A few weeks ago, Howard Bashman (I'm not motivated enough to go find the actual post, but it's there) wrote about watching "Shattered Glass" on DVD and enjoying it. Chris Geidner (again, not motivated to find the post -- and in this case it may have been in an e-mail, but he gets a link anyway) had similar thoughts. And some other blogger who I unfortunately just can't recall wrote that he usually doesn't watch director's commentaries on these things, but the "Shattered Glass" one was awesome.

I saw the movie, and loved it (you can find my brief thoughts somewhere below, when I linked to Howard's post initially) -- and really wanted to watch the director's commentary. My mom got me a DVD player for Hanukkah in December -- I told her to get literally the cheapest one she could find, this one was like 35 bucks and looks more like a George Foreman Grill than a DVD player -- it's blue and plastic and just extraordinarily cheap-looking, but it totally works and that's all that matters -- and I only own 3 DVDs, the sketch show Mr. Show (Seasons 1 & 2, although 3 &4 are on my Wish List -- if I ever finish watching 1 & 2), The Ben Stiller Show, which I got for a few bucks on Half.com, and a James Taylor live concert, which I also got for a few bucks on Half.com. I rented a couple of DVDs last summer when I was subletting a place in Washington for a few weeks, and the guy had a DVD player. But, anyway, the point here is that the number of DVD movies and director's commentaries I've seen is about three -- Wet Hot American Summer (great movie: go rent it), Sweet Home Alabama (not a great movie: don't go rent it), and Rodger Dodger (also not a great movie: and a pretty useless director's commentary) -- but I'm completely enthralled with the *notion* of director's commentaries and how cool they *should be*.

Anyway, reading the blog posts about Shattered Glass made me want to rent it and watch the director's commentary, even though I've seen the movie. So I signed up for a membership with a video store right near here (this is how many movies I rent -- I have no membership to anything... well, I have a Blockbuster card, but I've never been to the Blockbuster around here, although I do know where it is and suppose, now that I think about it, I just could have walked the extra 3 blocks, since I was going in that direction anyway...) just to rent Shattered Glass to watch the director's commentary.

I'm 6 minutes in. It's really good.

That was the entire point of this endless post. "I'm 6 minutes in. It's really good." Why am I watching this at 9 AM on Sunday? Because if I don't watch it now, it's not going to get watched and the DVD will be due. Why did it take me three paragraphs to get to the point? I don't know.

UPDATE: I'm 16 minutes in. It's *still* really good. What's cool is that the director is commenting, along with Chuck Lane, who was head of The New Republic and is a character in the movie, and has insight into what's real and what's fictional. The totally weird thing is that these two people seem so genuine and so decent that listening to them talk about this movie is really cool. I think this was the director's first film. Cool stuff.

UPDATE 2: The rest is good too. A nice sense of how a movie gets made, really worth watching/listening to. Great commentary on top of a great movie. I have nothing but praise.