FEATURING: Dwayne Johnson, Seann William Scott, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Justin Timberlake, Wallace Shawn, Miranda Richardson

PLOT: In an alternate-universe America controlled by a surveillance-happy government, the

lives of several Los Angeles residents—including a disabled veteran, a police officer, an amnesiac movie star, and a cell of political revolutionaries—intersect on the eve of the apocalypse.

WHY IT’S ON THE BORDERLINE:  Although its many subplots pile weird images and ideas on top of each other, many of them remain totally superfluous, and the film as a whole is a disappointing nexus of influences and half-baked premises rather than a cohesive work of art.  However, it does contain some moments of mesmerizing weirdness, and could have a chance of being certified weird in the future.

COMMENTS:  To follow up his impressive debut feature, Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly clearly wanted to challenge himself.  With Southland Tales, however, he bit off more than he could chew. All of Donnie Darko’s best and worst tendencies are on display (with an emphasis on the latter), but this time the showcase is twice as long, with enough intricate storylines and bizarre sci-fi subtexts to fill a dozen less ambitious movies.  With his second film’s epic size, Kelly lost the gently emotional touch that made Donnie’s coming-of-age so poignant; his fiery creative passion is still very perceptible here, but it’s obscured behind layers of apocalyptic razzle-dazzle, broad satire, and sophomoric humor.

In Southland Tales’ alternate timeline, Texas was struck by terrorist nukes in 2005, triggering World War III; this back story is filled in via a YouTube-style montage of video clips and hyperlinks.  It’s a genuinely original method of exposition, but alas, it’s a rare example of Kelly’s innovative spirit overcoming his love of non sequitur jokes and stunt casting.  While Donnie Darko just had Patrick Swayze’s unnervingly effective performance as a demagogic motivational speaker, Southland Tales crams in a disorienting array of surprise cameos and supporting players: Jon Lovitz as a hard-as-nails policeman; Kevin Smith as a bearded, paralyzed conspirator; Wallace Shawn as a megalomaniacal inventor who’s always accompanied by a bevy of eccentrics, Poltergeist’s Zelda Rubinstein among them.  This more-the-merrier approach aids in Kelly’s quest to make his movie as idiosyncratic as possible, but it also makes it feel like a 2 ½ hour parade of sideshows that are dragged together for a spectacular but meaningless finale.

These nonstop distractions notwithstanding, the film’s putative focus is on the conflict between the repressive regime of Orwellian snow queen Nana Mae Frost (Miranda Richardson) and Los Angeles’s guerrilla “Neo-Marxists,” with both sides trying to use delusional action movie star Boxer Santaros (Johnson) as their pawn.  Boxer’s fragile mental state during his stay with the Neo-Marxists and porn queen/media darling Krysta Now (Gellar) initially looks like a promising inroad to a neo-noirish mystery, especially as it features a clip of Kiss Me Deadly, but the plot thread degenerates into a series of unsatisfying explanations involving time travel, accidental cloning, and rips in the space-time continuum. Whereas Donnie Darko’s bizarre sci-fi detours worked as analogies for mental illness and self-sacrifice, Southland Tales gets weighed down in its third act by rambling expositional speeches about what’s going on, what it has to do with the energy source “Fluid Karma,” and why it’s all leading to the end of the world.  Why the viewer should care is never really addressed; Kelly just takes it for granted that we’re equally into his indecipherable mind games.

This is why Southland Tales is so frustrating.  Kelly’s desperate commentary on the state of 9/11 America is muffled beneath his extreme self-indulgence: his puerile jokes, like the title of Krysta’s debut album, Teen Horniness Is Not a Crime, which is repeated ad nauseum; his pretentious, self-congratulatory allusions, as when the movie practically grinds to a halt so he can demonstrate his knowledge of T.S. Eliot; and his painfully tone-deaf satire, which is reduced to cheap shots against Nana Mae’s stiff-necked presidential candidate husband (Holmes Osbourne).  The desperation is clearly there; the commentary, however, is lacking.  The film’s most potent scene is the one that’s unburdened by Kelly’s absurd dialogue: a 3-minute music video set to The Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done” in which a scarred, world-weary Justin Timberlake swaggers, lip-synchs, and guzzles beer in a hallucinated arcade.  Functioning like the “Mad World” sequence in Donnie Darko, the pairing of song and set-piece let Kelly escape into pop sublimity.  His dizzying, blatantly artificial visual aesthetic is most enjoyable in this bite-sized chunk; sustained over 144 minutes, it gets a little tiresome, especially when the film runs out of coherent ideas to back it up.

It’s a tragedy, really, because Southland Tales contains all the seeds of a truly great, weird, all-American epic.  Unfortunately, the film’s excesses trample over its subtler, more original ideas, and Kelly’s solipsistic smugness makes some scenes just embarrassing to watch.  The film aspires to meld a Robert Altman ensemble drama with the loopy reality-bending of Philip K. Dick, but settles for a more jokily postmodern version of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days.  Maybe if the film’s apocalyptic scenarios weren’t so calculatingly outlandish, or maybe if its lofty political and philosophical themes were given more than a perfunctory nod, then it could’ve been the masterpiece Richard Kelly wanted.  Instead, it’s an awkward jumble, a testament to one man’s artistic obsessions, and a mediocre movie.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…aspires to meld the satirical sci-fi of Kurt Vonnegut with the mesmerising weirdness of David Lynch, but Kelly hasn’t yet found the filmmaking skill to match his vaulting imagination…”–Paul Arendt, BBC (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly

FEATURING:  Cameron Diaz, Frank Langella, James Marsden

PLOT: A man comes unsolicited one morning to the doorstep of a financially

troubled family with a proposition: if they press a button he gives them within 24 hours, they will receive $1 million, and someone in the world, who they don’t know, will die.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Kelly’s surreal odyssey through Virginia in the mid 70s is hauntingly strange. One would not think it to be remarkably anything from the marketing, the extremely negative reviews put out by, um, pretty much everyone, and a tame, seemingly safe cast. But this is Richard Kelly, so nothing is really as it seems. The Box needs to be considered for the List because Kelly tells a morality story involving aliens, God, and Jean-Paul Sartre in ways that are as flippant and off-handedly odd as Fellini, as unflinching as Lynch, and as psychologically insightful as Cronenberg.  And while Kelly is not as good a filmmaker as those three, he has grown undeniably in his talents since Donnie Darko, and this time his story is just as weird.

COMMENTS:  The Box is a little more complex than you’re led to believe in the trailers.  I was honestly underwhelmed when I first heard about the idea, but after hearing more about it, it started growing on me.  I wanted to know what the deal was with this button, and what I got was beyond my wildest imaginings.  It’s unusually dense for a Richard Kelly movie, filled with haunting music, esoteric imagery, and references to existential philosophy.  In a way, The Box is Kelly’s most obscure work yet, even more obscure than his previous film, the dumb, loud Southland Tales. For something he’s touted as his commercial movie, I have the feeling that he might never have actually seen a commercial movie, because what he came up with is quite weird, and more than a little off-putting for the average movie goer at large.

Kelly’s imagination makes the film something special.  He takes a simple, bare-bones concept from a Richard Matheson short story and adds a third, and perhaps even a fourth, dimension to it, borrowing both from the Twilight Zone episode of the same name and from his own eccentricities.  The Box is divided into three acts.  The first act is the entirety of the Matheson story, neatly told like a television episode, with only minor asides. The third act is a reprise of the first act, with a new proposition put forth and a dastardly cyclical chain of events revealed.  But the second act is, from what I gather, completely and utterly original.  The plot goes from something reminiscent of an Outer Limits episode to the most mind-boggling sequences that one could ever imagine in this setting.  People being contacted by aliens through lightning, a community possessed by otherworldly powers, and a climactic scene in the public library that wins my vote for weirdest scene of the year all permeate this middle portion of The Box, and while I think the movie is well-rounded, the weirdness quotient is jammed up nice and tight in the middle.

It’s not all good.  There are a few things I could have done without.  First, Norma, played by Cameron Diaz, has a ridiculous-looking disfigured foot, a handicap that neither looks real nor plays any huge factor in the film. It’s simply an oddity for the sake of being an oddity, and while one scene uses it for leverage (HA!), and other scenes make the slightest attempt at referencing it, it seems like a big deal is made of it for no payoff.  Also, there are a few characters that deserved a little more screen time, while others are given a full set of scenes!  I could have done without knowing so much about Arthur’s NASA boss, who never really contributed much, but good luck trying to get an elusive character like the alleged murderer Lucas Carnes on screen for more than a minute.  I would have preferred to become immersed in the intricate story rather than see Norma’s sister’s wedding rehearsal dinner and reception.  And every now and then you get this weird feeling that Richard Kelly, who also wrote this, doesn’t really interact with people, and doesn’t have an idea of how conversation sounds.  Some of his dialogue is unwieldy, and that flaw is only amplified by the hushed tone of his conspiracy-theory style of conclusion-jumping.

James Marsden is good as Arthur, the devoted dad who works at NASA but could use a few extra bucks to help out with the bills and his child’s college education.  He has a lot of nuances that help the character breathe; even though Marsden is chiseled from limestone, it appears, I still buy that he could have worked at NASA in the 70s.  Cameron Diaz, however, is a problem here as Norma.  The main problem is that I can’t stand it when people use unnatural accents, and Diaz as a Southern lady is a stretch for her Cali girl palette.  I think she could have lost the accent and not appeared to be a total outcast; not everyone in the South sounds like Sookie Stackhouse, you know.  Frank Langella shines as the mysterious man known only as Arlington Steward, a man with a horribly disfigured face who delivers the box to them for unknown and perhaps unknowable purposes.  He is a terrifying presence that exerts a particular will in the film. Here, he showcases his growth as an actor, from an inferior incarnation of Dracula in the beginning of his career to a real power player now. All of my favorite scenes feature him in them.

In the end, The Box is about morality, and how morality, and the lack thereof, is perceived by others.  In some ways, we are all worried about how our choices in life will make us look, and at times we ponder the long-reaching effects of those choices. The Box itself represents an immediate dilemma that tests the limits of morality, and highlights our ability to look the other way and forget the long-reaching effects of cruelty and thoughtlessness, to face of our own lack of decency.  It also has Frank Langella with only half a face.  What more could you want from a movie?

366weirdmovies alternate take: it shouldn’t make the List: The Box is well within the weird genre.  The problem is, the weird elements seem grafted into the middle section by Kelly almost as a way to pad the film, while the beginning and end of the movie tell a different story, an ethical science fiction parable from Richard Matheson.  It’s also, in my opinion, not a very good movie.  The way the initial scenario is set up, the decision whether or not to push the button is not a valid moral test, and generates little suspense, because the young couple is never given any reason to believe that Arlington Steward has magical powers and that pressing the button will actually cause someone to die.  You may be able to invent a reason to get past this flaw, but you won’t be able to get past the flat acting.  Langella is good, although almost upstaged by his makeup, but Cameron Diaz is simply substandard.  Her accent is distractingly bad and unnecessary, and although her character should generate some empathy, she never pulls it off.  James Marsden’s performance is forgettable and generic.  I was never involved with these characters at all.  The middle of the film is indeed eerie and weird, but there’s no payoff to it: what the heck did the husband choosing one of three portals have to do with anything?  Did he choose the right one?  The issue is just dropped when Kelly returns from his bizarre lark to resume telling Matheson’s story.  Finally, in an attempt to end on a chilling coda, the closing scene (probably accidentally) suggests that there was no free will involved in pushing the button, which undoes the entire premise of the movie!

The reviews on The Box were not universally terrible; the film had several defenders (including warhorse Roger Ebert), but those who hated it, really hated it.

Because of that middle section, the weak weird field in 2009, and Eric’s endorsement, I don’t think The Box can be eliminated from contention as one of the 366 best weird movies of all time, but I wouldn’t be comfortable certifying it for the List until we dig a little deeper and examine what else is out there hanging about on the fringes.  So, into the borderline bin The Box goes.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The Box is a mess, but it’s a curiously haunting, intriguing, brain-tickling mess, and it delivers that Donnie Darko feeling in truckloads.”–Rene Rodriguez, The Miami Herald (contemporaneous)

“Kelly’s writerly ambition gets the most of him here – most nonfan audiences will likely leave The Box baffled – as he layers on a deep-pile, Seventies shag rug’s worth of ominous subplots that, while undoubtedly weird, has neither the interlocking backstory nor the off-kilter oddness of Donnie Darko.”–Marc Savlov, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)

Donnie: “Sorry.”

Gretchen: “No, it was a compliment.”

(Theatrical Cut)

-or-
(Director’s Cut)

DIRECTED BY: Richard Kelly

FEATURING: Jake Gyllenhaal, Jena Malone, Mary McDonnel, Patrick Swayze, Drew Barrymore, Kathryn Ross

PLOT:  Troubled teen Donnie sees visions of a six foot tall demonic bunny rabbit named Frank, who demands that he commit acts of vandalism in a sleepy suburban town in 1988.  Donnie narrowly escapes a freak accident when a jet engine crashes into his bedroom after Frank has awoken him and called him away.  Frank tells Donnie that the world will end in 28 days, on Halloween night, and Donnie attempts to figure out what he can do to save the world while simultaneously dealing with a new girlfriend, bullies, a motivational speaker he sees as a cult leader, and ever-escalating hallucinations.

BACKGROUND:

• This was the first feature film for writer/director Richard Kelly.
• With Barrymore, Swayze and Ross attached, there was a tremendous buzz for the film going into the Sundance Festival.  The movie was not a hit at there, however, and was only picked up for limited theatrical distribution by Newmarket Films at the last moment.
• Although Donnie Darko was initially a flop on its domestic release, a strong showing overseas helped it to nearly break even.  The film then became a cult hit on video, earning back more than double its production cost.
• The director’s cut, containing about 20 minutes of extra footage and including pages from the fictional book “The Philosophy of Time Travel,”  was released in 2004.  It was controversial due to the added footage, which  caused some fans to complain that Kelly didn’t seem to understand his own movie.
• Kelly created a website (now hosted at donniedarkofilm.com), which is structured like a puzzle.  Navigating the website can reveal supplemental material and backstory to the film.
• Donnie Darko is one of the most talked about films on the Internet, with several competing fan sites and FAQ’s that attempt to clarify and explain the convoluted plot.
• Followed by a poorly received direct-to-video sequel about Donnie’s sister called S. Darko (2009), which angered many fans.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  Frank, the six-foot tall man dressed in a twisted, metallic bunny suit, who only Donnie can see.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Donnie Darko at first appears to be a dizzying

Original trailer for Donnie Darko

collision of genres, themes and ideas.  For the first few reels of the film, the audience can have no conception where the film is heading.  The director drops clues through these opening segments that appear at the time to be simply bizarre, but spark numerous “a-ha!” moments later, when incidents that seemed like throwaway moments or coincidences at the first glance turn out to make a sort of sense.  The “identity” of Frank, the demonic bunny, is the most thrillingly chilling such moment.  Donnie Darko creates a sense of wonder and mystery throughout its running time, and sparks hope and faith in the watcher that all will be made clear before the curtain drops.   It nests this expectancy inside a bed of genuine empathy for tormented Donnie and his colorful cast of supporting characters.  But perhaps the weirdest thing about Donnie Darko is that it asks us to take its plot at face value; it works very hard to try to convince us that what appear on the surface to be the hallucinations of a paranoid schizophrenic teenager are, in fact, real occurrences with a metaphysical explanation.

COMMENTS: Even putting the mindbending plot aside for a moment (we’ll come back to that subject), Donnie Darko would be weird just because of the incredible shifts in style.  At times, writer/director Richard Kelly seems to be channeling: John Hughes.  The Last Temptation of Christ.  The Catcher in the Rye.  One of Quentin Tarantino’s absurdist pop-culture rants.  An episode of Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone.  David Lynch.  At times, the movie seems to be: a black comedy.  A high concept science fiction picture.  A character study.  A parody of 80s teen comedies.  An avant-garde surrealist film.

But the various ingredients never seem jarring.  They blend into a coherent whole, like the ingredients in a stew.  Kelly wears his influences on his sleeve, but he creates an entirely new and unique universe out of these elements: the universe of Donnie Darko, easily one of the most original films of the young millennium.

The production seems to have been as blessed as the initial marketing of the film was cursed.  Kelly seems nothing at all like a first-time feature director.  His visual choices are mature and confident.  The film is bookended by two magnificent 80s era musical montages.  The first, set to “Head Over Heels”, is a technically magnificent one-take tracking shot that snakes throughout Donnie’s school, introducing several minor characters.  The second, set to “Mad World”, is a heart-wrenching epilogue, following each character in the aftermath of the climax, rising from minor to major characters until stopping just before an emotionally devastating (and mysterious) shared moment between the two most important people in Donnie’s life.

Kelly also manages a cumbersome cast of varying experience levels masterfully.  Credit for the memorable characterizations ultimately stems from the script.  With so many characters playing a part in the story—the entire community of fictional Middlesex, Virginia is affected in some way by Donnie’s every act—it would be impossible not to construct some of the characters out of psychological cardboard.  Donnie Darko‘s villains are caricatures and pure objects of satire, but they play their role perfectly and don’t detract from the richness of character achieved by the rest of the cast.  Each member of the ensemble cast has only a few minutes of screen-time to make an impact, and most of them nail that moment.  Particularly praiseworthy are wine-swilling but loving mom Rose Darko (Mary McDonnel), suave and sleazy motivational speaker Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze), and Jolene Purdy as Cherita Chen, the mercilessly teased, earmuff-wearing exchange student who exists to illuminate Donnie’s compassion.

Then there’s Donnie himself (Jake Gyllenhaal ).  He first appears in the guise of an insolent teen, swearing at his sister at the dinner table, smoking cigarettes, and wandering off whenever he pleases.  Then, he becomes as a figure of menace; he’s terrifying when his face sinks into that brooding frown, he pulls his sweatshirt hood up over his head, and he skulks out into the night to do Frank’s bidding.  Then, Donnie is a lone voice of reason, a prophet calling out Pharisees on their pedestals.  Finally, he ends up an object of compassion, and a genuine hero.

And, there’s one character who can’t be forgotten: Frank, who’s little more than a mask and a computer-altered voice, but who upstages even Donnie.

But, for all the originality on display, because of its convoluted and confounding plot Donnie Darko will forever remain a flawed (and therefore, perhaps more interesting) masterpiece.  Difficult to follow in theaters, where there is no rewind button to review key scenes, Donnie Darko had major critics scratching their heads as they exited the darkened moviehouses.   While watching the movie for the first time, there’s the sense that Kelly has carefully laid out a number of fascinating strands that could resolve the film, followed by a sinking feeling when it seems he ultimately picks the most implausible and least satisfying one of all.

But the movie stays with you afterward, despite confusion and disappointment, lingering in your imagination as you try to tie up loose ends and figure out the meaning to it all.

Kelly only exacerbated the problem of the unsatisfying plot resolution after the movie’s release by starting the Donnie Darko website and producing director’s commentaries that strongly defended the literal interpretation of a film that yearned for a satisfying symbolic interpretation.  An Internet cult picked up on Kelly’s cues, creating numerous FAQ’s that purported to explain the literal plot.

The film’s most ardent defenders insist that the film makes perfect logical sense, if you just think about it hard enough.  The film’s most ardent defenders are wrong.  I think that, because the film’s trajectory makes such perfect emotional sense, they’re desperate for it to also make literal narrative sense. But it doesn’t, no matter how deftly Kelly twists or how much supplemental material he produces.  (I hate to give away spoilers for a film, but I’ve created a special post, Why Donnie Darko’s Literal Plot Doesn’t Make Sense [And Why It Doesn't Matter], to refute the film’s literal plot).

Despite his public defenses of the film’s plot, there is some reason to suspect that Kelly is just trying to make it as challenging and polished as possible, rather than trying to push his interpretation as the “correct” way to view the film.  First, he literally labels a crucial plot device as a deus ex machina, even drawing extra attention to it by having his main character mutter the phrase.  Writers who want their plots to be taken seriously usually try to hide the use of an improbable contrivance, not draw attention to it.   Second, there is a point in the film where Donnie is talking to his science teacher and the conversation is leading them towards a paradox which will be impossible to resolve.  The teacher pleads out of the conversation because God has been mentioned, saying “I could lose my job” (despite the fact that he teaches at a private, not public, school).  Donnie, who was a few moments ago in the heat of a passionate argument, accepts his demurral with surprising complacency.  This acceptance foreshadows the attitude Kelly will demand the viewer adopt when he springs his paradox on them: that they voluntarily shut off the rational voice in their own head and accept events at face value, as Donnie calmly accepts his teacher’s refusal to delve further into the mysteries.

Most importantly, Kelly is too smart of a guy to believe in his own gobbledygook.  In his DVD commentary, he describes the plot as “absurd” and one that deliberately relies on “comic book logic,” at the same time he tries his damnedest to defend it.  In the end, he concedes that the audience will have to decide whether the events of Donnie Darko “really happened” or whether they were “just Donnie’s dream.”   Usually, the “it was just a dream” ending is a cop-out by a writer who can’t figure out how to end his story, but here it actually works.  The plot of Donnie Darko is exactly the kind of grandiose, apocalyptic fantasy that a brilliant but troubled, possibly schizophrenic teenager would have.  In a movie where the central character is a bright adolescent who refuses to accept society’s standard lines, Donnie’s pseudo-sensible solution to finding meaning in his life makes perfect sense.  The genius of Kelly’s film is that it recaptures the integrity, the naivete, and the longing to recreate the world in a better way that’s the hallmark of adolescence at its best.  And the movie accomplishes this feat while creating a sense of mystery and dreamlike wonder that lingers long after the credits roll.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“If this movie ever figured out what it wanted to be when it grows up, it would be a terrific one.”–Bib Graham, San Francisco Chronicle (contemporaneous)

“’Donnie Darko’ is a stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it’s fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that’s about human beings and not images… Kelly himself has suggested that ‘Donnie Darko’ is the story of Holden Caulfield filtered through the paranoid sci-fi consciousness of Philip K. Dick, but frankly he’s selling himself short; whatever its flaws, this movie is more soulful and less self-absorbed than those sources might suggest.” –Andrew O’Hehir, Salon (DVD)

“In [my] 2001 review, I found a lot to admire and enjoy in ‘Donnie Darko,’ … My objection was that you couldn’t understand the movie, which seemed to have parts on order. With the director’s cut, I knew going in that I wouldn’t understand it, so perhaps I was able to accept it in a different way. I ignored logic and responded to tone, and liked it more…. ‘Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut’ is alive, original and intriguing. It’s about a character who has no explanation for what is happening in his life, and is set in a world that cannot account for prescient rabbits named Frank. I think, after all, I am happier that the movie doesn’t have closure. What kind of closure could there be?”—Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (Director’s Cut review)

OFFICIAL SITE: Donnie Darko

IMDB LINK: Donnie Darko (2001)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:  This site’s own Why Donnie Darko’s Literal Plot Doesn’t Make Sense (And Why It Doesn’t Matter)

Stainless Steel Rat’s Donnie Darko FAQ

Everything You Were Afraid to Ask About ‘Donnie Darko’ – a lucid plot explanation from Salon.com

Donnie Darko in His Mind’s Eye – a Freudian interpretation of Donnie Darko by Jim Emerson

Cellar Door - a collection of Donnie Darko resources and links for the hardcore fan, including the pages from The Philosophy of Time Travel

DVD INFO: Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut (buy) is available in a two-disc special edition, featuring Richard Kelly’s commentary with fellow hip director Kevin Smith, a production diary, and a two short documentaries focusing on fans reactions to the film.

The tighter theatrical cut (buy) is superior to the director’s cut, and contains two separate commentary tracks, deleted scenes and other featurettes that don’t appear on the Director’s Cut.  Unfortunately, it is harder to find than the Director’s Cut edition.  In fact, I am afraid that DVDs of the original cut will be discontinued and become collector’s items, which would be a crime.    It appears that the upcoming Blu-Ray release will contain the theatrical cut, probably in an attempt to encourage people to buy an entirely new machine to watch the original masterpiece. 

NOTE (2/13/2009):  My pessimism turned out to be unwarranted, as the Blu-Ray version (buy) contains both cuts of the movie, as it should, making this the definitive Donnie Darko disc–for those who have Blu-Ray.