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n. hoop·la fac·tor (h  p lä f kt r)
degree of entertainment attained irrespective of critical worth |
With Deluxe Exclusive Never-Before-Seen Unique Bonus Special Features: Fattening Up DVDs  Has anyone thought about the effect that special features have on a film? Obviously they can take away some of the movie magic when they explain how all the tricks of the trade are achieved, but there have been many occasions when the extra features on a dvd have drastically changed my mind about a film.I only truly appreciated Shadow Of The Vampire after listening to the audio commentary, which enlightened me as to some of the more subtle points of the film. After watching the deleted scenes on Go (a film I loved the first time), I realised that the film only narrowly missed out on being a shockingly terrible film. And after seeing the gazillion permutations of the climax to Roadkill (aka Joyride), I can no longer remember exactly which ending is used in the film. There are countless other situations where I have seen a particular scene so many times (from storyboard to animatics to rushes to finished product) that I'm sick of it by the time I actually watch it for real again. In Blue Car in particular, when I rewatch it I am sure I won't be able to forget the deleted scenes, which had important ramifications concerning my understanding of the characters and their motivations. Of course I only have myself to blame, after all nobody is forcing me to watch them, but all the same I can understand why some directors deliberately choose to not include special features. (Shyamalan has yet to include an audio commentary, as is Spielberg, and apparently the director of Memento decided against doing a commentary for fear of pointing out subtle things in the film that you'd only notice on the third viewing.) But, in conclusion to this rant I put that question out there to our three or so readers: does anybody think that bonus features are detrimental to films? Stuart |
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