Risto_H

This came out on finnish TV channel last night, but unfortunately I saw only last half of this and missed the first 20-30 mins... Well, maybe I'll have another chance to watch this. The part I saw was surprisingly good in many ways. The reason for the film-like visual look was simply because that this really was shot on S16 film, which was beautiful to watch.

The story was very original and absurd. It was an odd experience to see Michael Badalucco in a finnish film. He was great as a foreign chef, but the finnish cast had nothing to shame of. The cinematography of Mika Orasmaa was amazingly good. The filming locations, lightning set ups and editing style had nothing to complain about. You can see that the writers of this film must had spent many hours of intense brainwork on script and dialogue. The scenes were planned very well.

Simply I just liked everything I saw and heard and just hope there's going to be more finnish productions like this. Compared to the usual crap that is produced in Finland these days this is one of the refreshing exceptions. This is the right direction where finnish movies should evolve from now on.

This is a great film in many ways, it really makes you think and awakes many feelings inside. I don't know if someone had noticed and mentioned this before (there was over 1000 comments made so I didn't read ALL of them!), but Frank the rabbit reminded me immediately of the film "Harvey" (1950) starring James Stewart. The rabbit must be some kind of a tribute to that film. In Harvey the rabbit was invisible for others than the person Stewart was acting. In Harvey the rabbit was never shown, but it was told to be 6-foot tall human-like creature, just like in Donnie D. The name of the rabbit (Frank) has a weird link to James Stewart too, because Frank Capra directed maybe the most well known Stewart-film ever, "It's A Wonderful World".

Donnie Darko is an original, intelligent and beautiful masterpiece compared to many other modern films. The actors were awesome, shooting was artistic and creative, the script was very good and original... We even got to see clips from Evil Dead, which is another great movie. I highly recommend this film! 10 out of 10.

I got interested of this cheaply-done trash-spectacle just because of Michael Winslow. I expected to hear he making those crazy noises, just like in Police Academy films. Unfortunately there was just a couple of his scenes to make me laugh. The rest of the cast was unknown for me. The script is so bad and stupid that it seems to be put together very fast while drinking German "bier" in local pub. I think this film is supposed to watch while drinking beer, too... Many scenes were very awkward and obvious or tried too much to be funny. The scene where Winslow is trying to clean a hotel room and ends up just demolishing everything in the room... well - it is NOT funny. Just stupid. Overall, you can easily watch this film through if you have nothing else to do, but you will not watch it again.