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It stands to reason that if you like a movie, you should love the DVD, and uber-love the extras. But that's not always the case. Man, is that ever not always the case. Bad extras — especially bad director's commentary — can utterly ruin the experience of a good movie. Of course, on rare occasions, the converse is true: an awful movie can be redeemed by an amusing director's commentary, but this requires the presence of a charming, engaging director. Directors, like baseball players, are not chosen for their social skills (David O. Russell? Quentin Tarantino? Oliver "I Dare You Not To Hate Me" Stone?). So I've learned, finally, to think long and hard before hitting the "alternate track" option on my DVDs.
The worst was the alternate ending for … Dodgeball. Yes, Dodgeball. I was really looking forward this one. It's just the sort of stupid comedy I adore, and it did not disappoint: Ben Stiller as a diminuitive codpiece-pumping workout bully, Vince Vaughn as the puffy average-joe good guy, Christine Taylor as the girl who says, "I just threw up a little in my mouth when you said that." There was even a pirate involved. It all worked for me, providing fluffy fun right up there with Super Troopers and The Waterboy.
Anyway, wishing to extend the viewing experience, I began paging through the experts. I enjoyed a fine featurette on how everyone (except Ben Stiller and Christine Taylor) practiced really, really hard to learn dodgeball as well as a funny collection of outtakes involving tall 'n' skinny Justin Long. Alas, then I stumbled upon the alternate ending.
First, the ending itself. (Spoiler alert, by the way: if finding out the end of a movie called Dodgeball, about dodgeball, is going to make you wet your pants, back away now.) In the version released to theaters, it seems like the bad guys are going to win, but at the last moment something magical happens, and the good guys pull through. Shocking, I know, but since life so rarely works out that way, it was as satisfying and fulfilling as the final major chord of the Beatles' "A Day in the Life."
The alternate ending had several things wrong with it: 1. It ended abruptly, not even following up on a bad thing that happened to Steve the Pirate: loose-end city. 2. It let the bad guys win. 3. It sucked. Nevertheless, in his commentary, the director, Rawson Marshall Thurber, defended it as "the right way to end the movie, without question." Without question. In fact, he was so un-questiony about it, this first-time director walked off the set for a week and had be wooed back by Ben Stiller and the producer, who had plucked him from obscurity to start with.
And with that one simple story, my enjoyment of the film fell away. I can't re-watch it now, knowing Marshall Tucker Thurber intended for it to be such a mean-spirited antiromp. The jokes are tight, the dialogue is snappy, the triple-takes during the crotch-shots are well-timed, but it all means naught, because of this obnoxious little diatribe.
Why let it bother me so much? I guess it was because in watching the commentary, I found out that the very act of enjoying the movie put me out of the cool-kids club yet again. "We tested it, and I loved it, and Ben loved it, and Vince loved it," Marshall Tanya Tucker says on his commentary, "but the test audiences didn't get behind it as much as we'd hoped they would." Stupid proletariat. Idiot Wal-mart shopping losers. Dumb old test audience — as dumb as YOU, the viewer who liked the happy ending.
It reminded me of the time I went up to a girl in a pre-college program and said, "Oh you're from D.C.! You must shop at Commander Salamander. That store is sooo cool." And she rolled her eyes and said, "Commander Salamander is so over. It got lame when kids from Jersey started shopping there." It wasn't the first time I'd stumbled into the wrong end of cool. Liking Combat Rock before I understood that London Calling was the only true Clash album. Thinking George was the best Beatle when apparently it was John. It was just one more example of the oligarchy of cool people shutting its doors in my face, and I was goddamn sick of it.
And this wasn't the first time an enjoyable movie had been tainted by a bad commentary. Bridget Jones' Diary was a perfectly funny morsel of lite fare rendered smirking and cynical by the humorless, snooty opinionettes from director Sharon Maguire. Then again, I'd had awful movies saved by directors with unexpectedly funny annotations: Forced to watch Pretty Woman for an article about chick flicks, I caught Gerry Marshall's commentary, and holy crap, the guy rambled for an hour and a half and was ten times more entertaining than the goddamn movie.
"Here's some tough guys. One of them's my son. And LOOK-LOOK-LOOKITTHAT! He's got a knife in his skateboard!" he said, prompting me to pass Vitamin Water through my nose. The actual scene was beyond stupid. But the director, able to poke fun at himself even as he recalled a movie he loved, tipped his hat to its silliness. See, David Seymour Marshall, no relation? Gerry Marshall gets it. The director's commentary is not there for you to make your audience feel stupid. It's for you to thank your audience for watching your stuff, and enhancing the experience.
Or, well, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's not for me to say what the director's commentary is for — and I should just shut up and stop worrying about intent. These days, there's too much information making the same heavy rotation. Before Tara Reid's titty is back in its bra, it's being dissected by Michael Ian Black on VH-1, which is then being discussed on blogs about Michael Ian Black on VH-1. Maybe I should just let the movie end, and move on to Napoleon Dynamite.
Maybe so. Or maybe we need a ratings system for directors' commentaries: "A" for annoying, "R" for redemptive. Or maybe Garry Marshall should just do everybody's commentary, and call it a night. n°
| ABOUT THE AUTHOR: |
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Amy Keyishian is a New York freelancer with four parrots and a bad attitude. She sometimes writes young-adult fiction under an entirely different name, but she's not telling you what it is here. She's a big fan of The Moth, Venture Brothers, and Air America Radio. |
©2005 Amy Keyishian and hooksexup.com
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