the script was put together, etc. Roger Ebert has a great commentary on Citizen Kane. Michael Jeck’s commentary on Seven Samurai is very interesting, as are some of the commentaries on other Kurosawa films. The commentary on Once Upon a Time in the West is one of those spliced-together things with a couple of critics, some of the actors, and some other directors (John Carpenter is on it for some reason, and all he does is narrate the action). One of the critics is interesting; the rest I could do without.
I loved, let me repeat, loved “Pirates of the Caribbean”, but all the commentaries were awful, boring, dull…even Johnny Depp’s.
Robert Rodriguez is amazing in his commentaries. Is he on speed always? How does he get all that energy?
I truly enjoyed the LOTR commentaries, esp. when the actors were a little sarcastic, or when the Director/Writers crack themselves up, or when any of these guys gets real sincere with a compliment for the others. Heck, I guess I just enjoy these.
I haven’t listened to a lot of DVD commentaries so threads like this are helpful.
I really like the Futurama and Simpsons commentaries too.
Roger Ebert on Dark City surprised me - I didn’t think it was that great of a film but he had a lot of great things to say about the movie.
My biggest disappointment was Tim Burton on Sleepy Hollow - there were so many instances where he could have given some insight into the tricks they used in filming or whatever, but he always seemed to skip those parts and comment on the most dull things.