Weirdest DVD commentary track ever?
Did anyone watch this film with commentary "from a Russian scholar"? I'm watching it now and it is the single most bizarre commentary track I've ever listened to. Is this one of the actors putting on a Russian accent or a legitimate Russian scholar who simply refuses to identify herself? There's some fascinating film-studies nuggets in here but they are interspersed with tangents about Russian history. Even the more whimsical tangents have some degree of academic feasibility but only as elements in an idiosyncratic scholarly discourse along the lines of the written work of Foucault or Zizek, a phenomenon that I have yet to encounter on DVD commentary tracks. It's both very perceptive and weirdly confrontational. The "scholar" appears to be reading from a prewritten essay in many places, but occasionally she interjects bits of improvisation, almost in the way that a lecturer would depart briefly from reading a speech verbatim. And there are long stretches of silence. I actually thought at one point that the commentary had dropped out entirely after about the 15 minute mark. I seem to remember encountering a DVD commentator who read word-for-word from a script, but I can't remember where I came across this. (Anyone?)
But I just wanted to see if anyone else had actually listened to this weird commentary and what you made of it. By the way, I really enjoyed the amusing commentaries on another Blujarski film, Mutual Appreciation, by the parents of cast and crew members, and this commentary cemented my opinion that he has a knack for sticking intriguing goodies on his DVD's.