Unnecessary Commentaries

That is probably it. There is so much pressure to add "special features" for Dvds. I mean it's getting ridiculous. First you have the director's commentary, then the cast's, the cast and the director's, all the down till you know every goddamn person involved feelings about the making of the project. If it was intentional, I say kudos to the Venture Bro. team.

It may be a trend with adult swim dvds. The commentary track on Sealab vol. 2 was just guys jackin around as you say. I don't know if it was a studio requirement because the adult swim dvds are usually well packaged with solid special features, but maybe they just don't have much to say about their cartoons.

That's a good point. The judgement of Williams Street these days has been pretty poor, at best.

Venture Bros. is not a Williams Street, um, venture.

I daresay I've listened to more commentary tracks than most of you (background filler while working, mainly), and it seems like many of them are just there to pad the feature list. Some guys know it and just fuck around in (usually) failed attempts at humor, but just as many are genuinely awful. Best case for this: the Seinfeld DVDs. They are the absolute WORST, filled with little more than dead air and occasional bemused chuckling at onscreen antics as they see them for the first time in ages. Even Jerry and Larry David haven't recorded an interesting track.

There are so many people who should be on DVD's instead of the boring, big stars. Get the chatty, bitchy gay stereotype caterer or something, maybe the personal limo driver to Russell Crowe.

I stopped listening to commentary tracks a couple of years ago because I got burned on a few and I don't really feel like I am missing a lot. A good deal of the recent films I have liked don't have commentary tracks anyway.

I agree, I used to love commentary tracks...Now not so much. The all time worst commentary was the Star Wars DVD's where the goddamn sound effects guy was on every five freakin seconds. I could care less where you got the sounds for this or that.

I rarely sit there and watch along with commentaries, but I'll often put them on in the background like the radio.

Please don't take this as me defending those shitty tracks, but I for one am always willing to listen to what a good sound designer has to say.

There are a ton of movies that I have only watched with the commentary tracks. I will say that anything with John Carpenter and Kurt Russell is gold.

Or Paul Thomas Anderson on the Boogie Nights track. Really entertaining listen.

Commentaries, like most special features in general, have been pretty well bastardized by the mainstream acceptance of DVD. People like to pick up the box and see a ton of "bonus!" features, none of which that they'll actually watch. Commentaries just become another selling point, and most studios treat them that way. I'd say most comentaries are unnecessary, especially when you can tell within the first 5 minutes whether there's any point in listening any more. There's no context to them anymore, no sense of history. A director records the commentary before it's even out in theaters, so he has nothing to discuss aside from "It was cold on this day" and "We used computers for these FX".

Two of my favorite commentary tracks of all time are the drunken commentary on Cannibal The Musical and The King's commentary on Bubba Hotep. I've barely learned anything about filmaking from them but boy were they funny...

He was coked out of his mind while he recorded that, right?

I'm of the opinion that the screwing around tracks are for people who assume tracks are boring. There can be informative and (intentionally) funny tracks. The 40-Year-Old Virgin has a highly engaging track where we get a lot of information about the making of the film but also a lot of humor. Of course that track had almost all of the cast members on board as well as Judd Apatow.

Kurt Wimmer on Equilibrium is a pretty good track.

Wait, is this about good tracks or bad tracks?

Personally, as an aspiring filmmaker, I find commentaries invaluable. I bought Red Eye the other day for 4 bucks simply because it had a commentary. You can learn something from any commentary, I even learned a lot from Halloween: Ressurection. The only useless commentaries are Adult Swim's, and any commentary that has 30% or more dead air space (Fargo's cinematographer commentary is as desolate as the town it's named after.)

There are plenty of threads dedicated to great commentaries, there's no point going down that road again.

I find myself less and less interested in extras in general on DVDs nowadays. If someone goes out of their way and makes a truly interesting behind the scenes doc with some meat to it, or a director known for engaging commentaries does one, I'm sold. But there's just way too much fluff out there(especially with the docs). And as Stew said above, a lot of the commentaries are being recorded before the film has even come out theatrically. Not exactly a lot of time to look back and reflect on the film, especially when the filmmakers are most likely a bit burned out on the material at that point. There are exceptions to this of course, like Fight Club, but commentaries don't automatically score as an extra at all anymore.
It doesn't help matters that the double disc special editions of films are often over twice the price of the single discs. I used to opt for the special edition every time(damn collector mentality), but it's less and less worthwhile considering the prices. I check reviews and read the thoughts on the boards a lot more than I used to before taking the plunge on a overpriced special edition.

I was responding to Jared and the others who were listing off good commentaries, not you Patrick. It's not really about either. Or maybe bad ones, I'm not entirely sure now.

They're certainly less "special" than they used to be though. When Laserdisc was "big", if a director did a commentary, they usually put a lot more effort into them it seemed.
The dead air ones are the worst(any Tim Burton film where he's alone on the track). If you manage to forget the commentary track is even on during a 15 minute span, something is wrong.

I have my own commentary question, and I don't want to start my own thread. Has anyone seen the option featured on DVDs to turn the commentary on via closed captioning? I tend to like commentaries, but I find myself shying away because I actually want to hear the movie. Closed captioning would be great.

Is this unworkable?

The CC works just like on any of the other audio tracks, I think. You just select the commentary track and hit subtitles. Of course, that doesn't solve the problem of wanting the movie to be playing in the foreground.

With the exception of trivia tracks and things of that nature, I've never seen a CC commentary track.
Well, and some foreign films that have the non-English commentary translated in English subs. With those you can go ahead and switch back to the normal film audio and be fine.

Not sure if that's what you meant, but there's my 2 cents.

Dreamworks used to subtitle their commentary tracks. I know the tracks for Old School and The Time Machine were subtitled.

Netflix helped me break the habit. Especially with shit like LOTR and the Big-Box-O'-Matrix, you can spend far more time on the "special" features than on the real feature. Even the first release of a film now often comes with a 2nd disc of fx documentaries and related nonsense. When I get something from Netflix it either doesn't come with the 2nd disc of filler or I don't feel like keeping the disc long enough to watch again with commentary on, and it's helped me to realize that I'm not missing anything.

Unless it is a classic film or entertaining talker (or, like Ripoll, you are, how you say, Filmaker) why bother?

Related issue: Have you ever had the commentary track stuck in the "on" position? For the longest time I couldn't get Season 1 of BTVS to play without the commentary. The menu didn't have an "on/off" and instead you just highlighted the commentary before playing, and for some reason it wouldn't turn off. My player always remembered the disc and helpfully launched Whedon's prattling every time. Almost drove me mad.

Because the US doesn't have an official language and many, many people in this country speak Spanish, French, or any number of other languages - either as a primary or secondary language. For example, my Spanish isn't as fluent as my German, but my sister speaks French fluently, and my ex speaks French, German, and Dutch - so between us we'd be interested in listening to commentaries in any of those languages. And we're all primary English speakers.

Confused now. Maybe it is, as the logo's on the insert in the S2 DVD but I don't see it listed on the Williams St. wikipedia page.

Ah well.

I'm sure I've mentioned this, but have any of you guys checked out the scene-descriptive commentary tracks recorded for those with poor eyesight? They. Are. Spectacular. The non-DC version of Daredevil has one (and it's the only way I can watch the movie now). Munich, and, I'm pretty sure, United 93 have them as well. I hope there are more.

They describe all the things onscreen in such a grandiose, flowery manner that it's damn entertaining. Most especially scenes of extreme violence and the 3D spectacle of the opening production logos. Good stuff.

More in tune with this thread, I'll have to nominate the Jim Uhls / Chuck Palahniuk commentary for 'Fight Club'. I found it rather odd that both the screenwriter and the novelist could end up being such meandering bores and add not a shread of insight into the story or the process. What I did find interesting, were a few instances of Palahniuk complimenting Uhls on certain lines of dialogue that Fincher, Pitt and Norton attributed to Andrew Kevin Walker in their commentary, but Uhls replying with "thanks" or "How did I come up with that line? Well, it was just one of those things."

I find on TV Series DVDs sometimes the commentaries can start out good in the earlier seasons but start to suck as they run out of things to say.

NewsRadio is a good example as the first DVD collection's commentaries were entertaining and filled with good anecdotes. The problem was they didn't really pay attention or seem to know what episode they were commenting on. In the later seasons, when they ran out of interesting stories, they just started to joke around about things that were not even related to the episode and I stopped listening to them.

Anytime I pop in one of Kevin Smith's films in my DVD player, I watch it with the commentary on.

That's probably the only way I could get through his films anymore.

Friedkin has done 2 different Exorcist commentaries.

Both consist of him saying things like "Here Regan goes up the stairs" and "now Merrin begins the exorcism".
He's one of those has-nothing-to-say/verbalize what we're watching commentators.

His Version You Never Saw track is the only one I suffered through. I swear that twenty minutes or more would go by where he wouldn't say a word.

For my $$$, his finest work is Dogma and the Clerks "franchise" (i.e. the 2 films and the brillant animated-series!)

You rank those films above Chasing Amy?

Or Kurt Russell and anyone. Used Cars is a scream.

Do DVDs have easter eggs anymore?

Amy has its moments (i.e. the whole "no-budget" look perfectly suited the story/subject matter & 3 Oscar-worthy performances from Affleck, Adams and Lee), but something about it was just...off for me.

Do I consider it a good film? Certainly! But Smith's best? I'd say no.

yeah, he also did a nice one for The Leopard Man DVD (from the Val Lewton Collection). always cool when one great filmmaker enthuses over another great filmmaker like that.