Worst DVD commentary ever - don't buy SE DVD!

I understand your disappointment. But how is the VIDEO/AUDIO quality of this new release?

[deleted]

I do not listen to commentaries very often any longer, and partially for that reason. Too many persons seem totally unprepared for their commentaries, and do not seem to get the idea of it. We want to both be entertained and educated by their commentary. We want to learn interesting "behind the scenes" facts. Tell us some stories about making the film. Tell us what it was like to work with various people. Tell us something about your interpretation of the film, etc.

There are unfortunately a BUNCH of commentaries from people who'll start "narrating the film", as if you can't see it for yourself ("He's going into the kitchen now and picking up a knife", "She can't start the car", etc.), or they'll sit there, completely silent, for five minutes, then give a couple lines of narration, then sit there for another five minutes without saying anything, etc.

On some commentaries, people have admitted that until just now, they hadn't seen (or apparently even thought about) the film for 20 years, so they just start watching it instead, they struggle to remember persons' names, etc.


http://www.rateyourmusic.com/~JrnlofEddieDeezenStudies

I felt the same way about the dvd for "The Gate". It's been a childhood favorite of mine for a quite a while so I was naturally anticipating the special edition release with the writer/director commentary. Talk about a snooze fest. Outside of one or two interesting stories about having problems dealing with the special effects, most of the commentary track is them describing scenes(as if we can't see what's going on with our own eyes). Not the worst I've seen, but definitely a letdown since I was really looking forward to it.

Bad commentary is nothing new.

I used to buy a ton of Special Editions on LaserDisc way back before DVDs came out, as the picture quality and audio quality were significantly better than any of the other mass media formats - even though you had to flip those heavy discs every ~30 or 60 minutes depending which recording mode was used.

One of the other nice deals about the LaserDiscs were that most included all of the commentary stuff that we've come used to expect on DVDs - once the series of LaserDiscs with digital audio came out, they had two extra unused analog audio tracks to put content on - which they started filling up with sometimes two separate extra audio tracks. One was sometimes the director+writer+producer rambling along and the other was often a panel including many of the main cast.

You could flip between the main stereo/surround digital audio tracks and many players allowed you to set either one of the analog tracks as a 'dual mono' track so you would hear just that track but on all of your speakers.

The good special editions actually came with a CAV disc (allowed any player to do super crisp frame by frame) which had an art gallery on it - one image per frame. Considering you can get almost 30 minutes of video out of those discs, the number of still images that could be stored on the discs was quite impressive. The Aliens disc with that on it was one of the best single pieces of media that I have ever seen, however the media you could buzz through at your own pace - if you were listening to the audio commentary that went along the movie, you were at the mercy of the speakers' pace.

With only a few exceptions, even those early commentaries sucked badly. Even the ones from James Cameron (fanboys are going to jump on me for that one when they see this), who was very good about putting out director's cut editions of his films on LaserDisc. The commentary on The Abyss was really boring. The one on Aliens was not as bad but still very clearly unprepared.

And that's really the main problem about these commentaries - so many of the directors are getting nothing to appear, and others only get a small fee for showing up. Most don't seem to prepare at all in advance - they just kind of show up and ad lib. If this was a film from 6 months earlier, that would be appropriate, but if they've done a dozen films since then (and have 3 in various stages of pre-production) many will forget all of those details, or at least not speak very coherently about them once the cameras are rolling.

Or there will be a panel and one of the members will control the conversation, and it's sadly somebody that doesn't have a lot of anything interesting to say but they keep running their mouth anyways. Listening to a commentary where one of the minor (and unimportant) characters is dominating the conversation is not fun. :D

Sadly the bad DVD commentary has only one potential fix - people that care enough to prepare a bit ahead of time, or at least to think about that film during the travel there so they will have an interesting perspective on the film. Of course it also matter who they choose/pay to attend the taping.

For 'The Manhattan Project' any commentary that skipped Chris Collet and John Lithgow is probably going to suck. I can understand that perhaps Collet would be seen as less relevant these days, and Lithgow may be too busy - but having just the director alone doesn't sound very interesting - especially if the DVD is billed as a special edition (in more than just being a transfer from a much cleaner print than the DVD version came from).