A Commentary on Commentaries

When I was young I would always love to watch the behind-the-scenes shorts that they would show on TV right before a film was released in theaters.  Whether it was “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”, “Beverly Hills Cop II” or even “Jaws: The Revenge”, I would eat those things up, I would record them on VHS, and re-watch them both before and after the movie came out.  Later these behind the scenes bits would be put on the DVD’s of these films as a special feature.

The next evolution of behind-the-scenes in the early days of the DVD, was the audio commentaries.  It’s something that most average DVD, now DVD/BluRay buyers never look at or treat as a reason to buy the disc in the first place.  I always thought of them as good ways to get a little more insight into a movie you love or way to watch the film with its creators/actors where they are not confined to a five minute chat about their movie like in a late night talk show, they have to endure the entire film start to finish.  Sometimes that’s a good thing, other times and to be completely honest most of the time they end up just describing what’s happening on screen with sometimes telling stories about the scenes, these can be boring and can turn you off to the commentary track all together.

Early on almost every movie had a running commentary, the first DVD I ever bought “Analyze This” had a commentary.  It featured Billy Crystal and Robert De Niro talking as the movie played, which went about like you would expect, Crystal trying to be funny for 100 minutes and De Niro grunting a ‘yeah’ or ‘no’ every now and then but mostly counting the seconds to get the hell out of there.  However this was not the first commentary I ever heard, the first to get me interested was on the extinct Laserdisc system from the 1997 Kevin Smith film “Chasing Amy”.  It featured commentary by Smith, producers Scott Mosier, Bob Hawk, actors Ben Affleck, Jason Mewes, exec Jon Gordon, and historian Vincent Pereira. It was a lot of people for a one audio track, but the best moments of it are Smith and Affleck, they are hilarious through the entire track, the others tell some relevant stories, but the humor and good natured ribbing by Smith and Affleck is awesome.

To me the best commentaries are the ones that either take you further into the movie making process like “Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring”, or John Carpenter’s “The Thing” with a Carpenter/Russell commentary track, or there are ones that treat the viewing like their own personal MST3K (Mystery Science Theater 3000) where they poke fun at the films as well as themselves like David Fincher, Brad Pitt, and Edward Norton do in “Fight Club” and Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., Renee Zellweger, and Cameron Crowe laugh for hours in “Jerry Maguire”.  Another classic commentary is a classic itself, “Ghostbusters” with a track by director Ivan Reitman, Harold Ramis, and Joe Medjuck.

Then there are commentaries that are so special that they can be even more educational or at times more entertaining than the film itself.  Some of my favorites are films like “The Usual Suspects” track with director Bryan Singer and writer Christopher McQuarrie as they wax intellectual about their masterpiece and nit-pick the hell out of it as well. The “Stir of Echoes” track has writer/director David Koepp treating it like a filmmaking 101 class, it’s great.  There are geek commentaries like Tarantino on “True Romance”, his story of the origin of the Walken/Hopper scene makes it even more memorable.  “Dark City” and “The Matrix” has several different interesting tracks.  “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn” is pretty good, “The Zero Effect” is a fun one as well as “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang” with Val Kilmer and Robert Downey Jr. making fun of, everything.  If you want to laugh, check out the commentaries for “Tropic Thunder” or “Pineapple Express”.  The afore mentioned Kevin Smith films have multiple commentaries, so good in fact that a huge portion of his career now is just that, ‘talking’ on podcasts.

What brought all this back to my attention again was that I watch very little of the commentaries anymore, most are too technical or the speakers tend to play it safe and can be very politically correct.  However, recently I watched “Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengance” the sequel to the horrible original “Ghost Rider” starring Nicolas Cage.  This version was very B-movie-esque, which is fine, it works for the film and for Cage who gets to be a little crazy.  What I found totally worth watching was though was the video commentary by directors Neveldine and Taylor.  The pair walk you through the movie, praising the greatness and insanity that is Nic Cage, they pause at certain scenes and show a behind-the-scene clip of how the effects were created, they slow-mo a shot of a stunt man breaking his ankle, they make fun of the silly moments in the film as well as the short-comings of the script, they lust after actress Viloante Placido, and most importantly they show their love for making movies, even if it’s not intended to win Oscars.

There are plenty that I have not mentioned and after doing a little research myself, I found that there are several top ten best commentary tracks of films that I didn’t even mention or have seen.  So I will seek them out and try once again to see an old movie in a new way.  You should give it a try, you might like it.

--Robert L. Castillo