I love that film!

For anyone...ANYONE who is interested in cinematography should check out Chris Doyle's commentary track on Last Life in the Universe...

It's amazingly good

I finally got around to seeing Pans Labyrinth recently and I think the Del Toro commentary for that is quite good. Quite a bit of stuff in there about the Spanish Civil War which is a period of history i knew very little about.


Oh, and he seems quite restrained. He only swears about every 5th word instead of every 2nd one! LOL[/i]

Great thread - I love hearing about good commentary tracks because I have so many DVDs now and so little time I hardly ever get to hear any these days - last one I tuned into was Michael Mann on MIAMI VICE, one of my favourite movies of recent years. Mann give a typically detailed, intelligent commentary so he's always worth a listen...Recently, I've started ripping commentary tracks to mp3 and listening to them in work - not the most ideal way to do it (without the movie) but I find the best commentary tracks still work fine as audio only...

This is a long shot, but would anyone have, or know where I could find an mp3 of Cronenberg's commentary from the Criterion laser edition of CRASH ? Thanks

By the way, this might interest some folks here...I was gonna upload my copy of this to Rapidshare, but it was taking too long so I axed it BUT I then found another upload (by someone else)....

John Waters - Shock Value (Audio Cassette, read by John Waters)

http://www.mediafire.com/?th3xyx4bjdw

I can't vouch for the quality (I'm sure its fine), but if required I'll upload my copy

EDIT ! My copy with better sound quality is here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ddnkyjlmz20

Also, for fans of Hitchcock (and Truffaut) there's a blog posting mp3s of The Hitchcock Truffaut Tapes - currently up to the 16th installment:

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20Hitchcock%2FTruffaut%20Tapes

Enjoy !

Thanks Wez, thats awesome - love the book, and was actually thinking of re-reading it, but i can now stick it on the ipod for next weeks trip to work.

Re-Animator Cast commentary was pretty good. Very funny...
Clockwork Orange - must for fans of this film.
Freaks- very informantive.
Tim Burtons commentarys are alway pretty entertaining.

The commentary with Alan Jones + Tom Shankland on the new DVD for Waz is very good, listened to it today, nice mix of information and informal laughs and revealed a lot about the making of the film

For some reason I listened to the commentary on Resident Evil 2 (well, the second one whatever it was called).

Milla Jovovich and the others were having a great time basically joking about everything, and then just once in a while Sienna Guillory made a totally dry and serious remark, after which there was an uncomfortable silence. Then the others started joking again.

I was not sober at the time, but I didn't realize that Sienna had recorded her comments separately! I thought she was the dullest woman on earth at the time.

Carpenter usually gives good quality commentary - high points are The Thing, Halloween, Escape from New York ( two of which also feature his long time pal and star Kurt Russell ).

Kim Newmans "expert" commentaries on Halloween II & III are both very entertaining.

Also, I would recommend the episode commentaties from the Firefly box set. Clearly everyone involved in that series loved it, and their passion and enthusiam come over superbly in the chat tracks ( it will long be one of my great unfulfilled hopes that someone picks up and commisions a 2nd season of this programme ! )

Worst commentary ? Farenheit 9/11. Big Mike Moore lets his researchers give the chat track, and considering the subject matter is one of the great social debates of our time ( love or hate his views in the actual film, the material is NEVER boring ) the chat track is DULL, DULLER, AND DOWNRIGHT GREY !

It IS a great commentary, which i actually had to switch off, because it ruined the movie for me. ALIEN is one of those movies, that is in a strange way "real" to me, where i dont think about FX or camera-angles where i just let myself drop into the established world. And i dont want anybody to spoil the experience for me by disecting every detail of the shooting and telling me that those astronauts actually are children walking through the soundstage.
It is a little schizophrenic because in other cases i do enjoy commentaries. But as i said ALIEN is one of those titles where i just dont want to know..
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Yes! Jodorowksy is brilliant in all of his commentaries, especially in the recently released boxset of his movies. The commentaries here are in spanish wth english subtitles but fun nonetheless, even more so if you know some spanish. I love to listen to his tracks during work, he´s such a relaxed and open storyteller, it makes me feel relaxed and open minded as well

Since you didnt mention it, i have to: Carpenters and Russels Audio track for BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA has to be one of the funniest and most interesting of the two. You feel like hanging out with them while watching the movie. They obviously have a great time together and it actually improves the movie somehow.

Quentin Tarantino gives a very informative commentary about his work on the script for True Romance, and I also really like the Lord of the Rings commentaries. Carpenter does do good ones too listened to the one on Vampires and even though I hated the film found the commentary very informative and entertaining.

I've always liked the commentary for Hammer's Scars Of Dracula. It does get off topic at times, but the fact they were actually able to get christopher lee to do it makes it worth it.

Unbelievably no-one seems to have mentioned Verhoeven on this thread (apolgies if I missed a comment), Verhoeven's chat tracks on Robocop (from the long deleted Criterion DVD, although I think has been ported over to the current releases) and Starship Troopers (with Ed Neumier trying to get a word in) are among the very best commentary tracks ever. The man is genuinely unhinged in a really entertaining way. The Hollow man track is okay, but you can tell his heart wasn't in it.

Also great (but for very different reasons) is the Arnie/Milius track on Conan the Barbiarian, Arnie thinks he's there to explain the movie to the blind "here I am Running, and now I swing my mighty sword", "look! I haf cut of his head. Ah HAH HAH HA" and so on. Meanwile Milius sleazes over the actresses performance like a Republican Sid James and tries to big up the philosphical content of the flick. It's terrible, but at the same time FANTASTIC!