Coding, Darko, TSO

Managed to spend at least some time coding today. Finished up some simple Wiki-style text formatters and an HTML formatted text buffer. I promise all these references to this code might make sense once I release them.

A friend said “the director of [Donnie Darko] needs to take some film and editing classes”. He went on to say “watching the deleted scenes on the [DVD], there were some he should really have left in. [... It] was kind that thing where they cut stuff out of the movie, but there are still hints of it in the final movie. [Like] the dude who died was his sister’s [boyfriend] or somesuch [sic].” After watching the extended/deleted scenes myself — there are many on the DVD — I can see many different directions the picture could go.

First, I ask: should we study the movie only given the scenes presented to us in the final version, or should we take into account everything including things like deleted scenes. Why was the footage removed? There’s no one answer to this. Some people on the IMDB DD forums seem to assert that “Kelly cut the scene down so the religious overtones wouldn’t be so blatent [sic]” (for at least one scene). So scenes might be cut because the creative forces behind the movie really thought they didn’t belong after the fact of filming, for whatever reason(s). Then there’s the possibility that there were “business reasons” for dropping footage from the movie: because it’s not exciting, or they think it will be too confusing for the layman, or the movie is simply too long.

The deleted scenes can also drastically change the feeling of the movie for me. I’m not sure I would have been as pleased with the movie if, for example, they had left in some of the scenes that have more tension between Donnie and Gretchen. For me, the relationship that forms between them was one of the most important aspects of the movie. Some of the scenes also imply a much more religious nature to the movie’s content, which I didn’t really pick up the first time or two through it. While the religious bits left out wouldn’t necessarily change the meaning of the film, they would probably have affected my interpretation of it — which I can say with some confidence, since they have at least given me more to think about.

I’m pretty tired tonight, though, so maybe I’ll tackle this some more later. darkho and I played TSO for several hours tonight. She has to get up early for work tomorrow, but she was nice enough to stay at my apartment so I can sleep in tomorrow.