Ghostbusters 20th anniversary (I think it’s the 20th-- I can’t be sure) with Harold Ramis, Ivan Reitman, a mystery 3rd I believe and, this is important, no crazy-assed Dan Ackroyd.
Also Shaun of the Dead with Shaun and the director. I’m sure someone will come along and show me to be the fool that I am with the correct names for this post.
I’ll nominate Brad Bird’s director commentary from the just-released The Incredibles DVD. He’s got enough anecdotes and comments and pent-up energy to hold your attention for the full length of the film, and you wish he could have gone on even longer just to soak up all the goodness in his head.
Pirates of the Caribbean has a bit of both: although Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio (writers) are full of fascinating thoughts about the mythological background, character parallels, thematic points, and the craft of storytelling, Johnny Depp’s commentary is only slightly more interesting than watching paint dry.
For worst commentary I nominate Top Secret!. Jim Abrams and the Zucker brothers sounded as if they had written off the entire movie as a failure and couldn’t believe anyone would be interested in watching it, let alone hearing what they had to say. It’s as if they were doing their best to talk you out of liking the movie.
Another nominee is A Mighty Wind. I grew up on my dad’s Kingston Trio albums and loved the movie’s satire. Knowing that the actors were all actually performing songs that they had written (and such enjoyable songs) really raised the movie to a higher level. But listening to the commentary, Christopher Guest left me with the impression that his film was not so much intended as a playful jab at “folkies”, rather as a deliberate portrayal of the music (and by extension the people) as bland and worthless.
The DVD for 1776 has some fascinating commentary about the movie (especially the deleted/restored number), the actors (man, DaSilva was a primadonna!) and the history of the times even.
The DVD commentary for Boogie Nights was a state-the-obvious total yawner.
Gods yes! The one with Keira Knightley and the other guy (the naval officer guy) was just awful.
I love the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair, but the commentary on it was unbelievably dull.
After listening to the director’s commentary on Donnie Darko, it made me think the director didn’t even really understand his own movie and that it was kind of an accident that the movie turned out to be good.
Now a GOOD recommendation: If any of you are–like me–rabid fans of the new Battlestar Galactica series, I highly recommend the downloadable ‘podcast’ commentaries by Ron Moore available from the official website each week. I watch and record the show when it airs, then I download the commentary and watch the show again a day or two later with the commentary playing. He gives some good insight into the reasons they portray certain aspects of the show the way that they do.
When these types of discussions come up, UHF always gets nominated for the best. I would tend to agree, but I am easily entertained.
In contrast to the the Top Secret commentary, Zucker/Abrams are hilarious in all of the Naked Gun commentaries.
I enjoyed Cameron Crowe’s commentary on the “Almost Famous” extended DVD. He brought his mother in for it.
The dullest commentary I’ve ever heard was David Fury’s commentary in S3 of Buffy. He apparently was criticized for giving “commentary for the blind” on his first attempt in S2 (“And now Buffy is walking into the trap.”) so he is painfully self-conscious about NOT doing that again. So we are treated to info about how he set up this and that camera angle.
Fury’s Buffy commentaries are generally pretty poor, which is unexpected because he’s such an excellent writer.
–Cliffy
But they were dreadful in the Airplane commentary. It was all about the actors they didn’t get, a very boring story about getting money, and how the pacing was bad. By the end of it I was about convinced that the movie, one of my favorites, actually sucked.
Aw, apparently I am the only one who likes the writers’ commentary on Pirates of the Caribbean. Or is it just that everyone else gave up after the dead-boring actors’? 
Depending on your point of view, the commentary for the Clerks 10th Anniversary Edition is either the Best or Worst.
Jason Mewes starts out sounding “kinda drunk” and finishes sounding “completely blotto” by the end. Every time he speaks it’s like watching a car accident. Especially since everyone else on the soundtrack is sober.
The LOTR commentaries are great with a few exceptions. I couldn’t stand to listen to Orlando Bloom talk. Great voice but he spent every comment babbling on and on about how wonderful a time he had and how great the cast members were. Frodo (can’t remember his name) sounds like a twit. But, Billy Boyd and Dominic Monaghan totally made up for the lame bits. They’re very funny and it’s obvious what great friends they became.
I second the Red Dwarf commentaries mostly sucked. This is the second time in less than 24 hours that I posted that comment.
The Tomorrow People is a Seventies low-budget British SF show of, frankly, questionable merit at best … the commentary tracks, which reunite several of the “stars” of the show, are indescribably brilliant. The sets are worth it just for those tracks alone …
The director’s commentary for *The Mummy * is pretty good. Or maybe I just love that the director points out the unintentional full frontal male nudity shot.
*Dawn of the Dead * (2004) was pretty interesting, though I got to the point of wanting to strangle them when they used “rockstar” as their generic complimentary adjective.
I made the mistake of turning on the director’s commentary for Series 1 of Fawlty Towers. I think the dead air to speech ratio was about 3:1.
Oh, we’re doing worst commentaries as well?
Then let me make sure to mention the commentary track for Men In Black. Dull, dull, dull, dull, and stupid don’t even begin to describe how useless this commentary was – which was disappointing, given that the movie should have given lots of opportunities for interesting stories to come out. Instead, getting anything interesting from Barry Sonnenfeld was worse than squeezing blood from a turnip, and Tommy Lee Jones was reduced to making “uh huh” comments all over the place. The MST3K-style sillhouette “animation” didn’t help matters any. This is the only DVD commentary that I have voluntarily aborted, just to preserve my sanity.
(This was from the “Collector’s Series” DVD, by the way – I hear the Deluxe Edition has a different commentary track, but I refuse to buy the same movie again just for that)
Don’t laugh, but the commentary on My Cousin Vinny, by the director, I found almost as interesting as the movie (which, I suppose, isn’t saying much if you didn’t like the movie…). One of the few times that I’ve listened, attentively, to a commentary all the way through.
The commentaries on the Stargate SG-1 TV series DVDs are usually interesting, especially when Peter DeLuise is there. He is, frankly, a heckuva lot funnier off-the-cuff than his dad is with a script. James Tichenor, the special effects supervisor, is also good at commentating. The thing I like is that they actually tell you things that you probably don’t know. They talk about how a shot was done, they point out how great the matt painting is in the background, or how “Rick” (Richard Dean Anderson to us) is again playing with the props in the background of the shot, how beautiful Amanda Tapping is (ok, so sometimes they do state the obvious :)) etc. etc.
I recently watched Die Hard 3 and then listened to about half the commentary (stopping only because it was getting very late at night). It was pretty interesting to hear how the script was originally written as a standalone, not related to Die Hard in any way, then got picked up for use in Die Hard 3, what got changed, what didn’t, etc.
For the bottom of the barrel, my nomination is the Dick Van Dyke TV series. It has a few episodes with commentary by Dick and Carl Reiner. They had zero preparation, even saying early on that they hadn’t seen the episode in 30 years. Dick also comments at one point that since they are only watching, not listening (the sound is turned off for them since they’re recording the commentary), he’s not quite sure what’s going on. There are long, long gaps of silence, puctuated with such gems as, “Oh, I remember this episode . . . I wonder what happens next? . . . Oh, I remember what happens next . . .” It’s just blather, there’s no interesting behind the scenes info or anything. After ten minutes, I just had to turn it off. I’ve tried about three of the episodes with commentary, and they’re all just as bad.
I’ll second that. I dreaded hearing his voice every time he started talking, because I knew he would spend five minutes stuttering out praises for other cast members. There was always a few seconds of silence after he spoke because he just killed whatever thread of commentary everyone else was following.
On second thought, I think he may have done his commentary separately (and alone), which would provide some explanation. He praises other people on the commentary track, but they don’t even acknowledge it or thank him.
Speaking of the way people spoke - did you listen to the design team’s commentary? Richard Taylor, the guy in charge of Weta, has the strangest way of talking. His voice has constant inflections as if he’s always making a point about something. He reminds me of Robin Leach on downers. His work is incredible but I had a hard time listening to him talk.