S. Darko - The hack-job

So I, err, 'obtained' a copy of S. Darko, and now aren't you glad that I did, because you don't have to wait your turn. I mistakenly presumed that Richard Kelly, written/director of the original Donnie Darko was involved somehow, I imagined that perhaps given the less then stellar performance of Southland Tales (neither a critical or box office success), that he had returned to the Darko universe for a little comfort. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I actually thought Southland Tales was good.
Believing that when watching the film made for a strange experience above and beyond the self-consciously contrived actual strangeness of it. All of these 'Kelly-esque' were there, but it was like the film-maker didn't know how to put them together. Which would have been odd if Kelly actually had a hand in it, but he didn't. Not even some vague EP credit, nothing. He basically disavowed the thing that was created by the studio that owns the rights to Donnie. Many of the Kelly-esque elements were copied exactly from the original. Scary rabbit mask? Check. Shocking car accidents? check? Rewinding footage to reverse time? Double check. Floating, wobbly tubes in front of people? Check. (there was no need to even explain them, somehow the characters just accepted them). Things falling out the sky and killing people? Check. 
Once again its fascinating in an amusing/irritating/disappointing way to see big movie studios completely miss the point and not get what makes a film good. The Blair Witch was not popular because it featured shaky, hand-held footage from the characters POV. Donnie Darko was not the brilliant movie it was because it included a rising hollywood (Ed Westwick can't hold a candle to Jake anyway), or retro-chic period music, or strange-ghost characters, or scary rabbits. It was the beautifully intricate narractive, constructed with delicacy to line up like a rubix-cube at the end, around a core of superbly performed characters we care about. None of the humour, which gave the orginal depth and made the pathos more affecting, made its way into this hack-job of a sequel. The only positive of this film is, in taking all the superfical qualities of the original and turning them into something completely insubstatial, it has inadvertantly laid bare where the true depth and mastery of Donnie Darko is. 

On, a side note, I feel sorry for the cute but misguided Jackson Rathbone who was in it... He's quoted as trying to tell us to give it time, that Donnie wasn't appreciated at first, and neither was this. Sorry Jack, only quality gets discovered after time, not crap, and you might be better off to admit that you are a struggling actor and you did the film because you thought it might be popular, and not because you thought it was such an 'amazing' character. It wasn't and you sound like a tool. Save that drivel for if you actually get famous.  

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