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Shit.
Which Donnie Darko character are you? by Shay
OK, I came out of the cinema feeling a little disappointed, but on reading this thread it has perked me right up. Not knowing about the tangent universe thing really meant that for me a lot of Donnie's actions made no sense (I suppose we are to presume that Donnie drove the car into the wormhole thing in order to travel back in time and managed to arrive a few minutes before the plane engine?). Without that fairly important piece of knowledge killing himself by travelling back in time because his girlfriend has just been killed seems a more extravagent means of pointless suicide.
The characters around Donnie aren't particularly well defined, the two teachers for example, the Chinese girl, Grandmother Death herself. Especially the latter herself, there's no real need in the film for it to be her there, Frank could have just as easily run Gretchen over without her in the way. There is, at times, a self-conscious weirdness about the film, odd things to keep the audience off-track. The whole thing about the female teacher being fired (for no reason) and then shouting 'fuck!' and being seen by the Chinese girl.
And Donnie doesn't save Gretchen. At the end of the month, psycho-stepfather is still going to come calling, only now she'll have no-one to help her.
I'm still unsure about the whole Frank the Rabbit thing, it seemed the 'explanation' in the film was post-rationalised after the idea came up of having an evil bugs bunny. The scene in the theatre where Donnie says "why don't you take off the bunny suit?" and Frank replies "why don't you take off that man suit?" makes absolutely no sense to anything. It's a true Invisible moment, along with Donnie turning to the camera and trying to break the fourth wall in true Mister Six style, but I can't see how it makes sense within the movie. After all, Frank is the means Donnie uses to get himself to hang out with Gretchen, there isn't anyone under the suit, and unless the writer was going on some hideously dodgy 'inside our skins we're all angels' riff Frank's reply doesn't make sense. Self-consciously weird. But then, maybe Frank was just feeling in a bad mood.
Hopefully the film will come out on DVD with a copy of the website a la The Matrix so we can get the other half of the story. |
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