Alternate Audio Tracks for Movies

Patrick Stein writes "DVD Tracks is a forum for the distribution of home-brew, alternate audio tracks for movies. Inspired by Roger Ebert's column in Yahoo!Internet Life entitled You, Too, Can Be a DVD Movie Critic, DVD Tracks puts you behind the microphone to talk about your favorite flicks." Cool idea, but there's only one track. (Groundhogs day?)

Groundhog Day

[ackthpt]

...I got you babe...

I swear, if I got up every morning to that tune on the radio, I'd drop a toaster into my bathtub, too.

I can't quite figure out how or why I'd want to do my own soundtrack for a movie. Seems there's plenty I like the sound to just fine, and those that I don't, eh... I'm not sure I'm cut out for the MST3K line of work.

"Together I shall rule the world!" -- Tom Servo

Now I do have a lot of experience with running the play-by-play from the radio instead of from the TV during sports broadcasts. :-)

Bandwidth issues

[e1en0r]

I thought about starting a similar site a few months ago, but I think in the end there will be too many bandwidth issues. I would guess the same will go for this site too. The "Groundhog Day" track is 17MB and I'm sure everything else will be pretty big too. Unless they get some kind of revenue source I think they'll have a hard time. And although this sounds like it would be a great thing for the movie industry to get behind, I'm sure they think it'll hurt their profits or infringe on their copyrights (they'll try to find a way) in some way and won't support it. A better idea might be something like Audiogalaxy (minus the spyware).

This sounds cool but...

[jhaberman]

I have to think... Why would I want to do this? I mean, the reason I listen to the comentary tracks on my DVD's is because they usually are done by someone who had a hand in making the movie (Actors, directors, editors, etc.) See, I want interesting behind the scenes info about that day's shot, how bad the situation was, what they were going for... things they tried to do but didn't work... etc. etc. etc.

I definitely don't want a review of the movie while I'm watching it by some schlub who has no more insight than I do. I can take care of that for myself, thank you very much.

Maybe that's just me, tho...

Jason

Re:This sounds cool but...

[Gumshoe]

On the whole I would agree, the film makers themselves are in the
best position to comment on the film. However, this idea would
really come to life when people submit "background information"
commentries, ie. something a film maker wouldn't necessarily know
anything about.

For example, and someone has already mentioned this, a commentry
by a psychologist discussing the lead characters in Memento or Pi
would be fascinating -- at least to me.

Another example might be a compare and contrast discussion of a
piece of literature and it's celluloid adaptation. I would
suggest Lord of the Rings would be a great candidate for this
(Crikey, I've wasted countless hours in the pub critiquing this
film already, perhaps I should do it :-)

Re:Groundhog Day commentary

[Anonymous Coward]

That, sir, was kharma whoring brilliance

It may have sounded like flamebait...

[Golias]

but the AC has a point.

(For those who read at 1 or higher, the parent to this post said "No one will take the time to listen to this sort of thing. Except for the poster, maybe his girlfriend." Hopefully it will get bumped up soon, but AC's seldom seem to get their props under the current mod system.)

I strongly disagree with what Roger Ebert says about homebrew comentary. I like some director commentary tracks. I like it even better when a DVD comes with comentary by a very well-informed person who writes about movies for a living (such as the comentary on Criterion's edition of Seven Samurai, or the track Mr. Ebert himself did for Dark City). Listening to some of those tracks is like taking a film school seminar, with one of the nation's leading critics as your professor for the day.

That said, there is no way I'm going to spend two hours of my life listening to what the typical talk-backer from Aint-It-Cool-News has to say about his favorite flick. Why would I ever take the time to download a play-by-play breakdown of... oh, say "12 Monkeys"... when, for all I know, it was done by somebody who never saw "La Jette" (which it was based on), nor any of Gilliam's previous body of work, and spends most of the running time of the film talking about Brad Pitt's recent marriage to Jenifer Aniston and how he thought that the Bruce Willis movie "Hudson Hawk" was really underrated.

In Proverbs* it says that there is no man on Earth who you can't learn something from, but that doesn't mean that everybody's nuggets of wisdom are worth the time to mine them.

* Footnote: "Proverbs" is a popular religious text expounding on the virtues of wisdom, for those of you who drive around with those lame "Darwin fish" on the backs of your cars, in spite of having never attended a high school biology class.