There's a somewhat snarky piece about DVD extras over at Boston.com (link c/o Arts & Letters Daily) which ridicules the inclusion of blow-by-blow commentary tracks for such ephemeral fluff as Agent Cody Banks 2. Fair game, I suppose. But I think the problem with DVD commentaries is not that they're being wasted on junk movies, but that they're being wasted on almost every movie; or, rather, they're an amazing technical resource which just isn't being exploited properly at the moment. Most commentaries are currently made by people who don't have that much to say about the movie - in other words, the actors - or else people such as the director or producer, who might be able to throw in a few behind-the-scenes nuggests, but who have far too much emotionally invested in the project to really discuss it with any objectivity. But what about movie critics? A start's been made here with some classic films on, e.g., the Criterion Collection label. I recently got their copy of Olivier's 1944 Henry V, which includes a wonderful commentary track by film historian Bruce Eder that not only discusses the background to the production itself but also critiques individual scenes as they unravel on screen. Now, wouldn't something like this on the Star Wars DVDs - say, a deconstruction of the trilogy's many borrowings from cine-history - have been far more interesting than George Lucas' reheated waffle about Joseph Campbell and evil Fox execs?
Posted by Alan Allport at October 2, 2004 02:50 PMThe other problem is that anyone directly involved with the production of a recent $100 million blockbuster is going to be contractually compelled to be bland beyond belief - it's only when the film has made back its production cost that commentators can afford to let their hair down and say what they really think. And I suspect this is why you don't generally get critical commentaries on recent films (though Star Wars is established enough for this not to be an issue).
I completely agree with you about critical commentaries (I'm obviously biased, as I work there, but the British Film Institute is no slouch in that department either), though I'm also very fond of self-deprecating commentaries by filmmakers. There is no way I'd own seven DVDs by Sixties goremeister Herschell Gordon Lewis were it not for his hilarious verbal riffs - several orders of magnitude wittier than anything in the actual films and brutally honest about their artistic merit (or lack of same: has anyone else ever referred to one of his own films being "excreted" rather than released?). John Waters and Ken Russell usually provide good value too.
Posted by: Michael at October 2, 2004 03:10 PMRoman Polanski is another good commentator. He isn't funny but he's very straightforward and I find something irresistible about his deadpan manner.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at October 3, 2004 10:50 PMCritical commentaries are not always the most interesting things either. It really depends on who they have. Roger Ebert and Peter Bogdonavich do pretty good commentaries on Citzien Kane, but some of the Fox/Louber/Wellspring Truffaut releases have terrible commentaries by critics.
Good commentaries are like catching lightning in a bottle, I do agree. My favourite remains to be the one on Thirteen Days that uses remarks from historians, actual participants and archival recordings to create a commentary on the Cuban Missile Crisis that when viewed with the film is ten times better than the film itself, which I feel is underrated in the first place.
Posted by: Graeme Burk at October 4, 2004 07:05 PMYeah, that's true. Another terrible critical commentary is on the DVD release of Tarkovski's Andrei Rublev, which I think is a Criterion disk. It includes this frightening "featurette" in which this Russian film studies professor from Harvard lectures directly into a camera which must have been placed directly in front of his nose and just left there. It's extremely uncomfortable to watch. Very claustrophobic. On account of which I've never sat through the majority of his comments, but let's just say that he uses the word "poetic" to describe the film approximately 10 times in the first 10 minutes.
It really would be a good thing if critics were banned from using that word when discussing Tarkovski.
Posted by: Alan Hogue at October 5, 2004 09:25 AM