Still from the movie Donnie Darko, image courtesy CastleRock
We often presume artists know what they are doing, that when we find a perfect pop song, a great album, an enthralling TV series or a captivating film that the person who created it must have either given birth to it in a miracle of inspiration or planned it out with the care of an architect. But sometimes we learn from the subsequent output of the artist that it isn’t so, that instead their moment of greatness was a fluke which they are incapable of repeating.
Tricky’s “Maxinquaye” is, arguably, one of these creations. Tricky occasionally wrote great songs after his startling, haunting, utterly original debut album – the seething angst of “Christiansands”, the crushed, stately beauty of “Poems”, the vicious swagger of “Tricky Kid” – but all of his subsequent albums were stunted creatures, hobbled by self-indulgence, lapses into ugly bluster and the stubborn refusal of inspiration to take part in proceedings.
2001’s “Donnie Darko” is another one of those glorious accidents in pop culture, an unrepeatable one-off. Director Richard Kelly was one of the most briefly-crowned geniuses of all time, dethroned faster than Edward VIII (less than a year). No sooner had “Donnie Darker” made its strange journey from being a weirdo film that the studio had no idea how to market, to limited cinema release, to DVD, to vast, zeitgeist-surfing cult success than Kelly began to make a mess of it.
First the director’s cuts of the film itself, which sprawled with self-indulgence and layered the film in sci-fi hokum that attempted to explain the film’s central mystery, but instead killed it dead. And then there was his follow up film, Southland Tales: if you are one of the 99.9999999999% of the cinema going public who decided to give it a miss, we urge you to reconsider. There is something hypnotic in its sheer, spectacular awfulness, the apocalyptic posturing, the brain-murdering dialogue (from the same man whose dialogue in “Donnie Darko” sings), the risible plot and the diabolical performances from figures such as Justin Timberlake and, yes, The Rock. Films should make our jaws drop open and Southland Tales does this, though in disbelief rather than wonder.
But let’s not linger on painful memories but instead remember the wonder of “Donnie Darko”, non-directors cut. PopLifer remembers seeing a cinema trailer for it and being deeply confused – was it meant to be a horror film? Eighties period drama? Sci fi? Teenage angst? – but intrigued enough to go and see it at the cinema.
We left with our tiny minds blown. The film proved to be all of the above, of course, but also so much more. From the ravishing opening scene – young Jake Gyllenhaal wakes up on the side of a mountain, dawn breaking and his bike by his side, unaware of how he got there, then cycles home to the sublime sound of Echo and the Bunnymen’s “The Killing Moon” – we were hooked. Over the next two hours we were enthralled, mystified, moved, frightened and finally heartbroken. Continue reading →
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