Cate Blanchett to play Bob Dylan in an upcoming film.

# Cate Blanchett to play Bob Dylan in an upcoming film. [Started by Tuomas (Tuomas), last updated 1 minute ago] 58 new answers
# Oh! I Always Get Those Two Mixed Up! [Started by New Mark H (New MarkH), last updated 1 minute ago] 3 new answers

(saw this last night, liked it)

but basically if you hate Dylan and don't know anything about him I don't really understand why you would want to see this movie...?

Haven't seen this yet, but it's one of my most anticipated films of this year because a) I love Todd Haynes, and b) even though I can't stand his music, I'm interested in the idea of Dylan as an American icon.

the Billy sequences made me wonder why they were shot in the woods and not in a Peckinpah-styled Southwest. Esp with the musical number being "Goin to Acalpulco".

x-post

(I expect not to understand certain things, though, too.)

woods more evocative of Dylan's exile in upstate NY?

his woodstock years w/ the band

yeah that's the woodstock sequence. although haynes' conflation of it with billy the kid is fair, because both of them had to do with dylan's immersion in all that old-america tall-tales-and-outlaws nature-hippie stuff. (i kind of grew up in a vestige of that culture, so that sequence especially seemed right on to me.)

I was a little confused about where the Heath Ledger Dylan fits in the rough timeline -- is that after he gets back from swinging London but before the bike crash?

now that I think about it more I guess that character spans a couple of the eras and is just supposed to be "dylan the husband" (i.e. kind of a dick).

in conventional chronology that's post-bike crash "Desire"-era Dylan

btw also loved Bale's Born-Again Xtian Jewfro in this

in conventional chronology that's post-bike crash "Desire"-era Dylan

ok that makes sense .... but it's also heath who first meets charlotte g. in the village in roughly Freewheeling / Another Side era

yes, and the character Heath plays in his first film ("Jack Rollins") is the name of Bale's protest-singer/born-again character... Haynes stretched that character's timeline so he could do the relationship-bookended-by-the-Vietnam-War thing.

the heath character was the most fantastic in a way; i wonder if it was a lift from the dylan joke in the onion 20th century book, imagining an elvis-in-movies career for him.

Imagining a Dylan biopic being done around '64/65, like George Hamilton as Hank Williams, might be even funnier.

did anyone else think Kim Gordon's one scene = Nico...?

Man, I gotta see this.

I don't recall Kim saying enough to put me in mind of anyone.

yeah I don't recall either, maybe she was just supposed to be another NY folkie, Maria Muldauer or something

I don't remember any of her lines either ... I just thought she was supposed to be some minor folk-scene character (xpost)

also, Coco Rivington = who, Edie Sedgwick ?

guy who gets involved w/ her and makes Blanchett jealous = ? anyone in particular?

not that it matters

yeah I made the Coco = Edie assumption. the coterie of travelling companions on the UK tour seemed rather amorphous to me, I wasn't sure if any of them were supposed to represent particular people (apart from Grossman and Ginsberg, obvy).... I kept waiting for a Donovan joke but it never came :(

i know, i was sure a donovan character would turn up. (could have been played by tilda swinton.)

more random thoughts: the Black Panthers riff was weird and came out of nowhere, but Huey Newton DID really hold meetings lecturing Bobby Seale about Dylan lyrics (as well as Melvin Van Peebles)... also glad to see the gay subtext "Ballad of a Thin Man" visually referenced. Maybe it was the sandwiching together of these two sequences that threw me at first, perhaps a nod to the multiplicity of interpretations people were developing around Bob's songs at the time...

one of the gay weeklies in NY asked Haynes why he didn't include allusions / rumors of young Dylan hooking up with men, he said he didn't have time for everything and it wasn't significant enough.

huh never heard of that

Go to Rolling Stone.com -- Haynes and Greil Marcus chair a press conference, at which the gay stuff is alluded to.

interesting - I can only assume hanging out with Ginsberg probably spurred a few stories

ok more crowd chatter, courtesy of a friend who saw it at film forum over the weekend. he says there were two 30-something women sitting behind him, with what he swore were jersey accents. in the minutes leading up to the lights dimming:

Lady 1: So what is this movie about?
Lady 2: I don't know. I think Bob Dylan.
Lady 1: Who?
Lady 2: You know, Bob Dylan.
Lady 1: Who's that?
Lady 2: He's a singer.
Lady 1: What's he sing?
Lady 2: Oh, you know. Like, country.
Lady 1: Country?
Lady 2: Or folk. No, you know what? FOLK ROCK. He was a folk rocker.
Lady 1: What song did he sing?
Lady 2: Oh, you know. That one. "Blowin in the Wind."
Lady 1: I don't know that.
Lady 2: Sure you do. It's a famous song!
Lady 1: How's it go?
Lady 2: You know, like ... "How many roads does a man walk down..."
Lady 1: Oh! I know that song!

Lord A'mighty.

David Edelstein "tried tried tried" to like it, but find it wanting:

http://nymag.com/daily/movies/2007/11/im_not_there_whats_missing_fro.html

what interests me isn’t so much the archetypes that Dylan embraces and that Haynes creates using six different actors. It’s the transition from one archetype to the next. Haynes cuts crisply among the different Dylans, but only in the most superficial way imaginable does he dramatize those instants in which one persona can no longer contain him. And each time those transitions are a mark of artistic restlessness rather than an emotional escape hatch. He means the songs, in their glory, to make those transitions more evident and the movie as a whole more fluid. I found it a bit of a fudge, and the film a Cinema Studies experiment that doesn’t transcend its parts. Having recently rewatched the Pennebaker documentary Don’t Look Back, I don’t even think Cate Blanchett’s esteemed turn as the gnomic, drug-addled star suggests the vulnerable human being we glimpse at every turn. She’s less Dylan than Chuck Barris.

i think the cate/jude character seems plenty vulnerable. and i'm not sure "artistic restlessness rather than an emotional escape hatch" is an either/or situation. but also, i didn't expect from the movie much insight into dylan-the-man, whatever that might mean. (i didn't even expect that from chronicles.) in a way, that line of reasoning gets some basic things about dylan wrong; it's continuing to ask "but who is he REALLY," a question that dylan's whole career (and the movie too) is sort of an argument against.

Yeah, I think he's either misreading Haynes' intent or is just disapproving of it.

also, DLB is '65 Dylan, Cate/Jude is '66, which is a BIG diff, so I don't know why he's using one to critique the other.

why on earth is Edelstein looking for "vulnerable human being(s)"?

yeah Edelstein's problem seems to be with the basic premise of the picture, the essential unknowability/slipperiness of this media-persona

saying the Jude section has little to do w/ Don't Look Back is splitting hairs, I think. isn't some of that segment shot-for-shot Pennebaker?

Edelstein's review at least made more sense to me than Anthony Lane's, where he made the somewhat startling admission that he thought the Brit magazine editor was otm o_0

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2007/11/26/071126crci_cinema_lane

there is no mistaking a hard, Brechtian sense of dramatis personae being used like tools

he says this like its a bad thing

like OH NOES, META

Armond's review was written by Addison DeWitt.

(i rote review too.)

are there any movies that anthony lane likes?

isn't some of the Jude section segment shot-for-shot Pennebaker?

I'm not sure, but that's not in DNB cuz the real snippy press conference Jude press conference is almost verbatim from '66. Maybe it's in Eat the Document? Which is '66 footage, shot by Pennebaker but appropriated by Dylan, correct? (I last saw it in Scorsese/PBS)

I thought Eat the Document was Dylan taking Pennebaker's DLB footage plus some stuff of his own and editing it all together

anyway yeah yr correct about the press conference

no, ETD is '66

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0233629/

so he was booed for going electric two tours in a row?

1965 is DLB=acoustic
1967 is ETD=electric

but... he was playing electric stuff by '65 right? I mean the film opens with Subterranean Homesick Blues... he just didn't have the electric band with him on that UK tour...?

I thought everything after Newport he was doing two sets, one acoustic and one electric, but I don't really know

anyway I guess I got the "shot for shot" thing from NYT. I've never seen Eat the Document.

Devotees of Dylan lore will find their heads swimming with footnotes, as they track Mr. Haynes’s allusions not only to Mr. Dylan’s own music but also to the extensive secondary literature it has inspired, from books by David Hajdu and Greil Marcus to films, including D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” some of which Mr. Haynes remakes shot for shot.

I could've sworn there's footage of concert-goers complaining that he's a sellout for going electric in DLB, but maybe I am mixing it up with ETD.