Tim Burton is my go-to example of a talented filmmaker who should have never been asked to record commentaries.
"This is a cool shot. I'm not exactly sure why..." [long pause, laughs]
It's no wonder he hasn't recorded a commentary for one of his films since Big Fish (and that one had a moderator to poke him with a sharp stick occasionally in order to make him say anything at all ). I get the guy is intensely shy and introverted and possibly mildly autistic, but still, that doesn't make him especially edifying to listen to.
Some of these directors just don't want to spill the beans, and are protective of their sets and personnel. I also think the worst commentaries are usually the ones recorded right after a film has been locked and at times not yet released, which is what used to happen on a lot of DVD and Blu-Ray releases. Directors or whoever are often tired at that point of their movie and its production, and it results in tedium that you quickly turn off.
I watched Billy the Kid Versus Dracula last night on the Kino blu-ray. The movie is entertainingly cheesy but the commentary is just plain bad. It's two guys who seem very enthusiastic about the movie and are excited to tell you all about it but then they start rattling off endless lists of other movies...other John Carradine movies, other vampire movies, other "weird Western" movies, etc. Very rarely do they talk about the movie they're watching. They also complain about people who trash this movie for being "so bad it's funny." Look, I get it. Sometimes people go too far with making fun of movies and I admit I have a soft spot for monster movies but come on. There are such things as objective standards and this movie is clearly not good. Entertaining, yes but not good.
I actually tried my own hand at doing commentaries for some personally extended cuts of mine on all the episodes of "Battlestar Galactica". Mostly because after listening to a podcast of two people watching the episodes and reacting to them and showing they knew absolutely NOTHING about the show I decided it was time for me to prove I could do it better.
jkholm wrote: ↑Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:04 am
I watched Billy the Kid Versus Dracula last night on the Kino blu-ray. The movie is entertainingly cheesy but the commentary is just plain bad. It's two guys who seem very enthusiastic about the movie and are excited to tell you all about it but then they start rattling off endless lists of other movies...other John Carradine movies, other vampire movies, other "weird Western" movies, etc. Very rarely do they talk about the movie they're watching. They also complain about people who trash this movie for being "so bad it's funny." Look, I get it. Sometimes people go too far with making fun of movies and I admit I have a soft spot for monster movies but come on. There are such things as objective standards and this movie is clearly not good. Entertaining, yes but not good.
Lee Gambin is an Australian "historian" who gets hired routinely to do these commentaries (he's worked on a number of releases across various labels) and I can't say I've found one track of his to be enlightening enough to listen beyond a few minutes. On LINK, for example, he laughed it up quite a bit -- frankly it was kind of insulting to the people who made the movie. Other times he gets sidetracked and blathers about film theory like you're stuck in some bad movie class. What he CAN do is talk, endlessly, which is half the battle in these tracks.
His approach is almost like he's running his own "talk show" during the film -- which either works or it doesn't. With the right participants, I suppose that's better than the usual "oh look it's _____, they were in _____, also appeared in ____ before dying in _______."
This thread at the usually informative Monsterkidclassichorror forum has been going on for years, and they grill a number of people (including some veterans of that film music magazine we used to read lol) for their rough commentaries
Tom Weaver did a great job on "Creature From The Black Lagoon" but his new commentary for the Criterion "Incredible Shrinking Man" is terrible. I shut it off after ten minutes because it was rapidly sounding like an MST3K style commentary loaded with snark aimed at the plight of the main character and his reactions to his plight. It was really starting to get overly PC on that point so I'd had enough. Thumbs down effort.
Daniel Kremer and Allan Arkush's DEAD MEN DON'T WEAR PLAID commentary on the Kino Lorber disc is dreadful. Kremer usually just recites IMDB credits off his phone, but Arkush here talks about Mitch McConnell, Trump, etc. Absolutely useless.
The usual arrogance of these people assuming that movie fans all think one way only and that they can thus go off on those tangents with total reckless abandon. And they intrude this stuff into films with ZERO connection to contemporary politics. I shut off the commentary on "Foreign Affair" the late 40s Billy Wilder film starring Jean Arthur when the commentator started making cheap shots at Sarah Palin for absolutely no reason whatsoever.
I might add that doing commentaries on my personal re-edits of all the episodes of "Battlestar Galactica" inspired me to do a few more for select episdoes of Trek and Twilight Zone. They've served as a reminder to me how you have to go into these with some advance viewing to make sure you know some bullet points you'll want to make ahead of time and not be surprised by anything you see on screen as you do a commentary. A lot of people who make these professional commentaries don't follow that rule.
Like some others here I don’t like commentaries that recite/rehash commonly found information like credits from IMDB. I greatly prefer commentaries that dig deeper resource-wise (books I don’t have, articles I don’t have access to, etc). I also like when the commentators offer unique interpretation. There was a period where commentaries waned a bit as an extra but they seem to be back now and this means there is more underwhelming offerings out there.
Some favorites, in no particular order:
THE GRADUATE - Howard Suber. This originally appeared on the Criterion laserdisc. It is very much a scholarly commentary, offering insight into deleted scenes, story meaning and filmmaking technique. One of the all time bests, in my opinion.
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS - Robert Carringer. This originally appeared on the Criterion laserdisc (and was the only laserdisc I still pulled out until my player died). Gives a good overview on what happened with the film, Carringer ultimately released a book of the continuity script that gives a more complete picture, but for the time this was impressive stuff. Thankfully, the Criterion Blu-ray replicates most of the laserdisc extras.
Tim Lucas - As a long time Video Watchdog reader, I find most of his commentaries extremely worthwhile. His commentaries on the Bava films are well worth listening to (even better is his mammoth book on Bava), but the commentaries he did on the BFI release of the Alain Robbe-Grillet films were incredible. He opened those films up to me.
Glen Erickson - aka The Cinesavant, aka The DvdSavant, has not done many commentaries but the two I have heard, THE SATAN BUG and FIVE are packed full of information and insight. FIVE is a bit technically deficient due to the Pandemic, but full of great insight and information.
In the laserdisc era, John Carpenter perhaps did more to bolster the idea of commentaries as a worthwhile extra than any other active (at the time) filmmaker. He contributed commentaries on a series laserdisc releases in the 1990’s that were informative and educational. HALLOWEEN, THE FOG, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, all with Debra Hill are very good. THE THING, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, all with Kurt Russell and all three extremely entertaining.
I have others, but not time right now to write about them,
Lucas did an outstanding job on "One Million Years BC" because he treated the property with respect and spent a good deal of time explaining the differences between the US and overseas cuts of the films.
I will NEVER listen to another commentary by Tom Weaver again. His commentary for "Incredible Shrinking Man" was off-putting and made me shut it off after 10 minutes, but I was willing to hear him on the commentary for the cheapie Universal film "Spiderwoman Strikes Back". On that one, his off-putting tone was only somewhat irritating in contrast to "Incredible Shrinking Man"......until he got to the end. He made note of how nominal leading man Kirby Grant (later TV's "Sky King") had lost his life in a car accident in 1985 by driving into a ditch (while he had been enroute to watch a Space Shuttle launch where he was to be honored). And then at the end of the film where he drives off with leading lady Brenda Joyce after saving her from the horrible fate top-billed villainess Gale Sondergaard had in store for her, Weaver suddenly blurts out, "Eyes in front, Kirby, you want to end up in a ditch?" (or words to that effect).
I have NEVER heard anything more in bad taste than to hear this deliberate making fun of how a person died. It is absolutely disgusting and Weaver should be ashamed of himself. I won't even revisit any of his earlier commentaries again after this.
Good/Interesting:
HUMANOIDS FROM THE DEEP - With Mark Goldblatt, on a few Region B releases. (Not sure if it was ever released domestically.) Gives good insight into the problems the film had and what had to be done to "fix" it.
THE IPCRESS FILE - Sidney J. Furie and Peter Hunt. This is a great commentary. I especially liked how Furie was surprised that Hunt filmed as many pickup shots that he did to make some of the sequences work, which seems like a pretty good expansion of the role the editor usually has.
Joe Dante - I've enjoyed every commentary that he has ever been a part of. PIRAHNA, THE HOWLING, the GREMLINS films--all informative and entertaining (and all from the laserdisc era). I can also recommend "The Movies That Made Me", the podcast he does with Josh Olsen.
Michael Crichton - GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY and LOOKER. I enjoy both of these films, and I found his commentary on both to be intelligent and illuminating. Train Robbery dates to the laserdisc era, but I believe that Looker first made its appearance on DVD.
RE_ANIMATOR - Stuart Gordon. Again, from the laserdisc era (Elite Entertainment and a great release). Full of everything you would ever want to know about how the film came together.
Starship Troopers - Paul Verhoeven and Writer Edward Neumeier. I admit it--I didn't get the movie when I saw it in the theater. Listening to the commentary made me understand what I had missed. Considering that it changed my entire opinion of the film, this was a pretty impactful commentary.
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES - Ray Bradbury, Stephen Durum, and Harrison Ellenshaw. I suppose if Disney had used the commentary on their Blu-Ray release someone would have needed to have been paid, but it's still a disappointment that this excellent commentary is essentially officially lost at this point. Thankfully, it exists on YouTube. This gives a good overview of what happened with the film. Considering that the film as released is flawed (but contains some really good parts) the context that this commentary provides would have helped modern viewers to understand what they were watching.
Terry Gilliam - Fisher King, Baron Munchausen
BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING - Lem Dobbs, Julie Kirgo, and Nick Redman. I really liked the commentaries that Twilight Time did. This was a blind buy for me and both the film and commentary were thoroughly enjoyed.
THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT - Lem Dobbs, Julie Kirgo and Nick Redman. Another Twilight Time commentary. This film is a childhood favorite and I enjoyed their reading of it.
JANE EYRE - Nick Redman, Steven Smith and Julie Kirgo. One last Twilight Time commentary. This was another blind buy. I was impressed by the movie and the commentary enhanced that respect.
Bad/Uninteresting
THE MANITOU - Troy Howarth. From the Shout Factory release. While not without some good information, Mr. Howarth did not have nearly enough to fill the 90-minute runtime. His attempt to repeatedly suggest that director William Girdler may have been as successful as Spielberg if he hadn't died so young is just silly.
BASIC INSTINCT - Paul Verhoeven, I refer to the commentary he did for the Pioneer Special Edition laserdisc. Now, I haven't heard the commentary for a long time now, but my memory is that it was light on info and somewhat dismissive of the mysteries in the film. It lessened my appreciation of the film.
AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON - Griffin Dunne and David Naughton. Nice guys and they do have some interesting things to say, just not very much. I think I timed about 15 minutes of real information imparted over the entire runtime. A lot of dead air in this one. The commentary by Paul Davis on the Arrow Blu-Ray is much better.
This isn't about a commentary but rather liner notes -- and it will stun no one that Arrow's booklet notes have become so stridently political that they are borderline laughable in some situations.
Case in point: they just released MY STEPMOTHER IS AN ALIEN (1988), the wan Dan Aykroyd-Kim Basinger comedy (why is a good question, but only they can answer it!). It has an essay by Amanda Reyes which of course talks about the "myth of Ronald Reagan's America", how George Bush was a friend of producer Jerry Weintraub, how the movie had something to do with talking about single parenting and the "evolving nuclear family".
I mean, I get it -- they want to be "academic'" regardless of the movie they've released, but this is just asinine on any number of levels.
^ That's nothing compared to the painfully "woke" liner notes for Sixteen Candles, which excoriates the films for its "racist" and "sexist" 80s attitudes. If Arrow felt THAT strongly about it, they shouldn't have released the movie in the first place, like those idiots who think that Spielberg should have burned the negatives of West Side Story due to the allegations against Ansel Elgort.
). I get the guy is intensely shy and introverted and possibly mildly autistic, but still, that doesn't make him especially edifying to listen to.
