The dreams in which I'm dying are the best I've ever had

Plus it has Tears for Fears, Echo and the Bunnymen and Duran Duran on the soundtrack. Plus: Patrick Swayze! What's not to love?

well its set in 1988 hence the soundtrack. the review i read yesterday made it sound really good. prob going to see this,

I heard the leading man was annoying.

the cast is great, jakey dear's acting can be confusing at times but overall i left the theater with my head reeling, which is definitely a good thing.

A very good movie, even apart from the soundtrack (no really!). It has that wonderful feeling of just barely fitting together in the midst of chaos.

I am beginning to doubt your commitment to SPARKLE MOTION.

Using Paedophilia in the way that it's used in that kind of film, and also poss. to a lesser extent in Happiness = very bad in that it is a black and white Momusian mess of easy targetness and doesn't allow for the greyness of the world ie perverts moaning softly at Sunday football then going back to domestication. Ie, my truck with it is that it is caricuture-easy-way of killing a target who is obvly. morally dubious but we don't have a solid basis (ie being a televangelist soul soup guy isn't strictly something we can wholeheartedly attack) so then we tack on this easyness (uneasyness, haha), which is a cheapo way of solidify our distrust in Swayze - ie it would've been more interesting and subtler to see Swayze going back to domestication, after his dubiousity. Though, the line "Wait a minute guys we have another room back here..." = classic.

I'm not saying I have something against trivialising Paedophilia, that is not the issue so I'm not leaning down on either side of it, just that it shouldn't be wheeled out so ungracefully.

Also, feels like the last 30 mins not so much tacked on as rushed, ie trying too much, overshooting what he can feasibly do; also, the nasty sequence at the end going over all the characters, that guy in the rabiit suit (before the shooting) touching his eye = OUCH-k-FUCKIN-RUB.

Also, Donnie = Tim Roth in Meantime = no range, but what he does stick to = greatly done, well, well done, rather.

It's not 'genuinely moving' though, Jerry. Which bits? I'm concerned...

The crux of the movie is basically just one blatant reference in the movie, and if you don't catch it, nothing really makes sense.

The double-feature they go see at the theatre is playing "Evil Dead" and "The Last Temptation of Christ". Now, I haven't seen the latter, but I understand the gist of it. Christ is given the opportunity to live in a world where he WASN'T crucified, to see what it's like, and has to decide -- ergo, his last temptation.

This entire movie is basically a throwback to that idea.

Donnie Darko doesn't have the ability to travel in time. That's what I thought, at first, and I tried to justify the whole movie in that frame -- that he was learning to control this ability, or something. But he didn't have any ability at all. He was just subject to fate.

I think it's best explained that a wormhole opens up on Oct 31st. The jet engine on the plane gets sucked into it and then lands in his bedroom. on Oct 2nd. At this point, he is simply given the opportunity to live the days between Oct 2nd and Oct 31st as they would happen if he cheats death and avoids the jet engine, or if he doesn't, and just dies. If he dies, nothing ever happens -- he never burns down porn-daddy's house, so he never goes to jail, so freaky jesus-lady can go on the plane, so his mother never has to, etc. His mother and his girlfriend are still alive.

The movie with all his hallucinations and angst is supposed to be him realizing the inevitability of fate.

I liked the film.

1) Frank is real (it's more about dimensional shifting than time travel).
2) Everything Donnie experiences is real.
3) At the end Donnie goes back to when the engine hit the roof and dies

Jerry - which bits?

What?

I saw the film and liked it but I want to know what role Grandma Death plays.

Best two scenes:

1. The 'sit next to whichever boy you find the cutest' one.
2. The 'because there's a fat man watching us' one.

Apart from It's A Wonderful Life and Harvey, the other film it seems to reference a lot is ET.

The bicycle at the beginning.

One could also look at it as Citizen Kane in reverse. Instead of the reverie of a dying man struggling to find something of worth and value in the life he has lived, this is the reverie of someone unable to connect with the world who has resolved to commit suicide and imagines, in his fevered and probably schizophrenic mind, what would happen if he remained alive. Like Ward Littell, he determines that he will ultimately be responsible for the deaths of everyone who gets close to him and that his own life can offer no redemption, either to himself or to the world. So he kills himself, by whatever means - the 'plane fuselage, like the rabbit, are mere signifiers, the McGuffins. It's as if James Stewart opted to jump off the church in "Vertigo" rather than kill Kim Novak twice (which latter also raises another conjecture - Scotty Ferguson as the unchecked reverse of George Bailey?).

I love the scene introducing the high school. Ever since, I've had the odd desire to blast Tears for Fears in my living room. So, sometimes I do.

It was my favorite film of last year. Though I have to admit the screenplay reduces some characters to one dimensional characters, the atmosphere is something unachieved or unattempted in any film I can remember; a kind of post-modern, dark-romanticism. The director mixes wildly disparate genres as coming of age story, sci-fi, period piece, horror, comedy. There is also an unprecedented mixture of styles, as though the suburban worlds of Spielberg's E.T. and Lynch's Blue Velvet were discovered to be very similar. The sarcastic apocalyptic sensibility reminds me of certain DeLillo novels, this same sensibility is why Donnie Darko is only film to capture the kind of ironic fatalism that will come define the voice 21st century American entertainment.

Just seen this film for first time in the "Director's Cut" version. It's probably no clearer than it was before judging by all the DD threads I just trawled through. I like Marcello's theory upthread however. Makes as much sense as anything else I just read.