Have you ever stopped to puzzle the idea of what would happen to the people around you, your family, your peers, or the world, if you did not die when you were supposed too? Would they even be affected? Would things change or continue in it's same monotone path? Deep in the suburbs, in a town called Middlesex, Donnie Darko lives with his family of five. Known to be one of the smartest kids in the local Catholic School, Donnie is often regarded by his peers to be an daunting outcast. His therapist also follows suit by proposing Donnie to be psychotic, and prescribing him medication for his frequent black outs and hallucinations. His main companion, we discover, is a tall demonized man wearing a bunny mask with a gun shot wound in his eye, Frank, one of his hallucinations.
Frank guides Donnie out of his house in the middle of the night, helping him evade the jet engine that is about to crash into on his room of the house. A half-awake Donnie standing in a golf course facing the menacing Frank is then revealed the coming of the end of the world. 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. By the next morning Donnie is well aware that Frank had saved his life, and that by following him we will survive the end of the world. Frank send Donnie on missions complying to extremely reckless things, both vandalize and flood the school, along with burning down a local televangelist's house.
Before I begin to analyze the films' artistic technique and camera work, I wanted to bring up the soundtrack of the film. Many songs were made famous by the cult film or whose popularity were just enhanced (Duran Duran's "Notorious", Tears For Fears' "Head over Heels" or Echo and the Bunnymen's "The Killing Moon"). Even Michael Andrew's song "Mad World", that he made specifically for the film, has become renown across the world. At the same time Michael Andrew's scored the film making such melodies as "Gretchen Ross" or "The Tangent Universe" which would identify specific times or specific characters in the movie. Donnie Darko has been one of my favorite scored and soundtracked film's of all time. Purely brilliant.
My thoughts to categorizing a good or bad film dwell within the realms of intriguing me. Whether it be by the thoughts or ideas brought up by the film, motivations and actions of the characters (lead or not), and whether it consumes me helping me to forget world I live in. This film has claimed all three deeming qualities for me in just the first cut released in 2001 to just a hand full of small theaters in the U.S. thus making it one of my favorite films
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