Bob Dylan at the movies.

Who owns Dylan?

http://www.suntimes.com/output/ebert1/wkp-news-masked15f.html

Jody to thread.

I have always felt it ungenerous to have the answer but wrap it in enigmas. When Woody Guthrie, the great man's inspiration, sings a song, you know what it is about. Perhaps Dylan's genius is to take simple ideas and make them impenetrable. Since he cannot really sing, there is the assumption that he cannot be performing to entertain us, and that therefore there must be a deeper purpose. The instructive documentary "The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack" suggests that it was Ramblin' Jack Elliott who was the true follower of Woody, and that after he introduced Dylan to Guthrie, he was dropped from the picture as Dylan studiously repackaged the Guthrie genius in 1960s trappings.

amateurist
amateurist
amateurist
someone else
amateurist
amateurist
amateurist
amateurist
someone else
amateurist
amateurist
amateurist
amateurist pleading for someone else

2) The idea that Dylan's lyrics are impenetrable.

3) The idea that Dylan "cannot really sing." (This may be more true now than before, but he's speaking of the Dylan of yore.)

4) The idea that Dylan fans don't believe that Dylan is entertaining them.

5) That Dylan's essential appeal was as a "repackaging" of Woody Guthrie for the 1960s.

demands some kind of interpretation / understanding?

Can you expand on this? What exactly do you mean?

I hate to plug my blog, but I like how I put it on there. See the last two entries.

what a bloody awful movie. time has removed any hint of doubt in that statement.

the coast of Bohemia!

I didn't even know about this film's existence till yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypkDAO2JGhs

Happily, I was able to order it through Amazon Canada fairly cheaply (and able to pair it with Alan Rudolph's Welcome to L.A. from the same seller).

(None of my YouTube links embed anymore, even though they're not disabled. Not sure why that is.)

Someone probably posted about this somewhere, but seemingly not here: there's a cleaned-up print of Eat the Document that's been up on YouTube for a few months (just learned of it today via Facebook). Downloading right now so I can watch it on TV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJWWEjyqI68

Something to be able to watch a clear print of this on a big-screen TV. (The sound seemed to be a split-second out of sync at times, which may be a problem at the source.) When Lennon turned up at the end for just a few seconds, I started thinking the YouTube clip was a truncated version--I remember a much longer scene from when I saw a murky VHS copy a couple of decades ago. A little reading clarified that the extended Lennon scene was only in certain bootlegs, not the original.

When it meanders, it meanders, but beautiful and dreamlike for most of the way, with songs I'd never heard (the Cash duet, a duet with Robertson, a great harmonica instrumental). I drifted a bit and will likely watch it again. The whole thing reminded me of a Wussy lyric: "I'm not the monster that I once was/Twenty years ago I was more beautiful than I am today."

so I rented Masked and Anonymous. The plot is about as paper-thin as would expect and Dylan's sole acting mode can most generously be described as "inert". That being said, it's actually kind of entertaining, at the very least there are a handful of monologues that are GREAT (Kilmer's is hilarious, as is Dylan's summation: "I guess that guy really likes animals") and the music is v good throughout. What a weird thing to make, I wonder if Dylan was really the driving force behind it or if someone else thought it would be a good idea...

ah I see upthread that Dylan actually wrote it - which explains why all the dialogue is in Dylan-speak, among other things. Still, an enjoyable artifact.

https://variety.com/2020/film/news/timothee-chalamet-bob-dylan-james-mangold-1203458755/

will watch, will not like

lol this matches Louis Garrel playing Godard

you can call him Zimmy
just don't call him Timmy

I think I'm old enough and sufficiently out of touch that I'd like to audition for the role of the Time reporter he chews out in Don't Look Back.

saw "bob dylan" trending on twitter and got spooked for a second, so tbh i don't mind this news that much

I've finally watched Renaldo and Clara--five or six sittings over 10 days. Going by its Wikipedia entry, the full version never got an opening outside of three or four theatres before it was pulled, which would explain my not having see it in '78. I'm going to Zoom about it and other Dylan films with two friends, so won't say much here, but I was, weirdly enough, thinking about Twin Peaks: The Return now and again as I watched. This bit from Janet Maslin's original Times review might help explain that:

Mr. Dylan, who has a way of insinuating that any viewer who doesn't grasp the full richness of his work must be intellectually deficient or guilty of some failure of nerve, has seen fit to produce a film that no one is likely to find altogether comprehensible. Yet for anyone even marginally interested in Mr. Dylan--and for anyone willing to accept the idea that his evasiveness, however exasperating, is a crucial aspect of his finest work--"Renaldo and Clara" holds the attention at least as effectively as it tries the patience.

(Lynch himself never insituated such a thing, but I swear his more fevered acolytes sometimes do.)

That's one of the two contemporaneous reviews available online; the other is Kael's.

https://scrapsfromtheloft.com/movies/renaldo-and-clara-review-pauline-kael/

She really rips into it--not just the film, but Dylan himself.

"In the Sixties, his songs were said to have defined a generation, but what he does on the screen here is painfully out of key with the times. Where is the audience that will see him as he sees himself?"

*Cue John Cassavettes and Ben Gazzara to walk by*

Thought of Cassavettes too, even Wiseman occasionally. For some strange reason I used to think he was trying to do his version of Nashville. Not even close. (Kael's Mailer comparison is good.)

Looking on Youtube for "Dont Look Back", I found it's been colourised. Funnily enough, it works. Now, I can see they're landing at Gatwick walking across the same bridge that we did about three days ago returning from Rome.

It might well not be, but it looks like it has three dimensions now.

It skips the "Subterranean Homesick Blues" film, presumably for copyright reasons...

But that's like Citizen Kane without the sled!

Yeah, but we get over it quick enough.

Well, I watched about 20 mins and left it for schlafen. Don't know if anything else got snipped...

Eat the Document...great-looking print (colour) from the Internet Archive. I'm going to take a bunch of screenshots and post them on Facebook; dream-like at times. Whatever music there is (10-15 minutes total?) is uniformly sublime: came to love "Baby Let Me Follow You Down" and "Tell Me Mama" via the Royal Albert '66 bootleg I bought in the late '70s (probably about fifth-generation by that point). Some dead patches, for sure, but, from Dylan, none of the theatrical smarminess that mars Don't Look Back here and there. (I did find a near-mute Robbie Robertson somehow annoying.) I know this version was shorter than the (worse looking) print I watched off YouTube years ago because Dylan and Lennon in the limo is reduced to 20 seconds. Which, aesthetically if not historically, improves the film--I recall Dylan being zonked and embarrassingly incoherent, with Lennon visibly uncomfortable.

I did find a near-mute Robbie Robertson somehow annoying

Wait 'til he starts talking

He was talking all the time...they just left his mic off.

That's why I added "somehow"--famous for never shutting up in The Last Waltz, so maybe he's just annoying period. One of the highlights for me, though, was the two times Rick Danko harmonized a line with Dylan near the end; also the last song Dylan and Robertson work through in the hotel room (I didn't recognize it).

He was talking all the time...they just left his mic off.

Last time I saw this I was younger than a pre-beard Garth, so probably time for a rescreen.

Had long forgotten about Johnny Cash’s appearance.

TV, not the movies, but pretty great: a CBC show called Quest that Dylan did in 1963. I'd never heard of it till a friend mentioned it yesterday. Daryl Duke, who went on to make Payday with Rip Torn in 1972, directed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26LC1lVxbSA

Greatly enjoying this thread, which I don't remember seeing before. I saw Renaldo and Clara too, in 2012, and blogged about it; later linked from Billboard when Claudia Levy sued for Jacques no longer reaching his estate, or not all owed (Dylan-Levy songs included in Rolling Thunder segments of R and C, so that's why I linked the coverage, in which she also recalled introducing them---says she knew Bob way before Jacques, when she was a waitress etc---also how he would come to their house in disguise for writing sessions) (Billboard pointed out that Dylan had already sold his catalogue before she brought suit---) Also a link to Albums That Never Were's version of a R & C soundtrack, which might have a working link somewhere in the comments again---anyway, movie was well-worth seeing, whichever Dylan edit it was, and one for the Harry Dean Stanton stans at very least: https://thefreelancementalists.blogspot.com/2012/02/renaldo-and-clara-can-this-marriage-be.html

sued for Jacques royalties no longer etc

Part two of Dylan at the Movies (we Zoomed about A Complete Unknown a few months ago):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__I63sCM_Hg