Greatest Movies That Made Going to the Movies Suck #19- Donnie Darko

Simon Appears Courtsey of Four of Them

Oh, Donnie Darko. My love. My life. You, sir, are the reason I discovered the so-untapped world of real movies. Not whatever was playing at my local AMC on Friday night, but the wonderifulous 'underground' (that is, not so obvious to my previously-incarnate moviegoer) cinematic scene, if I may be so bold.

Enough of that, duh. Donnie Darko, released in 2000, one of those films released right before 9/11, a release you're thankful for, because no way in Jack's putrid hell would it fly post-2001. This, I assure you, is both spoiler and not-spoiler, involves a plane crashing into a house. A minuscule release, skidding by with a few months to spare of September, it was saved from persecution after the fact, as it had not yet been deemed a 'cult' movie. The story, in its simplest form, is about a teenager, the eponymous character played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a recovering emotionally-disturbed dude on pills, held back a grade, and seeing a therapist after a briefly-mentioned bout of pyromania, begins seeing visions of a sinister, if helpful, bunny, who first appears to him on the night of the falling jet engine. Okay?

I will not try and explain the intricate plotting, plot twists, plot explanations...in fact, I won't subject you to any plot explanation at all. Because I'm a good person. I can only understand a skeleton of the whole, and that's with ten different viewings within two years and the help of IMDb message boards.

So, why did it make going to the movies suck? Quite simple, me dear lads: It made muddled pretension the norm, the trend, the thing to do, the thing to be. As it slowly grew to the bestowed cult crown, up-and-coming young filmmakers, straight out of NYU with a degree in Film and Philosophy, got wind of the ever-fabled, long-hoped-for, but never-realized film. The one they all theorized about while stoned on those dateless Saturday nights, but never dreamed to achieve. A movie combining sci-fi, teen angst, paradoxes, time warps, the shadows behind suburbia (also still a trend, after the smashing success of American Beauty), talking rabbits, Drew Barrymore (that's what nerds dream about, right? There was that documentary, My Date With Drew, so I don't know), The Evil Dead, horror, and mental illness? What a scene of anarchy that year's graduation ceremony must've been.

Soon, we had films like The I Inside, eXistenZ, films that now dared to bring the twisted and philosophical to sci-fi and Doomsday. It brought upon a new wave of Catcher in the Rye-protagonists, young, surly, mature men with a stiff shoulder, contempt for everyone, and a raging libido. Genre bending was prevalent, still is, a new wave of 'X meets Y' movie pitches. A cinematic utopia or dystopia, you decide.

Yet, how did it effect we, John Q. Public? Well, I don't know. How it influenced me, at least, was it made me curious. I wanted to watch it again. It was a perfect blend of yearbook-worthy quotes (everybody: "Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!"), complicated science fiction that understanding immediately made you the envy of all your friends, and underlying horror and epicness previously untouched by the manly hand.

It created an impossible standard of movie going...any other sci-fi would seem tired and dated compared to the retro-modernism opaqueness of Donnie Darko. What does it mean, this movie? Who is Frank, Donnie's sister's Boyfriend, a young man destroyed by curse words, or the long-deceased Prom Night phantom of Mr. and Mrs. Darko's high school days? Was he even real, or was Donnie losing his mind in his final minutes (this is not longer a spoiler, people, you should know it by now)? What is reality? Existential crisis follows each viewing, no doubt.

We live in a world divided, movies in subject. There's the guys who defend a film's 'artistic integrity', and others who lambast it for being 'pretentious dribble'. Neither are right or wrong, but that's not the point. Donnie Darko just might've started the debate in its present form, a petty pissing match between fat men living in their parents' basements and hipsters loitering at Starbucks. We are all truly losers in our own way, but it's these guys that take the cake. They make going to the movies suck.

So, right, that's the best I can do. Thank Donnie Darko and friends for every Internet commenter you happen upon, because they, they birthed this blessing and this nightmare. Have a nice day.

Ed. Note-As a companion piece, I did my own reassessment of Donnie Darko several months back.

Can You Spot A Great Film?: A Justification of Shutter Island

There are two director's working today who, above all others, have managed to rise above just being great filmmakers and into the realms of pop culture phenomenons. One is Quintin Tarantino and the other is Martin Scrosese. The problem with great filmmakers reaching this status though is that hordes of viewers flock to their movies for no better reason than because everything attached to their name must be brilliant by default. This isn't based on any critical logic, any in-depth thought or any knowledge about the trajectory of the filmmaker's career; it's just generally accepted pop culture wisdom that has been passed down through the generations. I know hundreds of people who think Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas are masterpieces, and they are, but I can count on one hand roughly how many people have been able to provide a decent explanation as to why this is the case.

Therefore kids, and adults too, will go to these movies and declare them masterpieces because well, isn't that what Tarantino and Scorsese do: make masterpieces, as if they have exceeded mere morality and are instead a brand name known for quality every time. And, in fact, they are known for quality. I've only seen one Scrosese movie I didn't like (The Colour of Money) and two Tarantino movies I didn't like (Reservoir Dogs and Death Proof), but I could sit down and conduct a conversation or debate, justifying my loves and disappointments for every film each director has helmed. After seeing Inglourious Basterds in August I went to the McDonald's across the street from the theater to get a McFlurry when some kid I knew vaguely from high school, who had apparently also seen the movie, explained to his friends with vigour all the ins and outs of Tarantino's oeuvre without ever once saying anything useful about the aesthetic texture of his films, the brilliance of their construction, the subtlety of using dialogue to create the kind of drama that no physical representation could, and so on. Every time I hear conversations going on like this I think feel like interrupting and saying, "Hey kid, Tarantino is more than just hip dialogue and references to other films." And then I think of French critic Pierre Rissient who said that 'It is not enough to like a film. Oe must like it for the right reasons."

I'm not trying to be some sort of film snob here, but what Rissient says is true: it's not enough to like films because the vast majority of their viewers have deemed them good. You have to have a justifiable reason, otherwise, your opinion is a moot point that is being set up to be knocked down. That's why bad films like The Usual Suspects, The Boondock Saints and Fight Club have gotten so popular: a lot of people started to say they were good simply because they were different until the point where it would be considered taboo to cast a bad word against them (see my reconsideration of Donnie Darko to see what I am talking about).

But now I have gotten off topic because those kids are talking about movies they liked. I'm talking about good movies: movies where you can see a masterful director making the best out of what they have been given. I'm talking about appreciating good lighting and editing and camera angles; all that stuff that lead to a films overall style. Too often people confuse movies they like with movies that are good. Anyone can express if they likeed something to some sort of extent, but few people have the knowledge to judge whether a film is actually good or not.

That finally brings me to Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island which is the kind of film that really tests Scorsese's (or any great filmmaker's) audience and separates the film "viewers" from the film "watchers." I say this because as I was watching Shutter Island, someone in the back of the theater was laughing as each new revelation of the story was revealed, clearly so disgusted with the path the story had taken that he just had to laugh at the ridiculousness of it all. Then, after the screening, I heard some teenage girl declare it the "gayest" movie she had ever seen. Really, I thought, these are the people who go to see Scrosese's movies?

But you see, Shutter Island is a good movie. It's actually a masterpiece if you don't take the story into consideration. It's a masterpiece in film style, perfectly evoking a long forgotten time and genre of filmmaking. Scorsese flawlessly evokes the look and feel of the 50s film noir and uses that as a grounds to create the suspense of horror of the story. How does it do it? Well how about the brilliant overhead lighting, casting long shadows up walls and across floors, the shot that begins as a close up of Leonardo DiCaprio's face until pulling up to reveal the vastness of a cliff side lurking just behind him, one wrong move leading to death. Then there's my favourite shot in the movie. It takes place in Ward C and is an overhead shot on a low angle that shows a maze of steel stairs and corridors hitning that the story starting to come apart by perfectly representing the main character's state of mind: cold, dark, confused, and going in an endless tangle of directions all at once. The examples could go on for days.

That's great filmmaking. If the story isn't up to Scrosese's standards, well at least he still brought his A-game to the table. That's the problem with Scrosese as a pop culture icon: everyone can see the brilliance of the tracking shot in Goodfellas because tracking shots are big and obvious and draw attention to themselves, but when Scrosese goes subtle, pays homage to a past film genre, creates for his film the style it deserves and not the one that announces itself as film style, the movie is passed off or thrown away, as if it never occurred to these people to ask why Scrosese is considered, after all, one of America's best living filmmakers in the first place, because, believe it or not, there is a justifiable reason. It's the job (and the fun) of movie lovers to figure it out.

Revisiting Donnie Darko

The first time I saw Donnie Darko was when it first came out on VHS. A couple of DVD's were around at that time but the technology was just emerging and certainly too expensive for my family to invest in at that point, which was fine was me and I am generally not well receptive to change. I had no idea what the movie was at the time other than that I had seen a preview for it on some other VHS' I had recently rented and thought it looked alright. That of course was the sweet summer between grade 10 and 11 when I would watch anything that had a cool enough video box regardless of whether it was released theatrically or straight-to-video. I had already gotten into writing reviews at this time and had made the decision that one day I would be a professional critic (I think my original review still exists on IMDB somewhere, spelling mistakes and all).

What played before me, at the time, I considered an act of absolute brilliance. Of course, back then, when you're young and think you know something about something, Donnie Darko was just the thing I needed to floor my mind. Here I was, 16 or somewhere there around, working the film out over and over in my head, connecting the dots, making huge, brilliant discoveries about life and love and fear and death. I thought I had seen a masterpiece.

Soon after I got a DVD player and slowly started collecting them (up until that point owning a movie had seemed a strange concept to me because they were expensive and you could just rent it whenever you needed to see it). Donnie Darko was one of my first purchases. I intended to watch it over and over and over again in my lifetime.

I just watched Donnie Darko for the second time tonight, Saturday February 27, 2010. I watched it because I want to sell off some DVDs and thought it might be one of them. Over the span on those years I've grown. I now hold a major in Film Studies, I've had reviews published and presented at a prestigious film conference, I've even gotten an e mail from Roger Ebert complimenting my writing, and, most importantly, I've watched some of the greatest films ever made.

Needless to say I don't feel the same about Donnie Darko. One of us apparently hasn't aged well. I can admire the craft of it's making, the professionalism of it's performances, but now I've learned that ideas are not what makes a film great or not, it's how it goes about presenting them (Roger Ebert once said, "It's not what a film is about that makes it good or not. It's how it's about it."), and an over-emphasis on film style doesn't impress me nearly as much as it once did.

In reality, Donnie Darko is one of those stepping stone pictures. Like Fight Club, The Boondock Saints or The Usual Suspects, to name a few, young people discover them and latch on to them because they are like nothing they have ever seen before. Every independent thinking, individualistic teenager wants to have something that they can hold above everyone else; something that speaks to them in volumes that their brainless colleagues could never comprehend, until they grow up, see more movies, better movies and finally realize that those films are no more than empty-headed and empty-hearted excursions into style, with shallow philosophies that serve only themselves, not the stories.

That was Donnie Darko to me. I'm glad I got out of that stage. Some people never do. I think Kevin Smith said it best on one of his Evening With... DVDs when he made that comment that not even writer/director Richard Kelly knows what Donnie Darko is about. The comment was in jest but that basically sums it up. Kelly has no overarching approach to this material. He has no one specific thing he is trying to say, so he says them all and hopes maybe one or two stick.

I know, I know there's all this contradictory imagery that shows the duality of the human psyche, and I get that, but so what? Does that automatically make the movie good? What does it have to do with time travel? By the time the movie rolls around into it's third act and starts looping back upon time and upon itself and we are treated to a conclusion that is more ironic than anything, you finally see what Kelly's point was: to try to hold this thing together for just under 2 hours. That he does it is commendable. But it still doesn't make the movie a success.

To put imagery in a movie and assume it speaks for itself isn't enough. The golden rule of style is that form must equal function. You cannot separate the story from the style. As Godard once said, they create each other. That's the mistake Donnie Darko makes: it doesn't provide an adequate story to back up it's symbolism. I can see why a lot of kids would connect with Donnie Darko. He's a depressed, dissatisfied youth, wandering through life just trying to find something meaningful. I obviously connected with that once upon a time myself. Now though, his journey just seems in vein because Kelly doesn't allow him to find that meaning. At the end, Darko isn't a kid on the verge of grand epiphany, he's just some character in some minor, hip indie flick that goes through the motions of being some character in some minor, hip indie flick, and that's about it really.

P.S.- It's also strange, all these years later, to see that Seth Rogen actually had a small part in this film (that's him in the back row). The part is so small I don't even think his character is ever given a name, but it was his first film role after starring in Judd Apatow's cult TV show Freaks and Geeks

Update- I found that original Donnie Darko review on IMDB and, despite how embarrassingly amateur and nonsensical it is (I clearly have no idea what I am talking about), have decided to post it in all of it's original, unedited glory:

What would happen if M. Night Shyamalan had let sam Ramai direct The Sixth Sense? You would probably get something like Donnie Darko. This film is so psycholigically complex I don't even know where to begin. The film is simply brilliant in that it has so many different issues weaven together to create on huge ball of irony, that one finds blinking may take your eyes off the screen for much to long. From the very beginning you get the feeling that this film has more to it than meets the eye. At first glance one may write it off as a modern day attempt at Poltergiest. After veiwing the trailer you may even want to consider it a brainless slasher movie but nothing could be further from the truth.

What we have here is the tale of a teenager who's name is Donnie Darko. But Donnie isn't your average teen, see he finds himself drawn at night to a myseterious force named Frank. Frank is a bunny who teels Donnie that in 28 days , on Halloween, the world will end. We also have Donnie's girlfreidn who had to move away because her step-father stabbed her mom in the chest four times and seems to be living a life of torment and personal angst all fueled by fear. Fear is a hard topic in the movie, infact I would say that that one world "fear" us the basis for everything to come.

We also have Jim Cunningham, a motivational speaker that teaches that fear and love are the two strongest emotions that a human has and learn to live your life in the love spectrum of life and avoid the fear. Then we have Grandma Death, an old lady who may just be the most important piece of this huge puzzel. She stands in the middle of the road all day, occasionlly walking to her mailbox to always be greeted by nothing inside. One day after Donnie's father almost runs her over she wispers in his ear "Everyone dies alone." Donnie later finds out that in the past she was a teacher and wrote a book on time travel (but to understand that without giving away the plot you must see the film).

This comment comes up at Donnie's therepy and along with stories of Frank the bunny his shrink believes that Donnie is afraid to connect with reality due to a great fear of what may come from it. It pains me to say this but the climax of the matches, if not surpasses that of The Sixth Sense as everything finally starts to make sense. This will not only leave you wide-eyed, it will probably take your breathe away as well. The acting is all top notch including as cast of Drew Barrymore, Patrick Swazey and the gripping Jake Gyllenhaal as Donnie in his most mature role yet.

The love/fear topic is present throughout the entire film and you can look for hidden signs of this scattered all over the film. One example of this is the billing of Evil Dead and The Last Temptation of Christ as a double feature at the theater. The film is horrifying and edgy without becoming cliched or unoriginal, making it not on;t the best, if you will, horror movie I've seen since The Sixth Sense, it is hands down the best movie of the year so far.