Just got finished watching When Harry Met Sally, with Rob Reiner’s commentary. It was less than stellar.
One of my favorite things about DVDs are the commentary tracks, and I’ve watched plenty. This one was probably the worst I’ve seen, which is a shame, considering what a good movie this is.
It seems that Reiner recorded the DVD commentary, while seeing the movie for the first time in a long while, by his own admission. So when he rarely chimes in with a comment it’s suvch gems as: “Billy’s really good here…” or “this was shot in ::suchand such:: hotel”.
Or even less useful, “all I remember about this scene is my mother visited me on the day we shot it”
Thanks Rob, guess I won’t have to go to film school after all, with that sort of insight.
It wasn’t all useless, but a good 90% was.
So seen any stinky commentaries lately?
(I heard Braveheart’s was pretty lackluster as well)
The commentary for Conan wasn’t so hot. It didn’t seem as though Arnold had watched the movie in quite some time.
John Boorman who directed Excaliber had a bad commentary. The truth is he had some interesting information but he’s not a very good speaker and the commentary was boring.
The commentary track for In The Mouth Of Madness was pretty dang boring.
Now, I’m a big fan of the movie, so I was interested to hear any behind-the-scenes anecdotes and such.
Well, it had some stuff…like Sam Neil getting injured quite badly in one scene. But the thing is that John Carpenter was doing the commentary track with his cinematographer and ended up giving up the mic to him for the majority of the track. Now that could be interesting (the Requiem For A Dream cinematographer commentary was great), but this was more on theory. I’m a film production student and even I found it boring (my friend, not a film student, way more so). Examples from the track:
Carpenter: “Now, you use the term ‘balance’ a lot; explain balance.” Then the cinematographer would spend ten minutes (literally) explaining lighting balance. A lot of it was about very basic lighting theory.
The majority of the commentary didn’t even have to be screen specific. When it was, it was again about the lighting:
Carpenter: “Did you have any problems here because of the window?”
Overall it was just very dull…also, the cinematographer was rather dry. He reminded me of one of my film profs…and that’s not good.
The Matrix was the first commentary I never got all the way through. The auditory equivalent of hearing paint dry.
Excruciating for different reasons was the one on Blade, in which Wesley Snipes sounds like…well, not all that bright, let’s say. The truly frightening thing was, they probably took his most interesting stuff.
I’d nominate the Men In Black commentary. Barry Whatshisname and Tommy Lee Jones try to do Mystery Science Theater 3000 over the movie, but they’re neither funny nor insightful.
The Toy Story and Toy Story II directors’ commentaries, on the other hand, are hands-down excellent. There’s just so much interesting stuff being talked about all the time, and the movie really flies by.
I usually don’t like comentary, thus I was very disappointed to find out that the director talks over the alternate endings to Suicide Kings. When I say “talk over” I mean you couldn’t hear the dialogue because they lowered the volume on it so you could hear his pearls of wisdom. Unfortunately, there didn’t seem to be a way to watch those endings without the comentary.
Worst I’ve heard in a while, as I noted elsewhere, was the commentary for Dungeons & Dragons. Oh my GOD, the star and the director just giggle through the movie like two stoned fratboys. I don’t think I made it to the first chapter stop.
I’ll second rjung on Men in Black. Sonnenfeld made an effort to get Tommy Lee Jones involved, but Tommy’s contribution basically amounted to, “Wow, cool, that was funny. How’d you do that, Barry?” Might as well not even have been there, and the whole thing turns rather stultifying in short order, even with the semi-cool gimmick of having them draw on the screen like a football commentator.
Other comments: I actually kind of liked Boorman’s commentary on Excalibur. Not very exciting, but fairly informative. Oh, and M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t have a commentary on The Sixth Sense (not on my disk, anyway). He didn’t do one for Unbreakable, either.
Cool commentaries: The special-edition Abyss has a neat subtitle commentary feature that plays like “Pop-Up Video.” And on The Usual Suspects, Bryan Singer and Chris McQuarrie giggle to each other like schoolgirls as they point out all the filmmaking errors.
That’s the second time I’ve heard someone say that they’ve heard commentary on Sixth Sense. I have a DVD of it and it has no commentary. There’s a documentary, but no audio commentary. What edition do you have?
The commentary for ‘Little Nicky’ was pretty bad, it was Adam Sandler and some of the people who worked on the film (mostly his friends) making inane comments about what was on the screen, Sandler asking really stupidly obvious questions about how the scenes were done, etc.
The same thing happens with Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. It’s Mike Myers and the director (or maybe the producer). It’s an OK commentary, but the fact that I can’t hear the movie at least a little bit (especially when they aren’t saying anything) annoyed me too much.
Surely I’m not the only one who turns on the subtitles when listening to a DVD commentary so that I can still follow the movie, am I? Although that might not help you with alternate endings, since supplementary features often don’t get subtitled…
The most painful commentary I’ve heard is for Meet The Parents. The director and Ben Stiller are in California, and they have Robert DeNiro and a producer on the phone or something from New York.
It is terribly obvious that DeNiro would rather being doing just about anything else than trying to make comments on this movie. He’s perfectly silent unless one of the other people addresses him directly, and then his answers were rarely more than monosyllabic grunts like, “Yeah. That was good.”
I second the nomination for Matrix. It has commentary from three people, none of whom are named Wachowski. Trinity says barely a word through the whole thing, and the SPFX guy has to be the most boring person in the history of SPFX guys. Drone drone drone drone drone.