FEATURING: Kat Dennings, Reece Thompson, Josh Lucas, Andie MacDowell, Ted Whittall

PLOT: A teenage girl and her dad move to a small town populated with drug-addled

teenagers and a mysterious serial killer. Feeling alienated and struggling to make friends, she sees a fellow intellectual outcast in her English teacher and decides to seduce him, while her bumbling classmate Thurston starts to fall for her.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though its dark undertones, nonlinear format, and attempts to comment on the violence and sexiness apparently inherent to small-town teenagers have garnered comparisons to Donnie Darko and Twin Peaks, this is just an angsty, poorly-scripted knockoff with very little true weirdness.

COMMENTS: Narrated by the gorgeous Kat Dennings, who switches back and forth between her recent past and the present, Daydream Nation attempts to mesh poignant high school drama with erratic comedy and suburban darkness.  Caroline, our protagonist, is intelligent and disaffected, often sneaking in awkwardly sophisticated references that her peers don’t understand.  She embarks on a relationship with her teacher on a lark, in an effort to try something new and become a different person for a while; the unstable Mr. Anderson quickly becomes obsessively infatuated with her.  Their relationship falters as Caroline starts responding to the advances of Thurston (Reece Thompson), a druggie classmate mourning the recent death of a friend.  These core proceedings are surrounded by a lingering industrial fire, serial killings, parental interventions, and a ghost or two.

Seemingly shot entirely through a high-contrast haze, the film offers a few visual treats but nothing in the way of ingenuity.  The same can be said for the script, which has a few shining moments of interest but lingers in derivative mediocrity for most of the runtime.  Writer/director Michael Goldbach doesn’t seem to have much confidence in his ability to tell a story, inundating us with unnecessary amounts of narration and several needless plot devices.  The central character of Caroline—while played wonderfully by Kat Dennings—suffers the most. The best parts of the film involve her speaking her mind, calling out the hypocrisy and sexism of those around her, but these scenes are immediately followed by the character chastising herself in private, thinking herself a “bitch” just because she spoke the truth. It’s as if Goldbach wanted to write a strong female character, but then lost his momentum and copped out to typical gender stereotypes.

Daydream Nation aims for subtlety, but comes out with blaring obviousness thanks to the clumsy pacing and script. The performances from Dennings, Thompson, Lucas, and MacDowell are solid, but can’t save the ridiculous dialogue or self-indulgent shooting style (not that I’m complaining about the myriad drawn-out, close-up shots of Dennings, but really, it’s all a bit much). And it isn’t even that weird!

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…rolls elements of ‘Juno,’ ‘American Beauty,’ ‘Donnie Darko’ and ‘Twin Peaks’ into a potent blunt.”–Stephen Holden, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY:  Kinji Fukasaku

FEATURING:  Takeshi “Beat” Kitano, Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Chiaki Kuriyama

PLOT:  Intergenerational relations in Japan have broken down to such an extent that

youngsters are rebelling by committing acts of violence and mass truancy.  The situation has deteriorated so badly that the government reacts by passing the “Battle Royale Act”: each year a randomly selected high school class is sent to an isolated, uninhabited island, fitted with remotely detonated explosive collars, given meager supplies and told to fight to the death.  One must emerge a victor or three days later everyone will die.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Although I consider Battle Royale to be a “must see” film, it really can’t go on the list.  It’s just not weird.  It’s funny, violent, overblown, disturbing, both operatic and banal, but not weird.

COMMENTS:  My first review of the film was a little flippant and then, quite randomly, I overheard a man say it was the “sickest” film he had ever seen.  He appeared to be quite sincere and I was driven to go back and watch it again, and again, to try and see what he had seen, what had disturbed him so much.

I don’t think that there’s anything in Battle Royale which will upset “366-ers.”  Yes, it is a film filled with images of youngsters killing each other and it would not be unnatural to find that disturbing.  The violence is so over the top, however, that it’s difficult not to be amused at times.  Who would have thought that a saucepan lid could prove to be such an effective weapon in the right hands?  It’s not even a very good saucepan lid.

The controversy surrounding Battle Royale on its release centered on the graphic violence and the age of the participants, but there is no connection between the violence in the film and real life violence involving teenagers.  The high school class that we follow are being forced against their will to participate in a life or death game, and they have been forced to do so by adults: adults who have stooped so far as to rig the game.  Despite having their backs against the wall, some of teenagers behave quite nobly; pleading for peace, setting up co-operative groups despite knowing only one can survive, committing suicide rather than participate in the game.

With every viewing of the film more and more contradictions appear.  The results of the battle appear to be televised during the opening scenes but the class chosen show astonishment that such a thing exists.  I would expect teenagers to talk about the Battle Royale Act incessantly.  The existence of such a grim piece of legislation would surely provoke further anger and violence amongst the younger generation, and hero worship of the victors.  There are indications throughout that the Act is counter-productive, that underground rebellion is growing.  A moment’s consideration would surely tell the adults that not only is this going to happen, but that there’s every chance the survivors of previous Battles are going to be eager rebels.  There’s nothing like training the best of the best to fight against you in the future, after all.

The more I think about this aspect of Battle Royale, the more impressed I am by how relevant it still is.  In the UK, at least, I can’t remember a time when the adult population was more terrified of their children, but who raised these children?  This generation of teenagers will go on to raise the next generation.  Will they in turn grow to fear their own children?

There’s certainly a deep and troubling message at the heart of Battle Royale.  You do have to dig through a wild and crazy cartoon ride of glorious, gory violence and hilarious teenage angst to get there, but it’s really worth it.  If you have a teenager, or can remember being one, then it is possible to laugh at the dialogue, all delivered in an appropriately earnest fashion.  In real life teenagers tend to flounce upstairs to their room, announcing that no-one understands them and they hate everyone, before terminating their soliloquy by slamming the bedroom door as hard as is humanly possible.  In Battle Royale they do the same thing, except they cap their tantrum by stabbing someone in the head.

I didn’t have the chance to ask the man I overheard just what it was that so upset him about this film.  I tend to think it was the depiction of youngsters stabbing, shooting and decapitating each other.  I could be wrong though.  The underlying message is one of fear and lack of communication between adults and their children, and this is far more disturbing than any number of bouncing heads with grenades in their mouths.

Is it possible to be disturbed and amused at the same time?  I find it is; in fact, real life does it to me all the time.  Battle Royale is both amusing and disturbing, and better than real life in that it has a fantastic, deadpan performance from the wonderful “Beat” Takeshi; watch with joy his possessiveness over the bag of cookies.  The only thing that puzzles me is why there isn’t a computer game version of BR yet.

366weirdmovies adds:  Battle Royale is just weird enough to deserve mention here, but not strange enough to vie for a spot on the List.  The “Battle Royale Act” itself is the weirdest thing about the film: randomly selected teenagers slaughtering each other in an un-televised death match mitigates the social problem of juvenile violence… how?  The Japanese people overwhelmingly vote to send their own children, innocent and guilty alike, off to be massacred… why?  The premise is absurd, and just in case we couldn’t see that on our own, the instructional video with the perky female commando describing to the students how their collars they’re wearing will blow their heads off if they disobey the games rules makes it crystal clear.  Something funny happens after this surrealistically satirical set up, though; the movie plays it straight the rest of the way, turning into a highly effective actioner with unexpected depth of characterization.  The fun is in watching the student’s varied and generally believable reactions to the bizarre situation, and in watching the field get winnowed down to the finalists in some very grim ways. The film’s midsection is invigorating—packed with juicy, bloody surprises—and the thrills you get block out the horror of the “Lord of the Flies” scenario.  Despite the perversity of the premise, the movie basically shows a good heart: it’s firmly on the side of the misunderstood kids, who aren’t just blood squibs waiting to be exploded for their splat value.  “Beat” Kitano unexpectedly makes for one of the slimiest, yet most haunted sadists since Norman Bates took out his mommy issues on random vacationers.   And although the movie does indeed prey on adult fears about the coming generation, it equally addresses teenage anxieties about cutthroat academic competition: the whole thing can be seen as a metaphor for the Japanese education system, where the pressure on kids to get into a prestigious junior high school can be overwhelming and feel like a life and death struggle.  Overall, Battle Royale is a very well-made film that’s unlikely to seriously disturb or offend anyone but the most squeamish; it’s not very weird, but it’s definitely in the ballpark, and worthy of a strong recommendation.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a stunningly proficient piece of action film-making, plunging us into a world of delirium and fear… this is a film put together with remarkable confidence and flair. Its steely candour, and weird, passionate urgency make it compelling.”–Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (contemporaneous)

FEATURING:  Clancy Brown, Jackie Earle Haley, Kyle Gallner, Rooney Mara

PLOT:  A group of high school students share dreams of a burned, claw-handed man named

Fred Krueger. As the students begin to die in dramatic ways, the survivors discover that they share a past of secret abuse at the hands of Krueger. The final survivors take it upon themselves drag Krueger from his dream world and dispatch him once and for all.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It really isn’t particularly weird. There are no wild grandstanding dream sequences; they’re all very similar in a “Silent Hill Lite” style.  Given that the central character is a dead man who haunts people in their dreams and can exact real life revenge on their sleeping bodies, Krueger is lacking in imagination.

COMMENTS:  First of all, I should point out that I am not a fan of the Elm St. franchise.  I watched the original many years ago, and watched it again recently in light of the 2010 version, and I enjoyed it.  To my surprise many aspects of the film stood the test of time quite well.  Yes, some of the special effects had aged, but they had a wild, Tex Avery glee in their own madness that was contagious.  The fact that they were practical effects added an immediacy that was quite exciting.  The teens looked and behaved more or less like teens, making allowances for the nature of the film.  It unfolded at a good pace and we had a heroine who stepped up to the plate when called upon.

I didn’t have any objections to someone making a newer version; I  was interested to see it.  I think this movie is what publicists term a “re-imagining” rather than a remake.  The basic idea of the original has been kept.  There is a group of teens, they’re having terrible nightmares, they begin to die horribly, and the killer is Fred Krueger.  That’s as far as the similarities go however, the new film is darker both in mood and aesthetics.  At times it was hard to see where the action was taking place and what was happening.  Everything is dark.  The school is as dark as the boiler room.  The action takes place at night or during some town-wide energy saving drive where everyone seems to be using 20 watt bulbs.

Squinting in the dark has aged the teens a lot; they are a pretty mature bunch of high school types.  Their mothers, on the other hand, look more like older sisters.  Everyone is very slim, well groomed, has perfect teeth, glowing skin, and no one’s mother is an alcoholic.  Even a few days of sleeplessness doesn’t have a dramatic effect on their agreeable appearances.  The movie doesn’t make much of the ordeal of sleep deprivation; we see one lad washing down a pill with a can of Red Bull, but that’s about it.  No one has a coffee machine hidden in their bedroom.

In line with the new darker image, Fred Krueger looks more like a genuine burn victim.  The problem with this approach in the context of a film where Krueger is the terrifying central character is that it robs him of much of his expressiveness.  It was a waste of an actor to hide Haley behind the bland, featureless mask.  He is unable to do much with the make-up, which seems more or less immobile, and whether by choice or necessity all his lines are delivered in a monotone, growly mumble.  Before becoming a caricature in the later films, Krueger was a wise cracking shape-shifter as likely to stick his tongue in your ear as his claws in your chest.  Haley’s Krueger is somber and businesslike; oh, and he’s a bona fide pedophile. The nature of Krueger’s crimes caused controversy among film lovers in the past, it was never really specified just what he did to the children.  But he did kill them.  Krueger 2010 hasn’t killed the children; in fact, they are the teens he is now haunting.  But it’s plain he did molest them.

I’m not sure that one character is more or less distasteful than the other, to be frank.  I would be interested to know the rationale behind this quite specific change.  In the original, Krueger was the Bogeyman.  If you didn’t behave, he would get you, he would kill you, and the children knew this.  We see and hear them singing their skipping rhymes on the sun drenched sidewalks.  In the 2010 version Krueger is the creepy kiddie-fiddler who haunts the pages of the local tabloids; the pervert that modern parents fear lurks in every parked car, every nursery playground.  I’m not sure that depiction sits well in what is a very mediocre teen horror.

In the end, that’s what’s wrong with the 2010 version; it is mediocre.  Like it or not, the original version was different.  It might have been a terrible step along the path to jokey modern horror movies where the wise cracking killer is the antihero and scares are replaced with gross-out moments, but it was never boring.  The 2010 version is a cookie cutter modern horror: all the shocks are signaled with a huge audio cue so that even if you’ve dozed off in the theatre you’ll still jump.  None of the characters are very much concerned when their “friends” are butchered, and it’s hardly surprising because none of them are developed enough for us to care much about them.  One or two scenes from the original version make guest appearances just to remind us that glossy CGI effects are not always better.  Plot devices like mobile phone alarms are introduced and then forgotten when they’d actually be useful.  Adrenaline stolen from an unguarded drugs trolley in hospital has no effect on one character, but they decide to rely on it anyway during the life or death climax.

If you’re going to re-imagine a film that many people love and have strong opinions about then you really should bring your “A” game, and that didn’t happen here.  Krueger could have been anyone; he was really as characterless as everyone else.  There was one idea in the whole film which was new and potentially could have been used to craft a more interesting plot.  For a very short while the writers raised the possibility that Krueger was innocent, that the parents’ suspicions were unfounded and that they had burned an innocent man.  No sooner had I shifted in my seat to see where they were going with this than it was over, we were presented with proof that Krueger was guilty and the film swerved back onto the road to tedium and mediocrity.  This was a sad waste of an hour and a half or thereabouts.  To finish on a positive note though, it was nice to see Clancy Brown on the big screen again.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s indebted to the illogic of dreams (as Freddy’s bailiwick), but determinedly dumb about using it… It gives illogic a bad name.”–Cynthia Fuchs, PopMatters (contemporaneous)

DIRECTED BY: Chris Fuller

FEATURING: Kayla Tabish, Travis Maynard, Chris Fuller (as Lewis Brogan), Jacob Reynolds

PLOT:  Bad poetry interrupts episodes in the lives of three teens or twenty-somethings at

about the time of the 1997 St. Petersburg, Florida race riots.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: It’s only fitfully weird, but consistently dull and pretentious. Life on this planet is full of hardships and disappointments; no one should voluntarily compound their woes by watching Loren Cass.

COMMENTS:  A voice says “after the 1997…”   A solo trumpet launches a doomed search for a melody.  A boy wakes up on the floor of a mechanic’s garage.  Another boy, with a shaved head, piercings and tattoos, presumably a skinhead, wakes up on a couch and goes outside to lie in the middle of the street.  A cute blonde girl wakes up next to a black male.  The boy from the garage picks up the skinhead.  The girl takes her own car.  The three drive to school.  The parking lot is full but the hallways inside are empty.  We get a nice look at the urinals.  Someone loads a gun.  We see the urinals from a different angle.  An older man takes a shot of whiskey.  The two boys are next to last to leave the parking lot.  At a stoplight a black guy jumps out of a van and punches the punk kid with through an open window.  They have a fight.  The screen goes blank and a street poet tells us St. Petersburg is “a dirty dirty town by a dirty dirty sea.”  What’s going on here?  The cute blonde works at a diner where no one ever orders anything.  She has car trouble and takes it to the young mechanic.  He fixes it and they go to dinner together.  She shovels gray cubes of meat into her mouth.  He doesn’t eat.  They barely talk but look at each other a lot.  They are in love.  What’s going on here?  Other things happen.  They aren’t interesting, either.  Some kids drink beer and say the F-word a lot until the Man comes and hassles them.  The skinhead’s hobby is to ride the bus at night.  We look at his face.  He looks alienated. Snippets of bad beatnik poetry and drunken ramblings play on the soundtrack.  There is a punk concert.  The skinhead falls asleep on the bus and dreams he’s a victim of spontaneous human combustion.  Years ago an embattled politician committed suicide at a press conference.  The footage is in the public domain so anyone can insert it into their movie at random.  The mechanic and the cute girl have sex.  The skinhead scratches “Loren Cass” onto his arm with a hypodermic needle he finds in a dumpster.  He swallows a handful of pills in a desperate attempt to get out of the movie.  He vomits them up.  The movie won’t let him out that easily.  He wakes up the next morning and looks into the camera.  He looks disaffected.  The trumpet player still hasn’t found a melody.  The credits roll.  What just went on here?  The Variety critic stayed awake and alert long enough to write that he had just seen “a starkly radical film debut of uncommon power and artistic principle.”  Seriously, what is going on here?

The events are set around the times of the St. Petersburg race riots, which we know because we see newsreel footage of the aftermath and hear audio clips of a rabble-rousing black preacher.  The movie supplies no context to suggest whether these incidents take place before, after, or during the riots.  But the subtext makes the film political and important.  Use of the tragically real footage of Pennsylvania Treasurer Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out on camera either says something insightful about fiscal corruption in the Keystone state in the 1980s, or is completely indefensible.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…ingeniously experimental in form… The tone — spaced-out, adrift, grubby yet ecstatic — is reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s experimental youth movies and Harmony Korine’s ‘Gummo,’ while the formal precision brings to mind Robert Bresson’s clipped, oblique allegories.”–Nathan Lee, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

FEATURING: James Duval, Rachel True

PLOT:  Shallow L.A. teenagers take drugs and have kinky sex all day in preparation for

the party of the year, while a rubber alien reptile occasionally stalks and abducts them.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  As an attempt at a contemporary update of Repo Man by way of Clueless, Nowhere is weird, but only in the most superficial way possible; ultimately, it lacks the emotional and thematic chops to earn itself a more dignified adjective than “silly” (although less dignified adjectives like “self-indulgent,” “pretentious” and “annoying” do spring to mind).

COMMENTS:  It begins with the portentous pronouncement “L.A. is like… nowhere.  Everyone who lives here is lost,” voiced with emotionless fervor by “Dark” (Keanu Reeves impersonator James Duval) as he masturbates in the shower.  (This should be your first hint that you might want to skip this movie: do you really want to spend 82 minutes watching an inferior version of Keanu Reeves?)  In the course of a day, the film introduces us to such lost characters as bulimiacs, drug addicts, vanishing valley girls, a “Baywatch” hunk/rapist, and teen dominatrices, all of whom are at bottom indistinguishable but for their preferences in body piercings.  Their chief defining characteristic is a lack of character.  What little character development there is involves Dark’s doomed search for true love and his fruitless attempts to convince bisexual gal pal Mel (Rachel True) to stop sharing her nubile body with every Tom, Dick and Mary.  Too occasional chuckles come via the vulgar and exaggerated teen slang. (A three way cameo conversation between val-gals Traci Lords, Shannen Doherty and Rose McGowan about potential beaus to take to the big party who are not gay, dead by their own hand, or under-hung is an engagingly braindead highlight).  Any lighthearted satirical momentum the film may muster, however, is destroyed by the intrusion of ugly realities like date rape and teen suicide that belong in a non-joke movie that would treat these topics with respect.  Writer/director Akari aims his wit at an incredibly easy target—vapid Hollywood teenagers—but he hardly appears less shallow than they are; whenever the script veers dangerously near something that looks like a real human emotion, as in the climax, he’s quick to deploy predictable Gen-X irony to turn the scene into an absurd joke before his skill at eliciting genuine empathy can be tested.

The teens’ irresponsible “empty” hedonistic lifestyle of drugs, partying, and humping hot bodies actually looks pretty appealing, if only the company didn’t totally blow.  The flick may be enjoyed by smart teenagers (even though director Araki seems to have nothing but contempt for teens), but impressionable young minds should be steered towards better adolescent angst comedies like Heathers if it at all possible.  Not currently available on DVD in North America.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“This live-action cartoon might be described as a surreal ‘American Graffiti’ crossed with a kinky ‘Beverly Hills 90210,’ as imagined by a punked-out acolyte of John Waters or Andy Warhol…  If it weren’t so overpopulated and desperate to shock, ‘Nowhere’ might have succeeded as a maliciously cheery satire of Hollywood brats overdosing on the very concept of Hollywood.”–Steven Holden, The New York Times (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.