I’ll second the Simpsons/Futurama commentaries. Some of the best ever made.
Are we talking about the same show? I haven’t listened to all the Sopranos commentaries but the ones I’ve heard were downright horrible. One in particular featured only the writer and a second-string producer, and their comments boiled down to nothing more than, “This is a good scene… oh, I really like this scene… here comes another good scene.” Halfway through, the writer said (in a hesitant stammer): “You know, one thing we should talk about is how we came up with the inspiration for this episode.” Followed by a protracted silence, followed my more “Here’s a good scene… I like this scene…” :smack:
Even the commentaries featuring David Chase (of which there’s only one or two) were merely average.
He does pretty much the same thing for Conan the Barbarian, while he’s palling around with John Milius.
One I found entertaining was The Sum Of All Fears. Director Phil Robinson and Tom Clancy sound like they’re about to get into a fistfight at one point.
I haven’t seen it since the movie came out, but, for what it was, I liked the kids’ commentary on School of Rock. It doesn’t have many “technical” insights, but it was a great window into their dynamic. And, being kids, they were less…what’s the best word…guarded in what they said.
It just seemed more genuine, like they stuck them in a room with a microphone and simply said “here, watch the movie and discuss it”, whereas a lot of other commentaries come across like they’re being done because the person is obligated.
I also remember Branagh’s Thor commentary wasn’t too terrible, but I think that’s more because I was curious about aspects of the design and production that he touched on, rather than because of Branagh himself.
I have the 1931 Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde with Fredric March. The commentary is by some film studies professor, but it’s really good. Also, on the Universal monster collection that came out around 2006, and had Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, The Mummy & Dracula in sets that had the original films, the major sequels, and a couple of documentaries, with commentary tracks over the original films, the commentaries were all really excellent. So were the documentaries.
Also, the sets had about 12 hours of footage (more, if you count the main film itself twice because of the commentary track) for not a lot of money. I have them all.
I second “Weird Al”'s extremely detailed commentary on “UHF”.
A documentary called “The Overnighters”, which also aired on PBS, has an excellent commentary, and in fact this fills in a lot of unexplained holes in the story.
I also heard that John Waters did the DVD commentary for “Mommie Dearest”.
I remember either Airplane or Top Secret! commentaries with the Zucker brothers and Abrahams getting together first time in a while being really enjoyable…
The Airplane! Blu-Ray has a great “Pop up video” style trivia track. You learn a lot of weird facts like where they got the names for the random characters (usually just family friends and classmates).
The one I always go to is the video commentary for Pan’s Labarynth. It’s only available on Blu-ray, but it’s absolutely phenomenal. Del Toro goes into wonderful detail about the movie while showing his old sketches of creatures and other ideas. He even talks about how shots from the end of the movie deliberately parallel earlier ones, while showing the earlier scene.
I second the LotR commentaries. Those are fun and interesting.
I also like Bryan Singer’s Usual Suspects, X-Men, and X-Men 2 commentaries. He has someone else with him who had obviously prepped, as he’ll ask Singer prompting questions at certain parts of the films.
My favorite bit from X-Men, during the Scene where Mystique is impersonating Iceman, he mentions that had met Shawn Ashmore’s twin brother Aaron at the wrap party, and had he only known that they were identical twins, this scene would have been much easier to film.
Sometimes with multiple commentary tracks, compare and contrast can be interesting. In Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, when the treasure cave is first shown, in the track with Depp and Verbinski (the director), the latter grumbled that they had to keep redressing the set because a lot of the small stuff would disappear between shots. Depp retorted, “Well, you hired 'em to be pirates!”
In the track with Knightley and Davenport (Norrington), she confessed that she’d stolen a few coins. “Oops; I shouldn’t have said that.”
One of my favorites is the commentary for Big Trouble In Little China with John Carpenter and Kurt Russel. It just sounded like two old friends getting together for some laughs. Which it pretty much was.
I enjoy any commentary track by Barry Sonnenfeld. He has a great dry sense of humor as well as an ability to explain cinematography choices. On one of the Men In Black tracks, (I think) he explains why some lenses are better for comedy. On Big Trouble, he explains why two-shots are better for comedy.
The Spinal Tap commentary is good, but it got a bit old with the “he’s dead now” bit. They have commentary over the menu, too.
Carpenter and Russell’s commentary for The Thing is also a hoot. Kurt can’t help from busting out laughing during some of the really gross transformation scenes.
These aren’t on DVD (yet, anyway) but the prominent urbex filmmaker Dan Bell has a new channel titled “Another Dirty Room”, inspired by a dirty motel room he accidentally rented. He put the disgusting footage on his channel, and it went viral (and fungal, and bacterial, etc.). It’s turned into a series, and the latest edition should have launched this morning.
He has an allied sub-channel called “Check Out Time”, where he and his two partners in crime, one of them a health inspector, do commentary. All of them are worth watching, if you have a strong stomach. For me, the worst one was the one where they found a lot of toys (Matchbox cars, crayons, etc.) under the bed - and they found out that this motel was where the local welfare department sometimes sent homeless families when the shelters were full! :eek: :smack: :mad:
