What are your favorites on disc?
- Lord Of The Rings Extended Trilogy
- Back to the Future Trilogy
I love commentary tracks, along with interviews and other bonus features. I only buy DVDs, and try to get the Special Edition ones with all the bells and whistles.
I’ve listened to hundreds of commentaries, some good and some…not so good. One of my favorites was on the DVD for Blood Feast, directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis back in 1963. The movie itself is, by all accounts, terrible. However, it does have the distinction of being truly the first splatter/gore/dismemberment flick. This is THE FILM that spawned an entire genre.
By far the best thing about this DVD is the commentary track. Director HGL and Producer David Friedman discuss the making and marketing of the film. The commentary is a FASCINATING behind-the-scenes look full of trivia and interesting anecdotes. They discuss how they shipped the movies out to drive-in theaters, how the word-of-mouth gave the movie legs (good thing, too–no advertising budget), and how different communities tried to shut them down. We also learn that the editor of one of the more graphic scenes (a buxom gal gets her tongue pulled out by a sadistic killer) is non other than Bob Sinise–father of Gary Sinise!
There’s a David Lynch movie (unsure which one, I’ve seen them all) where there is a bonus feature with Lynch cooking broccoli with quinoa. It was long enough ago that I’d never heard of quinoa. I made broccoli with quinoa and loved it.
ETA: Here’s the IMDB review of the quinoa “short”.
The first DVD I ever watched was Dark City, on my very first laptop, on my very first redeye flight where I was all alone in a huge plane at 2 am with the Northern Lights out my window…
And Roger Ebert did the commentary. He started with a conversation he’d had with Werner Herzog, and soon it became a primer on film noir and its conventions. At one point I paused it and whispered “This is like film school on a disk…”
Kurt Russell and John Carpenter have great commentaries for Used Cars, Escape From New York and The Thing.
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are a good commentary team for their movies. I particularly like the track on Paul.
My all time favorite is the commentary for Sideways with Paul Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church. Those guys seem like they had a blast working together.
Many digital downloads now include commentary tracks as a bonus feature, and Disney+ includes them as extras on several of the most recent Disney/Pixar/Marvel movies.
One of my favorite moments in commentaries was for Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. There were two tracks, one with Verbinski and Depp, the other with Knightley and Pryce. When the treasure cave first appears Verbinsky grumbled about how they had to keep replacing the smaller bits of treasure – especially the coins – because they would disappear. Depp reported, “Well, you hired 'em to be pirates.”
On the other track, same scene and Knightley exclaimed. “I took a couple coins when nobody was looking – Oops, I shouldn’t have said that, should I.”
On the other hand, the commentary track for Total Recall was mostly Schwarzenegger saying over and over, “I remember that.”
Oh, good! I do miss those so. The wife and I would watch a movie, she’d go to bed, and I’d stay up til the wee hours watching commentaries/deleted scenes.
The Clerks cast does their commentary while drunk, with “Jay” falling asleep… oh, and Spinal Tap recorded their commentary as Spinal Tap…. as the band. Totally in-character, not understanding that the scenes are humorous.
The first time I watched Babylon 5 was on DVD from Netflix many years ago. A couple of times per season there were episodes where JMS did a commentary track, and I always enjoyed those. Lots of cool “inside scoop” and “behind the scenes” kind of stuff.
And bitching about the “hatchet job” Marti did on them.
Along these same lines, the commentary on Tropic Thunder is hilarious ! Robert Downey Jr. stays in “Osiris” character - as promised in the movie ! Some of the others are funny, too, but they all seem like they were wasted when they did the recording.
and improvised.
That commentary track for The Thing is one of my favorites. When they released Big Trouble In Little China, my favorite CarpenterRussell film, I was badly disappointed by the lackluster commentary. IIRC John and Kurt sounded like old friends shooting the breeze, not necessarily about the movie.
Favorite commentary bit. On “Logan’s Run” Michael York is talking about something, co-star Jenny Agutter gets naked on screen and he says “oh, Jenny!”
I have been going through the Abbott and Costello Complete Universal film DVDs. Quite frankly most of these films stink but several of them have commentary tracks and they are quite informative. Amazing how for “Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein “ Bela Lugosi wasn’t the slam dunk choice we think nowadays he would have been.
I never listened to as many of my commentary tracks as I should have (even though I would always buy the deluxe version over the basic one) but one that stands out in my memory is for Can’t Hardly Wait where everybody talked about basically how bad their movie turned out to be, and pointed out all the studio/MPAA interference that helped get it that way.
I need to get the DVDs out next Halloween, but I remember the commentaries on the Universal monster movies to be quite good.
I’m kinda surprised a station like TCM doesn’t occasionally show a film with the commentary, I assume it’s a rights issue. But, it would be interesting to show the film by itself and then immediately follow it up with a commentary version
With modern digital TV, you could just include it as a separate selectable audio track.
Don’t know if they still do, but I recall that back in the '90s IFC would occasionally air movies with director commentary. I used to have a VHS of Clerks with commentary by Kevin Smith that I recorded from there back in the day.