MOSTLYFILM: Kind Of Funny, Kind Of Sad
Pop quiz, hotshots! What do the films The Happiness Of The Katakuris and Donnie Darko have in common?
Answer: without actually meaning to, I've somehow ended up reviewing both of them three times on the internet. With the Takashi Miike musical, I wrote about it in three very different contexts - an unsubtitled print in Tokyo in the days before Monoglot Movie Club had even been invented, a subtitled print when it came over to the Edinburgh Film Festival, and as a feature in Tartan Video's Asia Extreme Festival.
All of those reviews occurred over the space of roughly eighteen months. The ones for Donnie Darko, on the other hand, are a lot more spread out. I first wrote about the film when it turned up at the 2001 London Film Festival, shortly after its American release. I got to re-assess it a little over a year later, when it was chosen by the Pals as part of the programme for VidBinge 2002. And now, fourteen years after that, Donnie Darko is getting a re-release in UK cinemas all over again, which meant I got to revisit the film one more time for MostlyFilm.
You can read my review over on Europe's Best Website right now: it's in a post titled Kind Of Funny, Kind Of Sad. And if you're looking for some bonus content to back it up, I've got some videos for you right here.
...and this is the new trailer for the 2016 re-release, which assumes you know what it is already.
As I say in the review, most of us probably haven't seen this film for at least a decade or more, so it comes as a surprise when the familiar face of Seth Rogen (though not his familar hair) turns up in a supporting role. He's only really got one line in this scene, but it's the big one.
Now. Remember how I said that one of the strengths of Donnie Darko is the way that it just glosses over the complexities of its sci-fi subplot, and lets you fill in the blanks yourself? Would you rather have someone else fill in the blanks for you? And do you have half an hour to spare? If so, then this next video's for you. Contains spoilers, inevitably.
Another fact about the film that you may be unaware of - in 2009, they made a sequel to it. And by 'they', I mean 'absolutely nobody who was involved with the original'. I haven't seen S. Darko myself, and I'm intrigued to learn that Ed Harcourt wrote the score for it, but by all accounts it's an absolutely terrible movie. Here's the trailer, anyway.
And finally, because we can't really get away from it, here's a video for Mad World as used towards the end of the film. Not the video for Mad World, you understand. This is a bit of fan art made from clips of Domo, the angry Weetabix creature who's the mascot of NHK TV in Japan. It's curiously affecting for reasons I don't even begin to understand.
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