2 mo. ago • 96%

What is your favorite movie or TV show director's commentary?

Been listening to a few lately, a few John Carpenter's, Mayhem was pretty out there, looking for more that are interesting or wildly off topic or entertaining.

13 comments

An unexpected one for me was the commentary for Godzilla 2000 on the American/English release. I kind of laughed when I saw it was an option because this is one of the Japanese-made films that was dubbed into English and I had no idea how they’d handle that. Would it be in Japanese? Would that be dubbed? In fact it was the director of the English version explaining the whole process of creating the English release, including that the dialog was not dubbed but looped, and what that difference meant. It was a fascinating look at something I knew nothing about.

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- what's the difference between dubbing and looping?
  
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  IIRC dubbing tries to be an exact translation of the dialog whereas looping takes more liberties to try and get the audio to more closely match the on-screen mouth movements. A scene should still convey the same overall story but the dialog might not be directly comparable.
  
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GalaxyQuest included an alleged commentary track that was all in Thermian. No one should ever listen to it, but my hat is off to whoever put it together.

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Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog has a commentary track called Commentary! The Musical! It is exactly what it sounds like, and it's hilarious.

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Blood Simple has a commentary track that's a satire of overly serious, artsy fartsy commentary tracks. It's hilariously applied to a very serious movie.

https://jasondeanbooks.blogspot.com/2016/07/the-greatest-dvd-commentaries-ever-in_21.html?m=1

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Not quite a director commentary, but I thought this side by side without vfx sounded super interesting

https://ew.com/kingdom-of-the-planet-of-the-apes-side-by-side-raw-cut-with-unfinished-vfx-clip-exclusive-8697941

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loat soul: The doomed journey of Richard Stanley's island of Dr Moreau.

documentary of the collected footage of everything behind the scenes of the production process of the island of Dr. Moreau made by Richard Stanley starring val kilmer and Marlon Brando.

this movie is notoriously awful, although Richard Stanley is a notoriously fantastic filmmaker, the main problem was Marlon Brando intentionally being a piece of shit and sinking the production because he was a narcissistic, cynical asshole.

not just complaining or being difficult but changing almost everything about every aspectod the movie and destroying the sincerity and process of the production until Richard Stanley literally went mad, was replaced, ran off into the jungle on the island they were shooting and lived in the jungle spying on the rest of the production process and then never made a film again for the next 20 years or something.

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The Venture Bros. Doc Hammer and Jackson Public are hilarious.

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Shawshank Redemption.

The Big Lebowski.

Also Star Trek 2.

So many great ones though.

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The firefly ones are great.

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The one for Predator is hilarious - done after the fact they can't remember half the movie, and lots of amazing stories come out, such as the heat-camera not working in the jungle (as everything is hot) so they tried dousing the scenery in ice water, making the cast stand next to a fire, then quickly record it. It didn't work well.

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