Okay, I'm ready to talk a bit about my Donnie Darko experience. It freaked me out, but compelled me too. I've read all kinds of stuff on it now. I have listened to "Mad World" about 50 times since I first heard it a few days ago.
While I thought I was pretty much "getting it" as I watched it the first time, turns out I didn't hardly get nothin' (based on listening to the the writer/director's commentary). How weird is it that I like my version of understanding it better than I like his.
I am going to watch the Director's Cut soon, though it sounds like I have seen a lot of the additions already in the deleted/extended scenes on the first DVD.
I am astonished by how many references there have been to DD under my very nose and I didn't realize it - our users Sparkle Motion and hungry, hungry hippos, for example.
And last (for now), I was IN the Aero Theater with starboardlight, henrypie, and others. It's where AnglessFest took place (where Heath, Jake, Michelle, Diana, Gustavo, and Rodrigo were a very few feet away from us). One of our gang at the time mentioned that it was the theater you see in DD, but not having seen it yet, that didn't make much of an impression on me.