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DARK, OH!revised 101805

I went off the Best list today and watched a film that I have heard and heard and heard about:

Donnie Darko (2001)

It is a kind of mess of a movie which I bet is headed for cult status.

It is one of those 'figure this out' films. Which, I believe, leaves all the right brain analyzers out of the picture, so to speak.

It is not a rational issue. You sort of take it in and let intuition and feel take over. You either get it or you don't. I think I got it but I cannot for the life of me tell you what 'it' is.

The review at the link is from the NYTimes on the theatrical version. The film opened right after 9/11 and, as it is apocalyptic, that wasn't good timing. In addition, it does not lay itself out for you. It is a teen-pic with so much angst and weird shit happening that it probably alienates ever conceivable market niche.

On its first trip into the theaters it bombed. $500,000 gross and out.

Here is the Ebert review on the director's cut which is the version we saw.

I am glad that I saw it. It will sink in. I like Jake Gyllenhaal and his sister Maggie is his movie sister. Neat.

A lot of conventions are skewered here and I always like to see that.

I am going to give it a 4 out of Netflix5.

OK. OK. I will take a crack at it.

This is all spoiler from here on. Do not read this if you haven't seen the film and think you might want to.

Save the seminar until after.

Jake is a gifted schizophrenic kid who 'sees' a being who tells him how to use a time portal. There is some serious doubt about whether this is in his own head or not; whether maybe he is dreaming it.

They even screw with us on this when he runs the time back and goes to sleep. You think "oh this is Dallas" or something. He will wake up and it will be over.

I don't think so.

I think that he does have a gift and he does get into the portal and that there are things that are happening for and to which he is instrumental.

He sees a lot of shit coming down the pike; a lot of which he is instrumental in. He realizes that, if he can travel back and kill himself, all the things that he is instrumental in will not happen.

So he returns to the original day that the movie starts and lets the pivotal thing happen to him so that it kills him and thus, saves the world. He is a christ figure, after all. There are a lot of clues to this.

How do I know this? I studied modern American literature with Carvel Collins at MIT. That is why.

There is a lot of recreational stuff thrown in and around the through line that I have described to make it time-portally. There is a lot of god stuff hanging around. Psychoanalysis takes some hits and then comes through. There are some barbs left over for Tony Roberts type gurus. There is some funny fundamentalist religion, sort of.

And all that.

There is even a pointer in the picture to how and where he starts and/or finishes the drama. Lit teacher Drew Barrymore talks about the deus ex machina. In this case it is a very very large jet engine which, as it happens, probably drops off his mother's plane thirty days after the day that the engine falls into DD's bedroom. Gotta see it.

The rest is up to you to see in the picture. Enough spoiling.

Now, I am going to give it a 5 out of Netflix5 and include myself in the cult.

The director of this first film is only now 30 years old. How in the hell did he get them to let him make this? Richard Kelly.