The Screengrab : bob dylan

In Other Blogs: Roger Ebert Contemplates Eternity

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 May 2009 14:30:00 GMT

The weekend is almost here, so let’s turn to our old pal Roger Ebert for some cheery TGIF thoughts. “I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can't say it wasn't interesting. My lifetime's memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris. I don't expect to die anytime soon. But it could happen this moment, while I am writing…I hope not. I have plans.”

Glenn Kenny brings reason to rejoice at Some Came Running: The Friends of Eddie Coyle is finally due out on DVD – in a Criterion edition, no less. “‘Young film fans raised in the multiplex era might look back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore,’ Kent Jones writes in his exemplary (as usual) essay on the 1973 film, included in the new Criterion DVD of it. ‘The truth is that they never did. There's only this one.’ Robert Mitchum's performance as Eddie, the hangdog, hard-luck crook whose quiet desperation—in this story, he's due to start serving some time in a couple of weeks, and he's just not going to be able to hack it—compels his every move, is a huge part of the film's uniqueness. He underplays like nobody's business, and never announces himself. Not only does the trademark Mitchum smirk never once cross his face—looking at his work here, you'd never believe he had it in the first place.”

At PopMatters, Kit MacFarlane reconsiders Mickey Rourke in Homeboy. “A glum and downbeat boxing film, Homeboy not only anticipates many of the key concerns of the highly-celebrated The Wrestler, but also, by now-obvious extension, the real life trajectory of Rourke himself. But the film fell into the ‘too depressing’ pit on its release, and the presence of standard genre cliches saw it treated dismissively by those who didn’t look close enough to see those same cliches being quietly, but firmly, derailed. Despite the presence of actors like Christopher Walken and Jon Polito, a delicate score by Eric Clapton, and even a fawning reference in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles ("The movie traveled to the moon every time [Rourke] came onto the screen. Nobody could hold a candle to him."), it is rarely mentioned today at all…Too depressing in 1988, Homeboy‘s aura of sorrow now seems too delicate, too nuanced and poetic, next to the sensationalized sledgehammer misery pioneered by today’s hip angst-peddlers like Aronofsky, Todd Solondz, Larry Clark, and Christopher Nolan.”

SmartMoney lists 10 Things Movie Critics Won't Tell You. We’re fond of #7: You probably don’t want to hear this, but you need me. “Want to stir people up? Ask them what they think of movie critics. Jen Davis of Louisville, Ky., is put off by what she sees as a superiority syndrome in the profession. ‘My opinion is just as valid, dammit!’ she says. Tammy Ras of Pascoag, R.I., is more militant: ‘If they say, “Don’t see it, it sucks,” that means, “Go see it, it’s great.”’ Sounds harsh, but the truth is, filmgoers need reviewers. As Salon.com’s Zacharek puts it, ‘Critics are the only thing standing between consumers and advertising.’ With hundreds of films released in theaters each year, ‘Critics are more important now than they ever were,’ she says. ‘There are just so many movies, so much aggressive hype.’”

Finally, it’s not exactly a blog, but The Worst Show on the Web is Blog Talk Radio, and more importantly, the most recent episode features your Screengrabbin’ pals Andrew Osborne and yours truly discussing some films screening at the San Francisco International Film Festival, most notably (and contentiously) My Suicide. Give it a listen here.

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Fiction Edition (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Last week, as part of our ongoing coverage of the South-By-Southwest Film, Music & Interactive Festival, we decided to get our collective groove on with a list of our favorite movies about real-live musicians.

But who says musicians have to be real to be memorable? Sure, Mitch & Mickey may be fictional characters portrayed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara in Christopher Guest’s faux-folkumentary, A Mighty Wind...yet despite the fact the duo never really existed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house when my lovely Polish bride and I danced at our wedding reception to that non-existent classic hit of sweet, sweet romance, “A Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow." And, sure, the real Sid Vicious was nice and all...but I have equally fond memories of Gary Oldman’s fictional version in Alex Cox’s Sid & Nancy.

To blur the lines of fiction and reality even further, this week’s list also includes movies about make-believe people affected by real musicians and real musicians transforming themselves into make-believe people as your pals at the Screengrab salute OUR FAVORITE MOVIES ABOUT MUSIC: FICTION EDITION!

THIS IS SPINAL TAP (1984)

Yes, we all know it's hilarious. But This Is Spinal Tap is a classic for more reasons than simple hilarity. This was one of the first major films to be classified a "mockumentary", and in order for the style to work at all, director Rob Reiner and stars Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer had to get all the details down cold. This meant concocting an elaborate backstory involving multiple group names, format changes, and a parade of dozens of drummers who met their respective ends under bizarre circumstances. But beyond the more obvious references, Spinal Tap had to walk, talk, and play like a real aging rock band, from the principles writing and performing their own songs before actual crowds to the shorthand that the band members have with each other, as when Nigel (Guest) calls out "GSM" during rehearsal to signal that he wants to practice the song "Gimme Some Money." The gambit worked -- numerous moviegoers at the time were convinced that Spinal Tap was a real touring act, and the movie quickly became a favorite of legitimate rock acts, who identified with such scenes as the group getting lost on their way to the stage. Soon enough, life imitated farce, and Guest, McKean, and Shearer began touring as Spinal Tap, even releasing a second album in 1992 entitled Break Like the Wind. Even today, Spinal Tap endures, both in its cinematic form and its real-life incarnation, with a tour coming later this spring.

24 HOUR PARTY PEOPLE (2002)

Steve Coogan has a motor-mouthed smart-guy comedian's dream role as Tony Wilson, TV reporter, pop theorist, and the man behind Factory Records, which brought the sound of Manchester to a postpunk world. Directed by Michael Winterbottom, the movie, which also provides plum roles for Shirley Henderson (as Wilson's first wife), Paddy Considine (as his sidekick Rob Gretton), Andy Serkis (as the deranged genius producer Martin Hannett), and Sean Hayes (as Ian Curtis), covers the first public performance by the Sex Pistols, the rise and end of Joy Division, the band's resurrection as New Order, the slaphappy career of the Happy Mondays and the coming of rave culture, and Factory's death throes, with Coogan's Wilson walking through it explaining himself and the culture he's part of, always talking a mile a minute. Coming from the cerebral Winterbottom, the movie itself could be called a sustained work of rock criticism, except that rock crit hasn't been this funny since Lester Bangs swigged his last bottle of Romilar.

HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH (2001)

John Cameron Mitchell energetically transposed his hit off-Broadway show to celluloid with 2001’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, the story of a transsexual punk rock goddess named Hedwig (Mitchell) who narrates her life story while travelling across the country playing second-rate venues, her shot at stardom stymied by a former lover and disciple (Michael Pitt) who became a music sensation by stealing her songs. Hedwig’s is a lunatic odyssey which begins in East Berlin where, as a young boy, she undergoes a sex change operation in order to marry her U.S. army lover and escape the Iron Curtain, and which is partially conveyed via a bevy of musical numbers and animated sequences that are striking in both their ingenuity and power. Bolstered by rollicking, blistering tunes that are as well suited for arenas as they are for the stage and screen, Mitchell’s film is rowdy, bombastic, idiosyncratic and heartfelt, a combination to which only a select few movie musicals can legitimately lay claim.

THE DOORS (1991)

A close friend once derided The Doors’ music as “bad poetry with keyboards,” and while I’m generally inclined to concur with his assessment, there’s nonetheless something transfixing about Oliver Stone’s 1991 biopic, which has the type of on-the-edge, trippy-druggy dynamism that typified the director’s creatively fertile early-‘90s period. Stone’s anything-goes aesthetic showmanship is an ideal approach for a portrait of the L.A. band and, in particular, lead singer Jim Morrison, whose larger-than-life persona – drunken fool, callous bastard, earnest poet, sex god – naturally appealed to a filmmaker fascinated with mythologizing socio-political icons. The Doors oozes reverence without alienating those who might think the film’s subjects and their classic-rock canon fall somewhat short of greatness, due in part to uniformly superb performances led by Val Kilmer’s pitch-perfect embodiment of the lizard king, but mostly thanks to Stone’s lack of inhibition, his madman stylistic excesses (and yes, I’m including the Indian in the desert), supremely well-attuned to the careening rollercoaster energy of The Doors.

VELVET GOLDMINE (1998) and I'M NOT THERE (2007)

With these two films, Todd Haynes has produced the finest examples of fictional rock movies that I can imagine. Both have taken the lives of real rock musicians -- Bowie & Iggy in the former, Dylan in the latter -- and played up the mythic qualities to create a transcendent hyper-reality. No, Bowie and Iggy and Dylan didn't really live like this. But speaking from the point of view of poetry and mythology and literature, these are more true than mere reality can manage. That's what myths and stories are about: heightening everyday reality into a more universal truth. Most people's lives aren't up to the examples set by Ulysses or Hercules or even Ishmael or Natty Bumppo. But I think few would deny that there's a universal recognition of the truth in the lives of these wandering heroes. Celebrities sometimes play the role of real-life analog to idealized heroes. That's why so many urban myths leap up about the lives of celebrities; people need to believe in the extraordinariness of others. Rock musicians in particular often play the debauched Dionysian role of the glorious artistic mess, the pleasure-seeker who indulges in sex and drugs to feed his or her creative output. With these movies, Haynes pushes past the mere facts to feed the stories, and the results are fascinating, part narrative and part critique. In Velvet Goldmine, Christian Bale plays a journalist in an Orwellian Britain of the late '80s. A series of events causes him to investigate -- and recall -- the heyday of glam rock and its figurehead Brian Slade, who is basically the Platonic ideal of David Bowie (with elements of Brian Eno thrown in for good measure) as played by Jonathan Rhys Meyer. Slade's closest associate is Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who is mostly Iggy with a little Lou Reed thrown in. The two are lovers, and Slade gleefully expresses his fluid sense of sexuality. So there's three layers right there: Orwellian future, permissive past, rockers as trangressors. But there's more. Haynes dares to suggest that the bisexual/creative impulse was a gift from aliens (or angels) to Oscar Wilde in the Victorian era, and has passed down through the ages to the instigators of glam. That's, well, audacious as all hell. Haynes specifically compares Slade to both Wilde and his horrendous creation Dorian Gray. So, that's at least two more layers, maybe more. So, yes: gay theory, rock theory, lit theory, treatises on repression and freedom combined with the cults of youth and beauty. There's a lot going on in this movie. And it rocks like hell.

In I'm Not There, Haynes similarly adopts all of the myths about Bob Dylan into a narrative that's both fractured and more meaningful than a straightforward film could convey. There are six Dylans in this film, which is fewer Dylans than real life has given us. But these six Dylans represent the greatest periods of his life. Marcus Carl Franklin, an 11-year-old African-American boy, represents the youngest Dylan myth, the farmboy who rides the rails calling himself Woody Guthrie, learning America's traditional folk and blues music along the way. Ben Whishaw plays the interior Dylan, the playful interviewee who calls himself Arthur Rimbaud and comments cryptically on the rest of Dylan's life. Christian Bale plays the young and sincere New York folksinger Dylan, the socially active songwriter who calls himself Jack Rollins and travels to the South to sing to Civil Rights workers in a field. Rollins will later morph into Pastor John, the born-again Christian Dylan of the late '70s and early '80s. Heath Ledger plays the actor Dylan, the one who is horrible to his beautiful wife and torn in two by their divorce. His name is Robbie Clark and his wife, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg, is Claire, and their story evokes the mid-'70s Dylan of Renaldo and Clara and Blood On The Tracks. Cate Blanchett plays Jude Quinn, the rock star Dylan of the mid-'60s and Don't Look Back. Quinn is explicitly shown as dead from a motorcycle accident at the beginning of the movie, which references Dylan's 1966 motorcycle accident which effectively killed off his Don't Look Back-era persona. Richard Gere plays Billy the Kid, who is the Dylan of The Basement Tapes, John Wesley Harding, and Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett And Billy The Kid. Gere's Billy lives in Riddle County, where the carnivalesque/Old West/Old Testament world of the Basement Tapes springs to life. So, that's the shallowest overview I could provide, and it more or less ate up all my space. Layers and layers in these films. Watch 'em again. And again.

Click Here For Part Two, Three, Four & Five

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Phil Nugent, Nick Schager, Hayden Childs

Screengrab’s Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Part Six)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 22:30:00 GMT

Scott Von Doviak's Favorites:

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT (1979)

My first exposure to the Who was the 1982 HBO special The Who Rocks America, which was actually shot in Toronto at the final concert of their farewell tour. (That’s their first farewell tour, approximately 37 Who concert tours ago.) I had no idea at the time that this was quite possibly the worst performance they ever gave; I was just enthralled by the whole thing – the songs, the guitar windmilling, the microphone-swinging, and probably the hatred and self-loathing seething from Pete Townshend’s every pore. But it wasn’t until I tracked down a copy of The Kids Are Alright that I really experienced the Who in all their glory. Directed – or, more accurately, assembled – by Jeff Stein, who would go on to direct some of the seminal music videos of the 1980s, Kids is a scrapbook of television performances, promotional video, talk show appearances and assorted Who ephemera. It was exactly the right movie at the right time for any Who fanatic – the equivalent of a bootleg videocassette a few years before such things existed, and a perfect tribute to drummer Keith Moon, who died the year of its release. Watch the above clip from The Smothers Brothers Show carefully, and you can see the exact moment that Townshend’s hearing was damaged forever.

DON’T LOOK BACK (1967)/NO DIRECTION HOME (2005)

D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back has a deserved reputation as the seminal rockumentary, but to get a full picture of the mercurial Bobby D., it should be watched in tandem with Martin Scorsese’s retrospective documentary in which Dylan, er, looks back. Shot cinema verite style during Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, his last before going electric, Don’t Look Back captures a snapshot in time of the hipster-dandy version of the Bard on the verge of supernova pop stardom. He’s funny, snotty, weird, puckish, contrary and inscrutable, and he always carries a lightbulb. Scorsese’s film covers the same period, as well as Dylan’s early days and his first electric tour (using footage from the misbegotten Eat the Document), with the added perspective of a wizened, plain-spoken, remarkably straightforward Dylan. He doesn’t seem like a guy who’d have much patience for the brat with the giant lightbulb.

LOUDQUIETLOUD: A FILM ABOUT THE PIXIES (2006)

The heyday of the Pixies had long since passed when filmmakers Steve Cantor and Matthew Galkin decided to follow the iconic indie rock band of the 1980s from rehearsal halls to arenas on their recent reunion tour. While lead singer Charles Thompson had achieved some success as solo artist Frank Black, the rest of the band had struggled in the years since its breakup. As loudQUIETloud opens, Bassist Kim Deal is fresh out of rehab, guitarist Joey Santiago is scoring an independent film and drummer David Lovering is barely scraping by as a stage magician. The band members have never been particularly close; as one interested party notes, they may well be the four least communicative people on the planet. As a result, the fascinating loudQUIETloud plays a bit like the alt-rock version of the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster, as the Pixies try to hold it together through mental breakdowns, family tragedies and those ever-popular musical differences.

Hayden Childs' Favorites:

DANIELSON: A FAMILY MOVIE (OR, MAKE A JOYFUL NOISE HERE) (2006)

Here’s an understatement for you: Danielson is an oddball band. Spurred on by a very positive review at Pitchfork, I bought the 2006 album Ships not long after its release, but I was completely unprepared for the bizarre melange of influences on the album: folk skronk with lightning-quick time changes and sudden silences, led by offputting squeaky vocals, as if Moby Grape were covering The Pixies while fronted by the muppet Beaker. Let’s just say I had a hard time finding a way into the band, so I rented the just-released documentary Danielson: A Family Movie. The movie has a lived-in feeling that shifts the strangeness to familiarity. Here’s some facts about Danielson and the Danielson Family: (1) the band is populated by siblings, spouses, and very close friends, (2) the band is led by the eldest sibling Daniel Smith, who formed the band as part of his senior thesis in art at Rutgers, (3) the band is explicitly Christian, if you can bother to parse the obscurant lyrics, (4) the band has a homemade-art aesthetic that includes matching outfits, synchronized dance movements, two drummers, and a giant cloth tree with holes for Daniel Smith to poke his head and arms through, allowing him to perform from within the tree like a born-again nature spirit. It’s weird, but also rather delightful in execution. The documentary has such a matter-of-fact way of dealing with the oddball Danielson path through life that they do feel like family by the end. The music makes sense. There is perhaps too much focus on how the band’s indie-rock fans feel about their Christianity (because, really, who cares?), but it’s a forgivable lapse. Extras on the DVD include a few of their silly, but also touching, videos.

I AM TRYING TO BREAK YOUR HEART: A MOVIE ABOUT WILCO (2002)

The story of Wilco’s 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is an archetypal rock fable: the band, signed to a major label, records an album that is too strange for the executives to understand. The label asks the band to modify their vision, to make something more commercial. The band sticks to their guns, and the label cuts the band loose. The band spends a little time in the wilderness, and finally another label picks the band up and releases the album. It’s a huge success. Now here’s the other side: this isn’t exactly what happened to Wilco. It’s close, sure. But there’s other forces at play. I Am Trying To Break Your Heart is the story of Wilco in the wilderness, and it’s a time of great upheaval. The major battle in the story isn’t Wilco versus the record labels, but rather Wilco songwriter Jeff Tweedy versus Wilco guitarist/keyboardist/producer Jay Bennett. Bennett had arguably pushed Wilco in the creative direction that produced Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, but Tweedy had a definite vision and as the album was recorded, he appeared to be moving towards the idea that his current bandmates were not up to meeting his vision. As the documentary starts, Tweedy has just replaced longtime drummer Ken Coomer with avant-rock guy Glenn Kotche. Tweedy goes on to ask another avant-rock guy, Jim O’Rourke, to remix the song “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” effectively making room for Bennett’s eventual ouster. It’s a fascinating look at the group dynamics behind the scenes, but probably most meaningful to fans of the band.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Seven

Contributors: Scott Von Doviak, Hayden Childs

Screengrab's Favorite Movies About Music: Non-Fiction Edition (Part Two)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 20:30:00 GMT

Nick Schager's Favorites:

NEIL YOUNG: HEART OF GOLD (2006)

Conventional wisdom be damned, Jonathan Demme’s Neil Young: Heart of Gold is superior to his celebrated Stop Making Sense, its marriage of style and substance so subtle and affecting that it stands as a pinnacle of the concert-doc form. The focus is an August 2005 Young show at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium in support of Prairie Wind, an album written while the musician was anticipating brain aneurysm surgery, and a haunting, lingering sense of mortality hangs over the proceedings, which features a setlist divided pretty evenly between old and new material. Young is in superb shape here, whether performing on stage alone or accompanied by others (a choir, Emmylou Harris). It’s Demme’s direction, however, that elevates the endeavor to borderline-greatness, his alternation between intimate close-ups and expansive shots of the stage and theater (all beautifully handled by cinematographer Ellen Kuras) reflecting a balance between pessimistic loneliness and heartening, communal optimism that’s echoed in Young’s songs, which range from selections typical (“Old Man,” the titular track) to lesser-known (“It’s a Dream”). Refusing to chop up his footage with unnecessary edits, Demme lets the man play, to the film’s – and our – immense benefit.

THE LAST WALTZ (1978)

An elegiac lament for the end of a band and a musical era, The Last Waltz has a melancholy derived from both its subject matter and from its director, Martin Scorsese, who shot this superb concert doc during the difficult production of 1977’s New York, New York. Part funeral, part celebration, Scorsese’s depiction of The Band’s 1976 farewell show at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom is an all-star affair, as the Canadian outfit – led by charismatic frontman Robbie Robertson, and delivering a wide range of selections from their catalog of Americana tunes – is joined on stage by a who’s-who of titans, including Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Neil Diamond, Joni Mitchell, Eric Clapton and Muddy Waters. Thanks to meticulous pre-planning, Scorsese’s live footage is aesthetically dazzling, though The Last Waltz also takes detours to studio-shot musical numbers and interviews with members of The Band, who by the time of the show had begun to drift apart thanks to a combination of road weariness and drugs, and whose worn-out commentary further suggests that the film is a snapshot of a moment in time slipping away, if not already lost forever.

METALLICA: SOME KIND OF MONSTER (2004)

Depicting Metallica as a divided, dysfunctional family, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, about the turbulent events surrounding the writing and recording of 2003’s St. Anger, exudes real, unvarnished honesty in its portrait of a mega-band coming apart at the seams. There’s plenty of drama to fill out the 139-minute runtime, from the extracurricular artistic activities of drummer Lars Ullrich, to the alcohol-related issues of singer James Hetfield, to the group’s meetings with a therapist after bassist Jason Newsted ditches the group and the remaining three members are left to figure out what’s next – which, as it turns out, is a long, messy hiatus caused by Hetfield’s sudden decision to enter rehab. Berlinger and Sinofsky strike a suitable balance between respect for their subjects and dedication to warts-and-all authenticity, and if their doc is more rock (soap) opera than speed metal, it’s still a fascinating backstage glimpse of a supergroup attempting to manage professional success and expectations, personal demons, and interpersonal relationships strained by 20+ years of constant contact.

THE FILTH AND THE FURY (2000)

Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury is more than just a non-fiction biography of The Sex Pistols; it’s a striking sociological record of late-‘70s England. Temple’s aesthetic is to cut-and-paste archival footage at a breakneck pace, a strategy that’s in tune with the band’s unpolished, anarchic music and attitude as well as the era’s socio-political tumultuousness. Rarely has a documentary collage been so fierce and formally shrewd, recounting the band’s 26-month history with a dynamism that, aided by new interviews with band members (all seen in silhouettes), makes the action feel current, urgent, vital. Ostensibly Temple’s rejoinder to his own 1980 doc The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, which told the Sex Pistols’ story from the perspective of manager Malcolm McLaren, The Filth and the Fury assumes lead provocateur Johnny Rotten’s viewpoint. It’s just as slanted a POV, to be sure, but the scruffy, skuzzy, electric energy of Temple’s direction, amplified by his sharply funny and insightful editorial juxtapositions, results in a blisteringly honest portrait.

THE DEVIL AND DANIEL JOHNSTON (2005)

The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Jeff Feurzig’s film about the troubled West Virginia singer-songwriter whose music is colored (and complicated) by mental illness, has a form modeled after that of Tarnation, its multimedia biography crafted through a combination of archival audio, video and still-photographs. The director’s clear fondness for his subject somewhat hampers his ability to fully investigate the many issues raised by Johnston’s life, most notably the question of whether Johnston’s music would be quite as celebrated were it not for the fact that Johnston is a seriously unstable individual. Still, if The Devil and Daniel Johnston doesn’t raise this relevant possibility, instead proving content to just respectfully document the man’s life and career, it benefits from having a remarkable story to tell, as Johnston’s up-and-down saga includes brushes with stardom, psychotic breakdowns, stints in psychiatric facilities, and professional conflicts. Not to mention that the musician – funny, charming, erratic, disturbed – comes across as a case study in the fine line between, if not outright intersection of, inspiration and madness.

Click Here For Part One, Three, Four, Five, Six & Seven

Contributor: Nick Schager

Screengrab Salutes: The Top Biopics Of All Time! (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

The problem with biopics, as most cineastes know, is the way they often tend to play like a greatest hits of their subjects’ lives, packed with historical moments and celebrity impersonations rather than realistic character development or any kind of specific story worth telling.

But Gus Van Sant’s Milk vaulted out of the specialty box office charts and into the mainstream top ten largely on the strength of a gripping, inspirational (and, sadly, still timely) story of persecution, triumph and tragedy, featuring a classic protagonist/antagonist duo embodied by Sean Penn’s crusading gay rights activist and Josh Brolin’s conflicted assassin.

And so, with Oscar buzz clinging to Van Sant, Penn and Brolin like...wait for it...yes, milk mustachios, we here at the Screengrab decided now would be the perfect time to Walk Hard through the positively true story of OUR FAVORITE BIOPICS OF ALL TIME!

ED WOOD (1994)

Tim Burton’s tribute to the so-called “worst director of all time” is a two-fer: while Johnny Depp’s relatively obscure title character is the focus, the Oscar-winning main attraction was Martin Landau’s portrayal of a lusty, foul-mouthed, morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi in the final years of his life, after Hollywood had kicked him to the curb and the once proud actor could only find work rolling around in a lake with a giant rubber octopus. Lugosi’s son, Béla Junior, initially criticized Burton’s film for its inaccuracies with regard to his father (who, for example, was married at the time of his death and rarely used profanity, at least according to friends like Forrest J. Ackerman, Ed Wood’s one-time “illiterary” agent). But what makes the film great is that docu-drama realism was never the point: we don’t necessarily see events as they happened, but rather the way Ed Wood, Jr. (and, to a certain extent, Wood biographer Rudolph Grey and cartoonist/old Hollywood enthusiast Drew Friedman) perceived them: in surreal, melodramatic black & white fantasias where an alcoholic transvestite wannabe could actually transcend death and live forever like his idol, Count Dracula.

I'M NOT THERE (2007)

If ever there was an artist who required no further mythologizing, it would have to be Bob Dylan. A conventional biopic of the Bard might well be unbearable, which is why it's a good thing Todd Haynes, World's Cleverest Film Student, signed on for the task. Haynes takes the well-known Dylan mythos, scrambles it all together and then bounces it off a series of funhouse mirrors, delighting in the ever more distorted reflections that result. Six different actors play six different versions of Dylan, among them Woody Guthrie (Marcus Carl Franklin), an 11-year-old African-American boy who rides the rails with hobos, spinning tall tales of a rambling youth with no direction home; Jack Rollins (Christian Bale), an alternate universe troubadour whose Dylanesque career unfolds as scenes from a mockumentary in the mode of A Mighty Wind; and Robbie (Heath Ledger), an actor who is playing Jack Rollins in a conventional biopic called Grain of Sand. (Sample dialogue: "I'm only a pawn in their game!") The standout is Cate Blanchett, who was nominated for an Oscar for her eerie take on hipster-dandy Jude Quinn, supernova post-Beatles pop star. In appropriating and manipulating various filmmaking styles, Haynes is striving for a cinematic equivalent to the way Dylan adapted and exploded traditional folk forms in his music. The resulting surreal swirl recalls Dylan's most fertile creative period, his mid-60s "thin, wild mercury music" wherein characters ranging from Paul Revere to Jack the Ripper to Cecil B. DeMille could inhabit the same soundscape. Through these methods, Haynes is attempting a biography not so much of a man, but of an artistic sensibility. If I'm Not There is occasionally impenetrable, pretentious or overly impressed with its own cleverness, that only serves to make it a more accurate, warts-and-all portrait, without delving into tabloid trash. You may love it or hate it, but you get the feeling its subject wouldn't want it any other way.

LADY SINGS THE BLUES (1972)

This soapy treatment of the life of Billie Holiday is not beloved by jazz critics or historical purists, who recoil from its sloppy handling of the facts of the singer's life and gag on Diana Ross' pop stylings when she sings Holiday classics such as "Strange Fruit." But the movie remains highly enjoyable when taken on the terms that it set for itself in 1972: a chance for African-American audiences to wallow in the kind of old-Hollywood melodrama that had been spun from the lives of white celebrities such as Lillian Roth and Ruth Etting, with a dash of blaxploitation attitude for flavor. (It turns out that Billie needed a toxically blond white man to turn her onto heroin. Who knew?) Ross' singing here takes a back seat to her acting, which should have marked the start of a major movie career. She proved she had the talent, but once she'd tasted success in Hollywood, her diva gene ate her common sense alive. Her scenes with her piano man sidekick, Richard Pryor, have a special poignance today, because it's hard to remember that there was a time when Diana Ross and Richard Pryor occupied the same planet.

GENTLEMAN JIM (1942)

This affably sanitized life of heavyweight boxer James J. Corbett (Errol Flynn) is probably the most entertaining example of the boxer-biopic genre that Martin Scorsese was to bury for all time with Raging Bull. It also provided its star, Errol Flynn, with a rare chance to appear onscreen in street clothes instead of leggings or cowboy gear. The premise is that Corbett was the first brainiac who conquered his opponents by means of the "scientific" method, which enables him to whup such swaggering sides of beef as John L. Sullivan (Ward Bond). This allows Flynn to win his fights and still display a glib enough tongue to pitch woo at society gal Alexis Smith. This is also the movie that was in theaters when Flynn was dragged into court on hinky charges of statutory rape, a sideshow that turned out to do the movie not the least bit of harm at the box office.

WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT (1993)

In this updating of Love Me or Leave Me (the 1955 cult classic in which Doris Day, as singer Ruth Etting, was physically abused by James Cagney as her husband-manager), Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne play Ike and Tina Turner, from their days starting out together on the R & B touring circuit and the period when electrifying star performances on-stage alternated with one-sided sparring matches backstage to the day that Tina, having discovered the untapped strength at her core with the help of a chanting regimen, starting punching back. The closest thing to a flaw in Bassett's performance is that she didn't have Turner's legs, a problem that today would probably be corrected with the help of CGI; she compensates with her slugger's arms, which make the scenes of abuse easier to get through, since you can't help but anticipate the moment when this woman realizes that she can take care of herself. Fishburne may be even better, tapping into deep reserves of rage that a lesser actor would have been tempted to take out on the costume designer. This is probably the finest lead performance ever given by an actor who at one point is forced to don hot pants and a Prince Valiant haircut.

Click Here For Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five & Part Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Screengrab Review: “Synecdoche, New York”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 13:00:00 GMT

It’s not often that two monumental works of art fall in your lap within 24 hours (unless you’re a clumsy custodian at the Louvre), but something like that happened to me last week when I picked up Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 8 the night before attending a screening of Synecdoche, New York. Other than this coincidence of timing, the two wouldn’t appear to have much to do with each other. The former is just a collection of outtakes in much the same way Moby Dick is just a fishing story, from an artist who has nothing left to prove but keeps proving it anyway. The latter is the most ambitious, challenging, frustrating and thrilling American movie since I’m Not There, which happened to be about Bob Dylan (see, it all comes full circle) – maybe even since Mulholland Drive. Those two films are good points of reference, actually; if you hated them both, Synecdoche probably isn’t a movie for you.

Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut shares with those movies a dreamworld logic, puzzle-like narrative, identity confusion and a filmmaking intelligence engaged with the material on a sub-atomic level. In each case I walked out of the theater feeling as if I was setting foot on a different world than the one I’d left two hours earlier. Some of the same qualities can be found in Tell Tale Signs, which has something else in common with Synecdoche: The specter of death looms large over many of the Dylan tracks – and permeates every frame of Kaufman’s film. Most American movies are comfort food, but not this one; it offers only the comfort of knowing we’re not alone in our own existential confusion.

If it seems like I’m putting off the plot summary, well, it’s sort of like John McCain’s debate line about nailing jello to a wall. Philip Seymour Hoffman is Caden Cotard, a theater director in Schenectady, New York. Caden would seem to have it all: a fulfilling career (his production of Death of a Salesman has won praise for the innovative casting of young actors as old people), a wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), who is herself an accomplished artist, and an adorable four-year-old daughter Olive. Yet Caden exudes morbid dissatisfaction; when he opens the morning paper, he goes straight for the obituaries, and his health is deteriorating under the weight of numerous mysterious ailments. Soon it’s all falling apart. Adele decamps to Berlin for an art show, taking Olive with her, and seems unlikely ever to return. Time is slipping through Caden’s fingers, with months and even years passing in the blink of an eye. It’s time to make a statement – to leave a legacy.

Caden uses a genius grant to construct a massive set inside a New York City warehouse, where he will stage the most ambitious theatrical work ever conceived. The project never receives a proper title – Caden considers Simulacrum but not, to our knowledge, Synecdoche – but it sprawls on for many blocks and many years as Caden struggles to get a handle on it. Since he is compelled to put everything into the production, he needs to find someone to play himself, as well as his assistant and one-time lover Hazel (Samantha Morton). He casts Sammy (Tom Noonan), who has been following him for 20 years and thus already knows everything about him, and Tammy (Emily Watson), with whom he is soon having an affair. The production becomes even more complicated – and the line between artifice and reality further blurred –when, eventually, he must cast actors to play both Sammy and Tammy.

It sounds confusing, but I haven’t even scratched the surface. (It was especially confusing for me as I tend to mix up Samantha Morton and Emily Watson anyway.) For instance, what to make of the absurdist touches, ranging from green poop to a house perpetually on fire? One viewing hardly seems adequate, given the narrative and thematic layers upon layers. Yet Synecdoche, New York is not just an intellectual exercise or postmodern mind game. It’s clear that Caden is, on some level, a synecdoche for Kaufman, and that his would-be masterpiece wrestling with all the great questions finds its real-life equivalent in the movie we’re watching. (The major difference being that Kaufman actually finished his version.) But as frustrating and opaque as Synecdoche can sometimes be, its emotional impact is undeniable. Heartbreak, sorrow, dread and regret…these are not the ingredients of the feel-good movie of the year – just the best one.

Related:
Charlie Kaufman Gets Wired
Screengrab Exclusive: "Synecdoche, New York" Clip

The Screengrab Highlight Reel: Oct. 4-10, 2008

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Hi, folks. I'm Lance, the Screengrab's monkey intern, and I'll be handling the Highlight Reel this week. Frankly I asked for this opportunity to address you today because I'm simply sickened that a few bad apples have once again set back my community's efforts to be taken seriously. Folks, it's hard out here for a chimp. Yet we've got these bozos in Japan running around with bottles of Jager for a handful of magic beans. Now it's true that I'm not compensated monetarily here at Nerve, but that's because it's an internship, fer crying out loud! Soon I'll be an editor here, and I'll be able to put an end to insulting stuff like this Top 25 Leading Men list. I keep asking the Screengrabbers, where is the list of top leading monkeys? They keep saying they'll get around to it, but I see them laughing when they think I'm not around. Sure, they'll throw me a bone by reviewing Me Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood, but they treat it as a joke! Believe me, folks, there are statues of Cheeta where I come from.

Anyway, I guess I've got to pretend that some of the stuff these clowns wrote is worth reading, so here are your highlights of the week:

New Reviews: Ashes of Time Redux, Fireproof, An American Carol

When British Comics Attack: Simon Pegg vs. Ricky Gervais

Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals (ha ha, very funny)

Ozsploitation! Razorback (more like pigsploitation, if you ask me)

Special Election Year Report

Dylan in the Movies

How Not to Interview Faye Dunaway

Nick Nolte Does His Own Stunts

Fargo's Marge Grills Sarah Palin

Gordon Gekko's Speechwriter Clarifies

Double Threats: Dylan in the Movies

Hayden Childs — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Here’s an idea I have for an ongoing series: Double Threats, in which I discuss the acting careers of people mostly known for other artistic endeavors. Or conversely, the other artistic endeavors of people primarily known as actors. Inspired by tonight’s debate between the quick-witted enigmatic younger man and the proverbial Mr. Jones who seemed unsure of what, exactly, was going on here, didn't he?... OK, I’m stretching at this point, aren’t I? Actually, I’ve just had Bob Dylan on the brain recently and thought he might be a good test subject for this idea.

The double-aughts have been pretty good for Dylan in the movies. The man who made a household phrase out of “the sun’s not yellow, it’s chicken” managed to baffle critics and audiences alike with 2003’s Masked And Anonymous, which (this may surprise you, unless you saw it) he wrote himself. Then Martin Scorsese made the epic 3+ hour documentary No Direction Home in 2005, which included footage that shocked and amazed rock fans, such as the famous “Judas” moment from the misnamed Royal Albert Hall Concert, Dylan at the March on Washington in 1963, or (and this blew my mind) contemporary gnomic-old-man Dylan cracking a smile. And then 2007 saw Todd Haynes’ brilliant I’m Not There, which created an alternate universe where all of Dylan’s mythologies sprang to life.

Masked And Anonymous wasn’t Dylan’s first acting role, of course. Prior to that movie, he appeared as a chauffeur in a 1999 movie called Paradise Cove. I confess that I’ve never seen it, and his role was apparently miniscule, so let’s move on. In 1989, he had an uncredited role in the Alan Smithee-directed Backtrack. The Smithee name is always a sign of quality -- and we’re all on the same page here, right? (“Quality” is my clever code word for “utter crap.”) Moving on. Two years before that was 1987’s Hearts of Fire, which starred Dylan as a rock star with the supernatural ability to bore everyone senseless. At least, that’s what my vague memory tells me. I also seem to recall that he turned into The Hulk at one point, so I’m willing to concede that I might have fallen asleep somewhere in there.

By now you’re wondering: has Dylan been in anything good? Well, there’s the four-hour Renaldo and Clara from 1978. I have a simple test to assess how much you’ll enjoy this movie: add up the number of Dylan albums you listen to regularly (and you’re free to define “regularly” as you and your maker see fit) and then divide that number by the total number of albums he’s released (32 studio albums, 13 live albums, 14 compilations, and a near-infinite number of bootlegs, but you don’t have to count them unless you feel so compelled). Should you hit somewhere around 40 percent, then you might like Renaldo and Clara. You’ve probably already seen it, though, so, uh, never mind. Finally, before Renaldo and Clara, Dylan was in Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 great-on-the-square Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid.

Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid is a masterpiece, but it’s a messy one. I guess you could say the same thing about some of Dylan’s 70s albums, too. In the movie, Dylan plays Alias, a mostly wordless guy who hangs around Billy The Kid looking shockingly similar to a rock star named Bob Dylan. It’s not a big stretch for the man. But it is a pleasant, unassuming role that complements his sometimes-powerful, mostly-pleasant and unassuming soundtrack for the movie.

According to movie lore (and, uh, Wikipedia), Peckinpah had never heard of Dylan before the movie and had to be talked into meeting him by Rudy Wurlitzer (who wrote it) and Kris Kristofferson (who played Billy). Dylan was a fan of Peckinpah’s movies, especially the elegaic Ride The High Country. So Dylan played Peckinpah a couple of songs he’d written after reading the script, and Peckinpah, sentimental cuss that he was, was blown away. Peckinpah brought in Jerry Fielding to help Dylan score the movie. Fielding despised Dylan and everything he stood for and was thoroughly unimpressed with the music Dylan wrote for the death scene of Sheriff Colin Baker (spoiler!).

Baker, who was played by Slim Pickens, has a quite moving death scene, one of the most poignant in any Peckinpah movie, and that’s saying something. Fielding pushed and prodded Dylan to come up with something better, and Dylan responded with that obscure ditty “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” (Obscure? I kid, I kid.) Fielding, not exactly a man of the times, hated the song so much that he quit the production. Dylan toiled on without him. Later, as with so many Peckinpah movies, the studio took control away in editing, and the theatrical release chopped Dylan’s role down to not-much and cut his music into pieces. The 2005 DVD release restores the movie to its director’s cut and adds a different version that combines elements of the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, and previously unreleased scenes. None of these versions, however, expand Dylan’s role into anything major or even coherent, but they’re certainly worth a viewing. Apparently, most of Dylan's role was shot using a camera with a defective lens, so there wasn't much left for the movie. It’s a shame no one's brought his acting chops to cinema yet. That Dylan guy would have killed as the lead in Don’t Look Back.

Unwatchable #68: “Kazaam”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

No, loyal Unwatchable readers, you have not missed an installment. Number 69 on the big list of failure is last year’s The Perfect Holiday, which will not be released on DVD until November. We’ll get back to it then, but meanwhile, let’s move on to the 1996 family movie that made you believe in Shaquille O’Neal as a seven-foot-tall rapping genie.

To his credit, Shaq does an admirable job of convincing us that he is, in fact, seven feet tall. Honestly, I would place little of the blame for Kazaam’s failures at the big man’s big feet, even if they are encased in goofy pointy-toed genie shoes for much of the running time. True, his rapping ability is largely a figment of his imagination. But the fact remains that someone in an office somewhere decided it would be a good idea for the genie played by Shaq to rap, and we can hardly blame the amiable giant for going along with the plan. He may not be much of an actor, but he’s got undeniable charisma and I appreciated his willingness to get silly. I don’t think Kobe Bryant would be caught dead in those MC Hammer pants.

With that, I’ve just about run out of good things to say about Kazaam. Some might tell you it’s a clever conceit that the genie, moving on with the times, has abandoned his traditional bottle for a boombox. I am not among them. Anyway, Kazaam is dislodged from his portable stereo home by Max Connor (Francis Capra, later of Veronica Mars), a mild troublemaker being raised by a single mom. Max gets the traditional three wishes, but he can’t wish for “ethereal” things like a second chance for his estranged father, only material things like a room full of junk food.

At first Kazaam is eager for Max to get his wishes over with so he can get back to his boombox, but when his sensational rapping takes the clubs by storm (even Da Brat is impressed), the big genie starts to get used to life outside the box. Meanwhile, Max gets to know his dad, who, it turns out, is something of a sleazebag. Especially compared to the heroic firefighter mom is dating. Along the way we keep trying not to notice that this is a movie about a little white kid who owns a big black man, but it’s not easy, especially in the scene where Max yells at Kazaam, “I own you!”

I guess it all works out in the end, although I retain some confusion over how Kazaam transforms himself into a ‘djinn’ who actually can grant ethereal wishes. I must have been distracted by all the rapping. So much rapping. Why so much rapping? Let’s blame director Paul Michael Glaser. You know him best as TV’s Starsky, of course, but don’t overlook his directorial career, which began with Band of the Hand in 1986. The only thing I know about Band of the Hand is the theme song by Bob Dylan, which is actually the most listenable thing Dylan produced in the mid-80s, even if I have no idea how or why he did it. Glaser next directed the oddly prescient Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle The Running Man, followed by the hockey romance The Cutting Edge and the basketball comedy The Air Up There. But even with all of those dubious achievements under his belt, it took Kazaam to kill off his career in feature filmmaking. That alone makes it worth three Maurys. Well, that and the rapping.

Previously on Unwatchable:
70. Epic Movie
71. Gigli
72. Meet the Spartans
73. Fascination
74. You Got Served

In Other Blogs: Faster, Britney...Kill! Kill!

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

At Some Came Running, Glenn Kenny is skeptical about a rumored remake. “A couple of my esteemed colleagues have expressed slightly guarded enthusiasm over the extremely shaky prospect that Quentin Tarantino will direct Britney Spears in a remake of Russ Meyer's 1965 exploitation classic Faster Pussycat...Kill! Kill!, but I can't say it pushes any of my buttons, personal or otherwise. Of course the argument that, for what it's worth, Pussycat got made but good the first time isn't gonna cut any ice if in fact a remake is in the cards. But really...Britney Spears. Who cares. Her cultural currency—which is entirely distinct, as I'm sure you know, from tabloid currency—is as low as it's ever been…Having Tarantino hand-hold her through a turn as a loudmouth psycho drag-racing lesbian stripper will do exactly what for her at this point?” I don’t think this one’s worth worrying about. It’s taken how many years to get Inglorious Bastards going? Cooler heads will prevail.

Flickhead checks out some obscure DVD releases from restoration house Legend Films. “Set in the trendy inner sanctum of late 1970s encounter groups where narcissism overtakes self awareness, Bill Persky’s Serial (1980) is as safe as an episode of Love, American Style peppered with four-letter words, Sally Kellerman’s boobs and Lalo Shifrin’s quaint muzak score. (With some embarrassment, I confess the theme, ‘A Changing World,’ rattled around in my head for days after.) It’s a quietly amusing time capsule of Marin County after the fall of The Sixties, where middle age and middle class values are perpetually analyzed by quack psychologists and individuals fearful of commitment. An intriguing companion piece to Phil Kaufman’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1979), this slice of Left Coast lunacy includes Tuesday Weld, Martin Mull, Bill Macy, a coked-out therapist played by Peter Bonerz, the woefully undervalued Barbara Rhodes, and Christopher Lee — Christopher Lee! — as a gay biker named ‘Skull.’”

At the House Next Door, Andrew Johnston revisits Risky Business. “As much as I loved them, teen sex comedies didn’t exactly make me feel good about being the kind of kid I was in 1983, the year I turned 15. They all took place in a world where smart and sexually inexperienced kids (i.e., guys like me) were always laughably pathetic, and rich ones (me again) were universally evil and arrogant. Here, finally, was a movie that didn’t pass judgment on those qualities. In the opening scene, our hero Joel Goodson recounts a dream in which he’s riding his bike home through his affluent neighborhood and winds up inside a neighbor’s house where a nubile girl invites him to join her in the shower, a dream that turns into a nightmare when the shower stall turns into a classroom full of his peers taking the SAT, for which he’s three hours late. How could I not identify with the guy?”

At Scanners, Jim Emerson becomes the last film blogger on earth to see The Dark Knight. “When we were in college, a music critic friend of mine who delighted in making "best ever / worst ever" statements proudly (and sincerely) proclaimed that Bob Dylan's Blood On the Tracks was the single greatest artistic achievement in the history of mankind. We teased him about the hyperbole, but I admit I liked him all the more for saying it. Unguarded, unbounded enthusiasm is a wonderful thing to behold, to feel, and to share…I waited a couple weeks to see The Dark Knight and I even though I felt lukewarm about the movie, I couldn't wait to talk about it.”

And in List-o-Mania this week, in honor of the Tom Cruise cameo in Tropic Thunder, Spoutblog presents the 10 Best Small Roles for Big Stars. Some are fairly obvious (no such list would be complete without Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glenn Ross), but I admittedly had forgotten all about Arnold Schwarzenegger as “Prince Hapi” in Around the World in 80 Days. “Schwarzenegger’s hilarious appearance as a lecherous Turkish prince — one of his last roles filmed before becoming Governor of California — is one of the few highlights, if not the sole highlight (personally, I enjoy Jackie Chan in anything, and I liked more of this movie than most people did). The role is especially funny and creepy if you’ve ever seen that old footage of Schwarzenegger being sleazy at Carnival in Rio.”

Scorsese Passes the Baton to Demme on Bob Marley Documentary

Phil Nugent — Fri, 23 May 2008 19:00:00 GMT

In what might just be a propitious turn of events, Martin Scorsese has dropped out of what was intended to be his next film--a documentary about Bob Marley that he was working on with Steve Bing's Shangri-La Entertainment and Fortissimo Films, the same team with whom he made the Rolling Stones concert movie Shine a Light--and Jonathan Demme has stepped in. The movie, which everyone wants finished for a release date of February 6, 2010--the late, Jamaican reggae legend's 65th birthday--would have been Scorsese's fourth music documentary of this decade, counting the Bob Dylan film No Direction Home and Scorsese's episode of the PBS series The Blues. (It also would have taken him out of his comfort zone of music and musicians associated with the 1960s, unlike another project that's still reportedly on his plate, a documentary about George Harrison.) Apparently Scorsese was forced to bow to scheduling reality. Besides the Harrison doc, he's also preparing The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt with Leonardo Di Caprio and an adaptation of the Shusako Endo novel Silence from a script by Jay Cocks, even as he's already begun shooting Shutter Island, also with DiCaprio, and based on a novel by Dennis Lehane.

Scorsese was working on the Marley movie with the blessing of the singer's family. When he signed on, Marley's son Ziggy Marley, who's serving as executive producer, was quoted as saying, "I am thrilled that the Marley family will finally have the opportunity to document our father's legacy and are truly honored to have Mr. Scorsese guide the journey." Now Ziggy's gone back to the well and said of Demme, "His empathy with my father's body of work and his unique understanding of the musical documentary form makes me confident that this film will be the ultimate celebration of my father's life." Even if it's intended as spin control--Marley would probably do his best to sound upbeat if he woke up tomorrow morning to find that Demme had been replaced by Uwe Boll--the sentiment computes. Not only has Demme made his own string of superior rock movies (Stop Making Sense, the more recent Neil Young picture Heart of Gold), but some of his other films, notably the documentaries Haiti--Dreams of Democracy and The Agronomist reveal a passionate feel for the Caribbean culture and the mixture of pop and politics that informed Marley's career. Warming up to his assignment, Demme has referred to Bob Marley as "one of the greatest human beings of modern times".

Screengrab’s “I’m Not There” Study Guide

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:30:00 GMT

As you have already been informed, I’m Not There arrives on DVD today. For those of you in the “I’m sort of interested, but not really a big Dylan fan” camp, here are a few supplemental materials that may or may not enhance your appreciation of Todd Haynes’ unconventional biopic. Put away your notebooks, there will not be a test.

As you may have gleaned, I’m Not There is a cavalcade, a kaleidoscope, a veritable cinematic smoothie blending many eras and images from Dylan’s career. Mmm…smoothie. I’m sorry, where was I? Oh, yes. Throughout the film Haynes quotes, tweaks and otherwise references a number of original sources very familiar to Dylan fans but perhaps not to neophytes. Such as:

DYLAN GOES ELECTRIC (1965)

In one of the seminal moments of Dylan’s career, the one-time pride of the Greenwich Village folk scene plugged in his guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, alienating the purists in the audience and prompting Pete Seeger to announce he’d cut the power with an axe if he had one. (Haynes has some fun with this moment.) Dylan’s evolution from earnest folkie to hipster rocker can be seen in the recent documentary The Other Side of the Mirror, which collects his Newport performances from 1963 through 1965.

EAT THE DOCUMENT (1972)

Once intended as a straightforward follow-up to D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back (which forms the basis of much of the Cate Blanchett segment of I’m Not There), this fragmented look at Dylan’s 1966 tour has no official release, but has been heavily bootlegged (and now, of course, YouTubed). Those seeking straightforward live concert footage are bound to be disappointed (though extended versions of many of the performances are available on the DVD of Martin Scorsese’s Dylan doc No Direction Home), but the film has its fascinations, notably footage of John Lennon sharing a car ride with a severely fucked-up Bobby D.

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID (1973)

This elegiac Sam Peckinpah western contains Dylan’s “acting” debut (as the mysterious outlaw Alias), but more importantly, his soundtrack composing debut, including the timeless “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” which should always conjure images of Slim Pickens clutching his bloodied midsection. In the Richard Gere section of I’m Not There, Haynes creates a landscape of the Old Weird America that is equal parts Pat Garrett, The Basement Tapes and Dylan’s 1976 tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue. (For more on Pat Garrett, check out Tom Block’s definitive appraisal at The High Hat.)

RENALDO AND CLARA (1978)

This one is for the completists only. In fact, I thought I was a completist and I’ve never completed it. Nearly 30 years before Haynes, Dylan himself did an impressionistic take on his own legend, with the assistance of Sam Shepherd. The nearly four hour result has long been regarded as a complete debacle, but here’s your chance to get on the ground floor of the re-evaluation. The whole thing is on YouTube if you have the stamina.

DVD Digest for May 6, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 06 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

This week: One of the most acclaimed films of 2007 arrives to do battle with some of the most reviled releases so far in 2008. Who will prevail? Read on…

DVD of the Week: No one does musical biography like Todd Haynes. This should have been clear from his previous films Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story and Velvet Goldmine, and his latest film, I’m Not There, lays any remaining doubts to rest. But then, when one is making a movie about Bob Dylan, how could it possibly fit into a neat little package? The Weinstein Company’s two-disc DVD of the film contains a wide variety of features, including a commentary track with Haynes, two deleted scenes, some audition tapes, a handful of documentaries, and a tribute to Heath Ledger. But most of all, there’s the film itself- I’m Not There is sometimes wondrous, sometimes frustrating, but always worthy of its subject, and this DVD should find a place in the collections of cinephiles and Dylan fans alike.

Alas, the other new arrivals on DVD aren’t nearly that noteworthy, sometimes aggressively counteracting the awesomeness of I’m Not There with their wholesale suckitude. More typical of this week’s crop is the universally detested The Hottie and the Nottie (Genius Products- how’s that for irony?), the latest attempt by its star- who I refuse to name here- to achieve total media domination. Also this week: Ice Cube and Tracy Jordan Morgan in First Sunday (Sony, also Blu-Ray); Hilary Swank in P.S. I Love You (Warner, also Blu-Ray); the long-awaited Eva Longoria Parker vehicle Over Her Dead Body (New Line); and 2006 TIFF Audience Award Winner Bella (Lions Gate). Also, this week brings the release of the heartwarming family-themed vagina dentata comedy Teeth, as well as Sony’s first step into the Bollywood market, Saawariya (also Blu-Ray). But while a few of these are worth seeing, I’d have to say this was probably the easiest week to pick a DVD of the Week in quite a while.

A few new editions of some already-on-DVD titles will be hitting stores this week as well, including: The Bridges of Madison County Deluxe Edition (Warner); Serial Mom Collector’s Edition (Focus); and a two-disc special edition of Twister (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Finally, this week’s sole Blu-Ray only release is the 2004 remake of Shall We Dance?

Sorry folks, that’s all I’ve got. Next week promises to bring more DVD goodness. Not a moment too soon, I say.

The Curse of the Rolling Stones

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 18:30:00 GMT

My profuse apologies for the lame Harry Potter prank. Here’s your actual Scorsese news of the day, concerning a movie that does exist: the new Rolling Stones concert film Shine a Light. Scorsese, as you may know, is no stranger to the rock and roll music. An editor on Woodstock, director of both the quintessential concert film The Last Waltz and the acclaimed Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home, Scorsese was also an early adopter of the wall-to-wall classic rock approach to movie scoring, for better or for worse. His frequent use of Rolling Stones music, in particular “Gimme Shelter,” has become something of a running joke, with Mick Jagger noting that Shine a Light may be the first Scorsese movie that doesn’t feature the 1969 track.

“I'm not really that knowledgeable about how music is put together,” Scorsese told the San Francisco Chronicle, in an interview from the set of his upcoming adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island. “I love music. I wish I could write or perform music. I can't do it. I love it, and it's one of my main sources of information. I was fascinated that if Jagger would sing a line in lyrics, Keith (Richards) would respond with two notes on his guitar or a strum. I found I wanted to capture all that. I wanted to capture the look on Keith's face when he decided to respond to that lyric.”

The project may seem a tad redundant to anyone familiar with the cinematic history of the Stones. A number of concert films precede Shine a Light, and as the L.A. Times notes, most of them have been touched by controversy and even tragedy. “Most infamously, the 1970 film Gimme Shelter by the Maysles brothers documented the nightmarish scene the previous year at Altamont Speedway, where the Hells Angels were hired as security but went on a rampage. One 18-year-old concert-goer was stabbed and stomped to death. There had been other dark tinges to the film library. The Rock and Roll Circus (recorded in 1968 but not released until 1996), directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, turned out to be a grim time capsule as the last public performance of Stones guitarist Brian Jones. The politically ominous Sympathy for the Devil (filmed in 1968 and released in 1970) was beset by a studio fire, the arrest of Jones on drug charges and a dispute between director Jean-Luc Godard and the producer that climaxed with a fistfight at the premiere. Then there was Let's Spend the Night Together, directed by Hollywood rebel Hal Ashby, who filmed the band in 1981 at Arizona's Sun Devil Stadium and then hours later was wheeled out of the band's hotel on an ambulance gurney after slumping into a drug overdose."

You’d think the senior citizen Stones would have put all that behind them, but even Shine a Light fell victim to the Stones movie curse. No, we’re not talking about the mysterious appearance by Christina Aguilera (“I'm still not sure who that is,” says Keith Richards), but the death of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, who stumbled backstage and hit his head, never to recover. “I loved him,” says Richards. “But you know, what better way to go? Backstage at a Stones show? That's how I wanna go.”

The Five Most Intriguing SXSW Trailers: Documentaries

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 19:30:00 GMT

The 2008 SXSW Film Festival kicks off a week from tomorrow, and naturally the Screengrab will be your go-to source for wall-to-wall coverage. We're whetting our appetites by browsing through the trailers for the official selections and making a checklist of can't-miss screenings. Tune in tomorrow for the five most intriguing narrative films; for now, here are the documentaries that have our attention.

Crawford

In 2005, I went to Crawford, Texas for a wedding. This was at the height of "Camp Casey," the makeshift protest community that grew up around Cindy Sheehan and spent the summer heckling the vacationing president. Looking around at the nondescript one-traffic-light town in the ass-end of nowhere, I wondered why Bush would move there on purpose, when he could be spending his considerable leisure time kicking back in Kennebunkport, Maine. Apparently the townspeople of Crawford have wondered the same thing:

Super High Me

They drug test us once a week here at the Screengrab, so I wouldn't know anything about the marijuana or "pot grass" as I believe you kids call it. But apparently comedian Doug Benson knows quite a bit about it; he was named High Times magazine's Stoner of the Year in 2006, and now he's following in the footsteps of Morgan Spurlock by smoking "medical marijuana" for 30 straight days. Sounds like more fun than eating a month's worth of Egg McMuffins. Not that we'd know, of course!

Dreams With Sharp Teeth

Here at the Screengrab, you don't have to tell us that Harlan Ellison still has his edge; we found out firsthand. So we're very much looking forward to this portrait of the world-renowned author, and we're not just saying that to get on his good side! Although we are sort of wondering what Robin Williams is doing in this thing.

Not Your Typical Bigfoot Movie

Bigfoot is back, baby! The star of countless cheapo creature features and pseudo-documentaries of the 70s has been spotted in such recent fare as Strange Wilderness, The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang and The Wild Man of Navidad. This documentary from first-time director Jay Delaney follows a pair of amateur Bigfoot hunters whose cryptozoological quest provides "a source of hope and meaning that transcend the harsh realities of life in a dying steel town."

Shine a Light

Next to organized crime, rock and roll is Martin Scorsese's favorite subject – and who's to say there's no overlap between the two? An editor on Woodstock, Scorsese made one of the great rock movies of the 70s in The Last Waltz, and presided over the definitive Bob Dylan bio with No Direction Home. Now he shines his light on the Rolling Stones – although if this trailer is any indication, Marty himself is at least a co-star. Ironically enough, early word indicates this is one Scorsese movie that doesn't feature "Gimme Shelter" on the soundtrack.

Screengrab Bets The Oscars: Leonard's Picks

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:30:00 GMT

With the 80th annual Academy Awards less than two weeks away, and with the WGA strike apparently near its end (assuring that there actually will be an Oscar ceremony, and not just a handful of star-struck entertainment journalists trying to figure out who the TelePrompTer works), it's time for us here at the Screengrab to suck it up. It's time for us to do what every other film writer in the world, self-respecting or otherwise, is doing, and lay down our picks for the big to-do. Since I've always had a knack for making a jackass out of myself on the internet, I'll be the first: under the cut, you'll find my picks for who deserves to take home a statuette come Oscar night in eigh different categories, and who's going to walk away with the gold, regardless of merit. Over the next thirteen days, I'm hoping my Screengrab colleagues will join me in this endeavor, and then, come March, at least one of us can strut around talking about how smart we are.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS:

There's a fine crowd of candidates this time around, and it's hard to pick a winner — there's no obvious failings just as there's no obvious standouts. All told, Cate Blanchett should win for her turn as Dylan in I'm Not There, but I'm predicting it will actually end up in the hands of Amy Ryan for the surprising Gone Baby Gone.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:

If, as I'm predicting, the Coen Brothers are shut out again this year, that means even more that Javier Bardem should win for his performance as Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men. However, given his spate of terrific roles towards the end of the year, I'm predicting it will go to Philip Seymour Hoffman for Charlie Wilson's War.

BEST ACTRESS:

Ellen Page surely deserves recognition for the breakout performance she delivered in Juno, and there's a slight possibility she'll get it. However, I think the Academy will go the other direction — since Hal Holbrook won't be getting an old-timer's award, Julie Christie will take home the gold for the little-seen Away from Her.

BEST ACTOR:

Although there's an off chance that George Clooney will take home the gold, I'm picking Daniel Day-Lewis' colossal performance in There Will Be Blood as both my should-win and will-win. Past performance and academy voting patterns be damned: it's a towering, masterful job of acting that carries the entire movie.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY:

Traditionally, the screenplay categories are the thanks-for-playing awards for the year's best movies, but which for whatever reason aren't going to get one of the big awards. As such, it's a dead heat between No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and my money's on Paul Thomas Anderson this year.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY:

If ever there are a sold-gold, lead-pipe lock in the history of solid-gold, lead-pipe locks, it's Diablo Cody winning Oscar gold this year for Juno. Bet the farm on it.

BEST DIRECTOR:

For filmmakers as talented and distinctive as the Coen Brothers never to have won an Oscar is a crime, but this isn't their Departed year. They'll be shut out again, though, leaving open the question of who gets it. P.T. Anderson seems obvious, but I'm gonna say this is a divisive year and Tony Gilroy takes it for Michael Clayton.

BEST PICTURE:

If Juno wins, the very balance of nature will be forever thrown askew. No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood are the most deserving, but are perceived as overly nihilistic and grim. Michael Clayton could be the winner by default, but I think it'll go to Atonement, the very definition of an Academy prestige picture.

The Rep Report (February 1-7)

Phil Nugent — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 17:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Since last Thanksgiving, Village audiences have been turning out in force at the Film Forum for I'm Not There, so the theater shouldn't have too much trouble drawing an audience for a week-long showing (February 1-7) of D. A. Pennebaker's Dont Look Back, the documentary record of Bob Dylan's 1965 tour of the United Kingdom, complete with Joan Baez singing away in her own little bubble, Dylan's notorious manager Albert Grossman auditioning for Tony Hendra's role in This Is Spinal Tap (and maybe Joe Pesci's role in GoodFellas), drop-in appearances by Donovan and Alan Price, and one of the all-time great pre-MTV music videos, with Dylan standing in the street flipping cue cards while Allen Ginsberg standing off to the sidelines looking as if he knows deep and ancient truths, even if he was really just wondering about the location of the buffet table. Released in 1967, Pennebaker's movie established Dylan as an icon of movie cool, much more effectively than his early attempts at actual movie "acting" (Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, Renaldo and Clara). If you've never seen it, you'll want to check it out to decide for yourself how the man himself compares with Cate Blanchett.

On February 1, as part of its "Golden Silents" program, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is hosting a special one-night event, a rare screening of Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness, a 1927, sixty-seven-minute film by the men who made King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack. The simple story about a family farm in a jungle setting is a pretext for the exciting natural wildlife footage; the movie includes fights with big cats and a bang-up elephant stampede — make no mistake, animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture. But its mixture of awe in the face of natural beauty and man-on-safari edginess will help you understand why everyone in Hollywood understood that the jungle-raping showman in King Kong was a Cooper self-portrait. Live musical accompaniment will be provided by the Alloy Orchestra.

Scarlett Johansson Sings! Sings Tom Waits Songs!!

Phil Nugent — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:00:00 GMT

If you've maybe gotten a little tired of Scarlett Johansson — she only seems to get a little less appealing and a lot less talented with every movie, and at twenty-three, the number of movies she's been in is far greater than the number of years she's been on our planet — the good news is that she's gotten a hobby. The perhaps not so good news is that her new hobby is singing professionally. Johansson, who will be seen later this year in He's Just Not That Into You — a title that could have applied equally well to audience reactions to The Back Dahlia or The Nanny Diaries — is releasing an album in May. Anywhere I Lay My Head consists of ten Tom Waits covers and an original, which I'm guessing — I'm hoping — will kind of stand out from the rest of the album. Reporting in the UK Independent, David Usborne writes that Johansson promises that the album will have "a dreamy, other-worldly feel," kind of like this post. "It was a really, really sort of inspired process, and it was something I'd never done before," she said. Johansson's only previously recorded work was a version of "Summertime" that appeared on Unexpected Dreams: Songs from the Stars, a benefit record for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's "Music Matters" educational program that also featured musical performances by the likes of Lucy Lawless, Jennifer Garner, Victor Garber, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ewan McGregor, Teri Hatcher, and Jeremy Irons, whose rendition of Bob Dylan's "To Make You Feel My Love" was hailed by one on-line writer as "less creepy than expected."

The new album was cut in Louisiana, with production by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek and a crew of musicians that included members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. If Johansson decides to do a follow-up, and if she really wants to shake things up, she should leave Tom Waits alone and do a concept album of versions of all the aching songs that various admirers and other horndogs have written about her. Scarlett Johansson singing "Scarlett Johansson, Why Don't You Love Me" by the Jai-Alai Savant and the tear-stained songbook of her ex-boyfriend Jack Atinoff, of Steel Train? Might be kind of funny. Of course, that's probably what she once thought about the script for Scoop.

Dueling Dylans

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 19:30:00 GMT

As if Todd Haynes hadn’t already made things confusing enough by casting six different actors to play Bob Dylan in I’m Not There, now John C. Reilly is horning in on the action. In Walk Hard, Reilly’s mock rocker Dewey Cox goes through a brief Dylan phase, as seen in the clip below. Reilly may not make you forget Cate Blanchett anytime soon, but to his credit, he does his own nasally singing on “Royal Jelly,” which was written in the Bard’s surrealist-hipster style by one of his many folk-rock descendents, Dan Bern.

Hoberman Hails Haynes

Peter Smith — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:00:00 GMT

In a long piece in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman calls Todd Haynes's I'm Not There "part of the larger, ongoing Dylan revival brilliantly orchestrated by his manager, Jeff Rosen" and also "the movie of the year." Hoberman suggests that this might be the Bob Dylan movie that Dylan himself repeatedly tried to make but never could have achieved; nobody but Haynes, "who studied film as semiotics" and who in Superstar and Velvet Goldmine had already "taken pop stars or pop music for a text," could have. As Hoberman sees it, only a filmmaker as audacious as Haynes could be worthy of this subject. "Certain cultural figures have a particular inevitability. Charles Chaplin and Elvis Presley rode technological waves, surfing to superstardom on powerful socio-economic currents. Had Chaplin never come to America, another slapstick comic would have emerged to reign over the nation's nickelodeons; Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then — having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning — vanish into a folk tradition of his own making." — Phil Nugent

Forgotten Films: Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Peter Smith — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 18:00:00 GMT

Bob Dylan re-wrote the rules about what was allowed of a famous singer, songwriter, and public figure, but it turned out that he did have one normal thing about him: he liked the idea of being a movie star. Dylan was a movie star whenever he got to be himself in caught footage, as in D. A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, but his first several attempts to pass for an actor, or to capture his magnificence himself, tended to be kind of, well, disastrous. The music he produced for the soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973) yielded a triumph in "Knockin' on Heaven's Door," but Peckinpah's attempt to incorporate Dylan into the cast, as a mysterious, knife-throwing hombre known as "Alias", only resulted in a smirking blank space on the screen. Dylan's own 1978 Renaldo & Clara, a four-hour mixture of fantasy and documentary sequences threaded through with performance footage from the 1975-76 Rolling Thunder Revue, inspired print seminars, in places like the Village Voice, on the theme, "Dylan: What Happened?"; long unavailable in its complete form, the movie will probably be seen again around the time that Jerry Lewis's The Day the Clown Cried is released as part of the Criterion Collection. Then there's Hearts of Fire, a misguided 1987 rock-'n-roll love story with Dylan as the sage old music legend who plays smitten mentor to the uni-named cupcake Fiona. The barely-released film was the last work by its director, Richard Marquand (Eye of the Needle, Return of the Jedi), who had a fatal stroke before signing off on the final cut.

After a long lay-off from movies, Dylan re-emerged in 2003 as the star of Masked and Anonymous, directed by Larry Charles. (It was the first movie directed by Charles, who was then best known for his TV work, as a writer on Seinfeld and a director on Curb Your Enthusiasm. His second movie would be Borat.) Dylan and Charles co-wrote the script, under the pseudonyms "Sergei Petrov" and "Rene Fonatine." It was made fast — principal photography was reportedly completed in twenty days — and relatively cheap; a lot of well-known people agreed to be paid scale on it because, like the various celebrities who appeared in Renaldo & Clara, they just wanted to work with Dylan. The cast includes Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Val Kilmer, Mickey Rourke, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, Giovanni Ribisi, Luke Wilson, Fred Ward, Bruce Dern, Cheech Marin, Tracey Walter, Robert Wisdom, Chris Penn, Christian Slater and Susan Tyrrell, as well as Dylan's longtime touring band (including guitarist Charlie Sexton and bassist Tony Garnier) and a little girl named Tinashe Kachingwe, who brings down the house with her a-cappella version of "The Times They Are A-Changin'." The reward they get for their participation is that they all get to be characters in a new Dylan song — one of the really long ones, like "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again," full of imagery and puns and symbols and throwaway jokes. That's how the movie is conceived.

The setting is America as a junta-led dictatorship, with government-controlled media and street executions, and with Dylan as a legendary troubadour named "Jack Fate" who's spent the last several years locked away in prison. An Albert Grossman-like manager figure — Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman — gets him sprung so he can perform at a big televised benefit concert, and he tours the back country on his way to the performance site, serving as witness to the perversion of the country's ideals, and playing straight man to a succession of ranters and weirdos. The movie has its dead spots and its puzzlements, and it rambles, as you might expect. But it's not just some vanity project. There's real pain and a lot of humor in it, and its vision of an entertainment-sated America in lockdown is politically sophisticated in a way that was guaranteed to go over like a lead balloon when it was released during the summer of "Mission Accomplished!" Part of the movie's strength, and part of what may cause many to regard it as dismissible, is that it pictures this nightmare of where we may be headed but doesn't have any ideas of how to slay the dragon once it plops its ass down in the seat of power. Dylan doesn't dismiss the power and value of music, but he knows damn well that it doesn't stop jackbooted thugs in their tracks.

The one message that does come through loud and clear is that the sixties have been over a long time, they aren't ever coming back, and they may not have been everything that nostalgic boomers and post-boomer dreamers want to think they were in the first place. In one of the movie's funniest and most pointed scenes, Goodman reads a long list of songs that the government would like Jack Fate to perform for the national television audience: it's a string of rebellious sixties classics ("Street Fighting Man", "Masters of War"), now toothless but still good for making the listener imagine that he must be a part of something daring. (Dylan's deadpan response: "I dunno, Sweetheart. It seems like a whole lot of songs.") And the movie's villain is a self-hating blowhard of a rock journalist (Jeff Bridges) who "interviews" the Dylan character by suggesting that he's a has-been and a sell-out while reeling off the names of rock heroes such as Hendrix who had the decency to die young. Dylan seems to hate this asshole more than the dying, dictatorial "president" (Richard C. Sarina) or his replacement — Mickey Rourke, who caresses the screen with his sweetest pussycat smile while promising, "We will empty the prisons, and fill the football stadiums!" Masked and Anonymous was part of a general comeback for Dylan that began with his 1997 album Time Out of Mind; since then, his autumnal renaissance has included a couple more albums (Love and Theft, Modern Times) and his memoir Chronicles, Volume One, as well as the belated official release Live 1966 and the Martin Scorsese documentary No Direction Home. (He also won an Academy Award for the song "Things Have Changed" from Wonder Boys.) In this unexpected surge of critically garlanded work, Masked and Anonymous (which also yielded a superb soundtrack album) may have gotten lost in the shuffle, but in its own eccentric way, it's as intriguing a statement about Dylan and his myth as any yet caught on film. At least, until the imminent release of Todd Haynes I'm Not There, which addresses the problem of summing up Dylan by dividing the part among six different actors. You can bet that Dylan is kicking himself for not having thought of that before.

— Phil Nugent