Hacker Cinema
Donnie Darko
2001 · Film · 114 min
Directed by Richard Kelly
After narrowly escaping a bizarre accident, a troubled teenager is plagued by visions of a large bunny rabbit that manipulates him to commit a series of crimes.
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42 comments on Hacker News
Donnie Darko is (to me) one of those movies ruined by the director's cut. Not only due to the music changes, but also because the "message" of the movie is made more explicit and on the nose. And reading Kelly's interviews and opinions is even worse. One of those movies where keeping the original, and the mystery, is absolutely mandatory.
I didn't know that and Donnie Darko is one of my favourite films.
From Wikipedia: "The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen was replaced with "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS, which Kelly had not had the rights to use in the film's theatrical release.
Also: Kelly had originally wanted to use the songs "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS and "West End Girls" by the Pet Shop Boys during the opening scene of Donnie cycling home and Sparkle Motion's dance at the talent show respectively, but financial constraints meant that he instead had to use "The Killing Moon" by Echo & the Bunnymen and "Notorious" by Duran Duran. For the director's cut, Kelly was able to gain the rights to use "Never Tear Us Apart" for the opening scene, and moved "The Killing Moon" to later in the film; "Notorious" was not moved from the talent show scene.
hell, it can ruin the movie in some cases, like Donnie Darko
His death later inspired the movie Donnie Darko, about a kid in 1988 who is killed by a jet engine in similar circumstances.
I absolutely love websites like this that have a ton of information about a very niche topic. No ads or monetization, just someone who put together a very detailed website about something they love.
I think my first encounter with a website like this was for the movie Donnie Darko, which I found after I first watched the movie and was trying to understand the story. The website is still up! [0]
If anyone has examples of similar websites, I would absolutely love to read them.
[0] http://www.donniedarko.org.uk
It goes on my list of 'dreamlike' movies, they don't always fully add up consciously but you can feel your unconscious going into overdrive while watching them (or maybe there is a surface plot that mostly adds up, like EWS, but there is clearly something going on at a least one other level). The viewing experience is often downright hypnotic for me.
A few off the top of my head, this is a very personal list and I can't even claim that all these movies are 'good' in any particular sense. Just that they put me into this state: * basically anything in lynch's cannon. I'm not always the biggest fan of his stuff, but sometimes they hit me hard. * Cronenberg's Videodrome and it's spiritual sequel Existenz * Donnie Darko & Southland Tales (objectively just an awful movie) * Prince of Darkness * Enter the Void (not for the faint of heart) * Paprika * Solaris (the original mostly, there are some qualities in the remake) * Stalker * Dark City * Sorry to Bother You * The Fountain * 8 1/2 * The Ninth Gate * and certainly Eyes Wide Shut
For convenience, I asked ChatGPT to create this table, which summarizes how many times each movie has been mentioned in this conversation so far. It got a few counts wrong (as usual), but it still gives a good sense of the frequency. I hope it can be useful to someone:
| Movie | Number of Mentions | |-------------------------------------------|---------------------| | The Matrix | 9 | | Lord of the Rings Trilogy | 8 | | Pulp Fiction | 8 | | Alien | 7 | | Fight Club | 7 | | Ghostbusters | 6 | | Die Hard | 5 | | Back to the Future | 5 | | Inception | 5 | | Star Wars Trilogy (original) | 5 | | Groundhog Day | 5 | | Terminator 1 & 2 | 5 | | Jurassic Park | 4 | | The Thing | 4 | | The Fifth Element | 4 | | Monty Python and the Holy Grail | 4 | | Ghost in the Shell | 4 | | Interstellar | 4 | | Casablanca | 3 | | Office Space | 3 | | Shawshank Redemption | 3 | | The Godfather Trilogy | 3 | | The Blues Brothers | 3 | | Blade Runner | 3 | | Mad Max: Fury Road | 3 | | Unforgiven | 3 | | Total Recall (1990) | 3 | | The Crow | 3 | | The Princess Bride | 3 | | Akira | 3 | | The Big Lebowski | 3 | | Guardians of the Galaxy | 3 | | American Psycho | 3 | | Indiana Jones Trilogy | 3 | | Kiki’s Delivery Service | 2 | | Ratatouille | 2 | | A Clockwork Orange | 2 | | Mission Impossible (various) | 2 | | Casino Royale | 2 | | Skyfall | 2 | | Ferris Bueller's Day Off | 2 | | Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan | 2 | | Apocalypse Now | 2 | | The Shining | 2 | | Groundhog Day | 2 | | Donnie Darko | 2 | | Dune (2021) | 2 | | Gladiator | 2 | | Predator | 2 | | Seven/Se7en | 2 | | The Dark Knight | 2 | | Snatch | 2 | | Prometheus | 2 | | Schindler’s List | 2 | | The Wolf of Wall Street | 2 | | Dr. Strangelove | 2 | | Silence of the Lambs | 2 | | Kill Bill | 2 | | Real Genius | 2 | | Top Secret! | 2 | | Tenet | 2 | | Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy | 2 | | The Adjustment Bureau | 2 | | The Expanse | 2 | | Pulp Fiction | 2 |
Movies I rewatch like once a year: Trainspotting (1996), Donnie Darko (2001), La Haine (1995)
Movies I've watched quite a few times and wouldn't mind watching again right now: The Matrix (1999), Akira, Breakfast Club
I downloaded it in the UK.
Here, there's not that much high quality TV content on it that isn't available on the free VOD providers (BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4) for the free-to-air TV channels. If I click on to the 'Series Spotlight' and look at the TV series on offer, they're all strange low budget things ('Bad Girls Club', 'Evil Killers', 'Z Nation'...) and I've not heard of the first 19 of them. The 20th one is a 'Gordon Ramsey: Uncharted' National Geographic show that I have access to through Disney+.
For films the picture is much better in that there are popular ones that if not blockbusters were at least things I'd heard of, but it's still mostly older stuff (Donnie Darko, Kick-Ass, Pacific Rim: Uprising, Twilight, Saw, Kill Bill).
Brazil, The man from Earth, Moon, The fountain, Ad Astra, Donnie Darko, Ender's Game, Edge of tomorrow, Solaris (the old one), Westworld (70s), Metropolis (the japanese anime), Dark Star (trippy, 70s, great end), Firefly series and Serenity movie, Attack the block, Fifth Element, planet of the apes (the old one), ex machina, children of men
And you will likely end up with one high quality movie and 110 duds. We remember movies like Donnie Darko because they are the exception.
How many Donnie Darko movies they can make before they start hitting diminishing returns? I wonder how many people want to watch 111 of them. There would be some natural variance between performances, editing, lighting, and the like, but it might be a niche audience who can appreciate those nuanced differences between what many might believe are effectively the same films.
Or fund _one hundred_ Donnie Darko movies.
Edit: 111 movies.
Or fund one hundred Donnie Darko movies.
I wonder how many great websites we lost with the death of Flash.
Off the top of my head, I remember visiting the website for the movie Donnie Darko back when the film was originally released and being blown away at the strangeness and creativity of it.
I think the author makes some good points. I've been a customer of Netflix way back when it was DVDs-in-envelopes and that was awesome because you could get just about any new movie as soon as it was released. The current Netflix is irritating by comparison. I can hardly find anything to watch, especially the stuff I search for. Instead, I'm railroaded into things Netflix created instead, by the algorithm that suggests similar alternatives, all of which feel like cheap knock-offs. I want to watch Star Wars. I want to watch Back to the Future. I want to watch Donnie Darko. And not just when Netflix happens to have them on the catalog.
Not exactly the same, but that quote reminded me of quote from the Donnie Darko movie: “everyone dies alone” [0]. I believe this is very much true.
——
[0]: https://youtu.be/8j1IMBM-QyE
Oh tsk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=accEKtBebaU
Good movie. A bit nuts. Product of a much more innocent time; set in an even more innocent time than that. Also no-one’s innocent. Free to watch with ads on Amazon Prime, or you can rent or pick it up on DVD for a few bucks.
https://www.amazon.com/Donnie-Darko-Jake-Gyllenhaal/dp/B002MGGM9I
I’m reminded of the film Donnie Darko, but I won’t say more as to not spoil anything for anyone.
Hah. I had bookmarked Donnie Darko because, while I had already watched it (good movie, even better soundtrack!) I wanted to watch it again with my wife. I swear it was available the week before I finally decided to rewatch it, then of course it was gone when I wanted it.
(By the way, I know this doesn't actually happen, but I swear Netflix sticks in my bookmarks movies and shows I never bookmarked!)
> Maybe Netflix loses the rights and it disappears.
That is interesting because it happened to me in the most annoying way possible:
I was watching Donnie Darko, a rather obscure movie that requires (or at least for me required) a bit of brainpower to watch. So I watched the first half of it and planned to watch the remainder the next day. Come the next day, and where is the movie? Nowhere to be found.
Also Memento was a $9 million dollar movie, even in 2000 that wasn't a lot of money.
What we're missing these days are what myself and my buddy, who's a film buff and writer, are the 10-30 million dollar films. Well written, competent director and director of photography, a reasonable cast of most likely newbies but they can act, and a decent plot/story....Memento, Donnie Darko, The Hurt Locker. Jeez the Hurt Locker was just a 15 million dollar movie, but it's pretty decent (I've watched it five times).
I think it´s funny with that much comments, none of them are really on the core issue here.
Just imagine if Tim Berners-Lee banded together with Mark Andreessen to create a closed and centralized platform, were they could centrally control everything.
Thats why i think the mobile phone plataforms are a real danger to a world were the information flows freely and were no government or company can control.
People are giving to much power to those companies, and when they do what a lot of people know they would do, they just wip, and try to contact his digital lord to just have mercy.
Dont neal, dont help them kill the spirit behind a world were people can access the things they want without any sort of centralized control.
Its beyond me how many people are so worried about government controlling their freedom, but are ok with companies doing it.
We do not need to accept this. The problem is in the app store model.. (they could create it, as long other could compete, but they could NEVER choose what you can access) and guess what, now our governments are too are weak to regulate them.
They can spy on us, know what we are doing, help shady government agencies, control what you see, listen, access and in the end shape what you think (Remember all the mess the simple 'like' Facebook algorithm did to the world.. its too dumb. It reminds me "Donnie Darko" with that shady coaching of "everything should be on the hate-or-love axis").
The despotic government of the future for me is a bunch of big tech companies who control information, and the lives of all of us united to have a world were they will be all powerful and always relevant.
People dont seem to know the dangers we are facing. This is very serious, and its a glimpse of the future. Think how much of what you understand as your right will be suddenly terminated by despotic tech companies who are too powerful to be controled or regulated.
It´s even worse, if you think we are in the dawn of the AI and what a very powerful player can do to keep the control.
You can think im exagerating, and i really hope im wrong, but its a real possibility, and we should not let this awful future be materialized because we did not see how this could be possible.
And to help you figure it out, if you travelled back in time to tell your 2010 self how the world would be in 2019, do you think he would believe it? We are living in idiocracy all over the world, and we use to laugh to those sort of movies. (Dr. Strangelove will soon look a lot like a documentary of the modern days)
What I’ve noticed about lawns:
From looking at pre-1990s houses in the suburbs, I have noticed that lawns typically comprise a large percentage of the lot size. It seems to me, back when those houses were built, a desirable quality of a suburban home was having a ‘lawn where the kids could play around’. Lawns also were (and still are) a personal show of accomplishment, so people took interest in their lawns and the lawns of others. (If you watch 80s and 90s movies with suburban shots - like Donnie Darko - it also shows “the American lawn” in the suburbs).
In newer houses built after the 2000s, I’ve seen house size comprise more of the total lot size, and lawn size reduced. I figure this is a sign of the trend to have a big house over a lawn. It’s fairly economical today to build a template-style cul-de-sac or subdivision of “large” homes built closer together (thus smaller lawns) to capitalize on the land. Plus, if someone is spending a lot of money on a house, then I suppose they want to get their money’s worth in amenities (2 car garage, 3+ full baths, nice kitchen, big living room, etc), which means more house is needed. There’s also less reason to care about having a lawn if it’s going to get less use out of it. On speculation, maybe 70% of the lot is house, with the remaining 30% of the lot being a small front yard and larger fenced back yard.
Aside:
As for having natural lawns that are more locally ecological friendly as opposed to manicured grass, I think the main impediment is people’s perceptions and fear of “pests”. Either neighbors get pissed off or they complain about property values, local ordinances, HOA bylaws, etc to some local government about “non-standard” lawns that promote ecological cohabitation.
It’s kind of weird so many people in the suburbs have this view. Like they are actually afraid of having nature next to them, when the suburbs are a place outside the city built right next to nature and rural land.
I used to live close to a small park, and I would leave out unused food at night on ocassion for deers, rabbits, and stray cats that would wander around, instead of throwing it away. My neighbor saw me doing that and threatened to call the cops on me, and report me to the health board and animal control. If animals were wrecking havok on neighbors yards I would understand, but neighbors like these are so protectionist of their yards, they will blow up a petty thing to huge proportions and find a way to get “the law” on their side to make life miserable for someone. As if I am putting them in grave danger because a deer ate some berries in my backyard. I don’t understand why people would buy a house next to a park if they really needed to be so fenced off.
The use of licensed music is a critical component in many movies. Just consider Donnie Darko or Goodfellas.
Reading the sample of Dunne’s temporal geometry, I was reminded of the film Donnie Darko, in which the protagonist repeatedly attempts to figure out a similarly complicated early 20th century theory of time travel.
There's also a (possibly apocryphal) quote by Nabokov ('All the Russia I need is with me, always with me. Literature, language and my own Russian childhood. I will never return.') that would be burnished by the inclusion of dreams of his long-lost homeland.
I've watched a lot of horror movies and none of them came anywhere close to scaring me. It's too easy to remember that they're not real. Donnie Darko however has scenes I'd call "philosophically scary", and knowing it's not real does nothing to lessen the impact. Despite not being officially horror I found it more horrifying than any horror movie.
I never thought of Donnie Darko as a horror movie. Care to elaborate?
I know this feeling exactly. I one time consumed 2.5g of caffeine on a very VERY stupid dare.
Me and another kid were trying to bluster each other and each were one-upping the other, though we had a hard limit of 3g. He had 2g and started crying, shaking, and rolled up in the fetal position. In retrospect we should have taken him to the hospital, but he was fine.
The experience reminds me a lot of the movie Donnie Darko mixed with the futurama episode of Fry drinking 200 cups of coffee; it felt like you could see the animus of someone being projected into the future, and everything was practically at a standstill (like the time I was in a car accident).
We had a few pick up games of various games at this LAN we were at while doing this, and I won every one of them having to do with twitch speed even if the person had 5 yrs experience on me in a game and I had never played it before.
Not something I would repeat voluntarily, but it was an interesting experience.
>>> So Facebook knows I like Bob's Burgers but not The Family Guy. And?
This. While in general privacy is definitely a concern, I see "don't give your information" way too often and it's becoming sort of a cliche.
How might the fact that I like some certain artists affect me in the future? No one is going to blackmail me for the fact that I liked Wu Tang Clan. I won't get denied some visa or whatever because I liked Donnie Darko movie.
Privacy is important but let's stop from making it a cliche or some 'easy win'.
Another cinematic application for a rabbit-proof fence: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/
Donnie Darko opened the month after 9/11, and many theaters refused to show it due to its depiction of a plane crashing. Didn't go positive in the box office likely as a result.
Absolutely excellent cult film for anyone interested.
Talk about timing. I just wrote up a list for a friend that includes a bunch of weird movies (most of them being head trips). My list includes two Cronenberg movies as well! Though, to be honest, I'm not really a fan of either. Heh, I know this is a little off topic but for those that dove this deep into the thread, maybe you would like to expand your weird movie viewing experience.
01. Eraserhead-- This feature film was the debut for Writer/Director David Lynch. The film is noted for its usage of sound as a theatrical device and "the baby" which is rumored to be created from an embalmed cow fetus. The films script is a scant 21 pages despite a running time of 85 minutes (script pages typically match runtimes).
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074486/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eraserhead
02. Dead Leaves-- Produced in 2004, this Japanese animated film clocks in at 55 minutes long. The films (thin) plot is composed almost entirely of a chase/fight scene that begins on earth and ends on a space station. The movie's weirdness climaxes when when the mutant baby of the the film's protagonists is born and proceeds to kill a giant space catepillar which is attempting to eat the earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Leaves http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0439533/
03. House -- This 1977 Japanese film certainly ranks as one of the weirdest (if not the weirdest) movies of all time. It was unreleased in the U.S. until after a screening at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival. In an iconic scene, a Japanese girl is consumed by piano monster as a green eyed catch watches.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_(1977_film)
04. Jacob's Ladder- Fans of the game Silent Hill should well be aware of this movie from 1990 that inspired many of its elements. Tim Robbins stars as a vietnam war vet suffering from demonic images increasingly polluting his fragile reality. One paticularly gruesome scene includes Robbins being wheeled through a bloody hospital corrirodor filled with limbs and mutating torsos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobs_Ladder_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099871/
05. Barton Fink- This Cohen Brothers film stars John Turturro as a novelist. The 1991 film closes with a set of iconic scenes including John Goodman exiting a burning hallway (like a badass).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barton_Fink http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0101410/
06. Naked Lunch- The first of two Cronenberg films in this category. This 1991 film adaptation of a William S. Burroughs novel features a protagonist who uses bug spray as a chemical escape from reality. Talking insects and failed "William Tell Routines" are just some of the madness this movie contains.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102511/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_Lunch
07. Videodrome- David Cronenberg wrote and directed this movie staring James Woods. The movie centers around Wood's character, a sleazy TV exec, who inreasingly loses touch with reality after he comes across a station which airs extreme violence and torture. Key scenes include his merger with a TV set and a VHS tape being thrust into his stomach.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086541/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videodrome
08. Donnie Darko (Jake and Maggie Gyllenhall sp?)- Donnie Darko served as philosophical fodder for a whole generation of "Emos". Written and directed by Richard Kelly. The movie stars this brother-sister hollywood team. The movie covers a wealth of ideas including fatalism and time travel. Movie goers will inevitably remember the creepy bunny head that pervades entirety of the film.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0246578/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donnie_Darko
09. Human Centipede- This 2010 dutch horror film quickly became a meme rivaling Two Girls One Cup for gross-out factor. The film features a mad doctor who connects three unfortunate souls in the most unfortunate way possible.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_centipede http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1467304/
10. Brazil- The second installment of Terry Gilliam's "Imagination Trilogy". This 1985 film represents the dreams of adults including navigating beurocracy and chasing true love. Robert DeNiro also provides a notable role as a rebel repairman in the film.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil_(film) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088846/
11. Black Swan 12. Paprika 13. Being John Malkovich 05. Teeth
This kind of reminds me of the Fear - Love spectrum in Donnie Darko. I don't want to be a charlatan, martyr, or hustler. The world really isn't that simple. And if you want to know where you can put your spectrum, see the movie and find out.
I agree - the article kind of lost purpose midway in the first paragraph, so I skimmed it too and found it with an atrocious closing paragraph.
My wife is generally averse to sci-fi, so what I always make sure to do is point out when an 'ordinary' movie is using sci-fi and it becomes disturbingly long.
I like to point out movies like Inception (being a big one people don't see as sci-fi even though it is pure sci-fi), Donnie Darko (a movie about time travel), V for Vendetta, Frankenstein, Jurassic Park and the funniest I've had to point out has been E.T. And that's without even having to step out into the 'grey area' where movies are using sci-fi 'concepts' or just using mild sci-fi elements.
It also works to point out that almost 3/4 of horror movies are still solidly sci-fi.
I think sci-fi's death will be when it becomes so mainstream it's rarely differentiated from regular fiction, which with a lot of movies it's still hard to convince people it's sci-fi. I mean 'Click' with Adam Sandler is a great example. It's sci-fi through and through, but because it's using only 1 element people won't believe it's sci-fi.
Just not possible... That's not fun.
Let me just clarify a little bit. Traveling to the past is not possible. "Traveling" to the future is already known how to.
At least some fiction make a coherent history for how time travel works, like Primer or Asimov's book 'The End of Eternity'... Unlike for example Donnie Darko, a movie that i love, but the ending....
No, I understood. And I really appreciate your intentions. I just addressed the things that were most relevant to me in more detail. I do have congressman fight insurance companies on my behalf. But, I'm very lucky because of my wife and finances at this point in my life (finally), so I think I can have a bigger impact by thinking outside of my own problems a bit.
One of the people that was very helpful to me in finding treatment (and her sister) are in the documentary I mention, for example, and she died from Lyme complications after filming because she was denied adequate treatment for so long. I know others that have died due to Lyme and associated vector-borne diseases. (A celebrity reference for the HN crowd: Mary McDonnell of Donnie Darko and Battlestar Galactica is an activist in fighting Lyme and associated tick diseases that I occasionally see because she had a family member die of Lyme.) In sum, people are dying - and wishing they could die - because of these diseases, so I also wanted to address other actions I have taken and that others can also take.
The difference is that The Catcher In The Rye is well-written, whereas American Beauty is tripe, and Donnie Darko is low-budget tripe. AB overstates everything and generally treats its audience like idiots (and hey, it won an Academy Award for that), and Donnie Darko is incredibly incoherent and so withstands every possible interpretation.
Compare that to the titular scene from Catcher In The Rye:
"You know that song 'If a body catch a body comin' through the rye'? I'd like — "
"It's 'If a body meet* a body coming through the rye'!" old Phoebe said. "It's a poem. By Robert Burns."*
"I know it's a poem by Robert Burns."
She was right, though. It is "If a body meet a body coming through the rye." I didn't know it then, though.
"I thought it was 'If a body catch a body,'" I said. "Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."
It suffers from being out of context, but basically Holden - the first talker - is talking with Phoebe about his life, and it's really immaculately done. Listen to his words. He doesn't come across as a phony-hating phony. He's just a confused guy trying to talk to his sister. The dialogue is a little dated in its construction, but it's still concise and powerful and it does pretty much exactly what it's trying to do. He mentions he wants to catch these children, but at the same time the narrator's admitting that he was wrong about this when he said it. And he doesn't come across as a douche, he comes across as a scared college student. The "douche" interpretation comes from people who skimmed the book and resented it from the beginning. I had that attitude for a while. It's not fair to the book.
In American Beauty, Kevin Spacey is an over-the-top pervert whose death was completely welcomed. In Donnie Darko, Jake Gyllenhaal is filthily melodramatic. Holden Caulfield, though, is really easy to sympathize with. He's not at all a broken, cliched character. It's hard even to call him cliched when you look directly at the soliloquy lines. Here are two samples from around the same part in the book:
The trouble with girls is, if they like a boy, no matter how big a bastard he is, they'll say he has an inferiority complex, and if they don't like him, no matter how nice a guy he is, or how big an inferiority complex he has, they'll say he's conceited. Even smart girls do it.
-
The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.
This isn't just Salinger writing "Oh man I hate how fake people are". It's him providing this view of the world again from this frustrated kid. And he's pessimistic about it and you can read the book as saying he's wrongly pessimistic - I do - but his pessimism isn't at all melodramatic and you can read Catcher In The Rye without it catching you up at all. I read it for the story: The leave from college, the search for his family, the incident with the hooker, are all really moving and engaging bits of story, and Holden's frustration is accurate enough that you can sympathize it even when you disagree with him.
If you look at "Catcher" as a critique of Holden Caulfield, you're still doing the book a disservice. Catcher In The Rye is first and foremost a story, and if you try reading it without analyzing it you'll probably find that it holds up terrific even when it's not a part of literature. That's the part of these books that all this analysis ignores: The point is always to tell a story, and the rest of this is just the icing on top.
No. You're wholly, unequivocally wrong.
A movie is good based on certain various aspects. There's the directorial technique. There's the cinematography. There's plot, there's acting. Donnie Darko had almost nothing.
The plot is extremely basic. The only reason people call it deep and confusing is because the director was absolutely shitty. It was his first time ever with a camera, and so the guy had no sense of timing and placement. The cuts are awful: I'm not a huge film buff but they made me cringe. The writing is thoroughly terrible. Donnie is a Mary Sue: hot, people like him (or, the right people do), he's very smart. Look at how he cuts down that strawman presenter at the start of the movie! Never mind that the arguments he makes are extraordinarily basic, or that this is a supposed professional he's arguing against. When I was 14, I had these same fantasies as myself as somebody who could say basic stuff and get away with its seeming clever. The problem is, by the time I was 15 I'd realized the valuable lesson that people tend to be smarter than you assume at first, and that they can respond to dumb stuff like that.
Other people my age didn't get that lesson, and as a result became unpopular, developed lots of weird obsessions, and left school with fantasies of themselves as supersmart supermen. Richard Kelly, the director of this movie, absolutely seems like one of these people.
In an interview I saw of Kelly, he says that the movie's not at all deep or complex. In his mind it's a straightforward movie. That shows the utter incompetence of the guy. He wasn't out to make something complex, and he made the movie so poorly that people decided it had to be complex and brooding.
Look, for instance, at the movie's much-lauded connection with the Reagan era. Once you've been told it's there, yeah, it's obvious. Beyond that? It's not a consistent theme. There are two or three moments where it's over-the-top blatant in your face, and beyond that it's completely abandoned and ignored.
The fact that you can't understand the movie without reading an external web site is a flaw. If you make the movie well, the entire thing is internal and consistent.
Acting-wise: yech. Nobody does a good job. It must have been because of the directing intent, because Jake Gyllenhall is a good actor when he's with a good director. In this he had about one tone of voice overall.
A good friend of mine who's a film buff once said of Donnie Darko and Moulin Rouge: they're the two tests of what kind of a movie person you are. If you like them, you're saying that you're willing to ignore a lot of flaws in a movie's conception for the sake of its glitzier sides. I agree with that statement, particularly about Donnie Darko.
Hmm, I find the list kind of "meh". There are some good films on there, but a lot of them I don't consider adventurous enough to be on among The Truly Strange. Lynch's stuff fits that bill well, but doesn't belong on the same page as e.g. Donnie Darko. A lot of these are really just witty.
Donnie Darko is such a terrible movie. It's utterly lacking in craft and expertise. People like it because - despite claims - it's easy to comprehend and simplistic in moral, but it's plain bad.
Complicated paradoxes like these make me appreciate simple ones like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sound_of_Thunder
After I saw Donnie Darko, I had to spend most of the night and early morning reading the theories which was fun. Great movie.
I recall Biff from Back to the Future saying in an interview he had no idea what was going on in the last film of the trilogy.