Movies

Positively dreadful film. Probably must be ranked as one of the all-time worst viewed by yours truly.The film depicts the life of Bob Dylan at various stages of his life. The film is terribly uneven with different characters just made to bounce around makes for a totally uninteresting affect.Yes, Cate Blanchett does give a solid performance but you just keep wondering and wondering what this is all about.The backdrops of the struggle for civil rights is lost in the absolute nonsense generated by the characters in this ensemble cast. Problem is that the writing is so atrocious, the uneven plot is never permitted to gel.A simply awful production of the worst character imaginable.

If you are thinking about seeing this movie I would suggest that you research Dylan first; otherwise you will be lost from the get-go, like I was.You need to know that the characters all represent different aspects of Dylan, and that even though they are "Dylan" they have different names. Some of the Dylan aspects are personified as a young black boy using the name Woody Guthrie, a woman, and a middle-aged Billy the Kidd, for example. And the film jumps from character to character and then back again, frequently.Chances are, if you are not an art film aficionado, you won't care for this one. On the other hand, if you do your Dylan homework, you may very well enjoy it even though it isn't typical mainstream movie fare.

Saw this at the Toronto Film Festival. I really liked it, although maybe the Richard Gere scenes are the one's to skip, though it's not really his fault. Cate Blanchett is getting a lot of buzz for her performance, and she deserves it. The actors are all playing versions of Dylan, though their characters have different names. Blanchett plays an incarnation of Dylan that would be right around the time of "Don't Look Back".Although I think Todd Haynes is mostly successful here, I fear that this will be a film that will really interest people who already know about Bob Dylan, and that it will sort of fly over the heads of everyone else. A good movie, and a nice place to start if you're a young movie lover who wants to expand and see something less conventional.