Review: Donnie Darko

[da]

Working my way through my movie to-watch list: I learned about Donnie Darko when I asked imdb for favourite cult films. The title totally didn't ring a bell for me. If it doesn't for you either, that's probably because its North American release date was October 2001, and it involves airplane parts crashing into a building. It had a poor theatre opening here.

However, it apparently played really strongly in the UK, and 2002 saw artist nutbars going around stenciling scary rabbit silhouettes all over the place.

I'm not going to summarize the plot. It involves time-travel, psychosis, destiny, teen love (with a slightly younger Jake Gyllenhaal), 80s music, skewering inspirational speakers (Patrick Swayze!), and, it must be said, a very Lolita-esque school band. Reading the wikipedia and imdb pages helped a bit after I saw it the first time; the amount of fan-exegesis of this movie is... well, it is what the Internet does best.

I liked it enough to watch a second time to tie up the loose ends (and replay some wonderful bits of dialogue. Favourite: "I heard they found feces all over the school." "What are feces?" "Baby mice." "Awwwwww.")

I like the overall magical-realism feel, as well as the dark humour, and I like the ending-credits song ('Mad World', a somewhat dark song written by Tears for Fears). The story is... clever. And occasionally maddeningly opaque.

[Edit: I saw the Director's Cut, which is supposed to be the better version.]

Comments

[da-lj.livejournal.com]

I was wondering if anyone was going to call me on that. :)

Better in the sense that more of it is publicly accessable, certainly. Also consider: all of wikipedia is written by fans. Much of the porn is also fan-exegesis, since geeks all obsess over the same women.

I could go on, if you like. :)