Cate Blanchett to play Bob Dylan in an upcoming film.

Eonline: $757,385 for Friday-Sunday at 130 theaters. per-screen average of $5,826.

dylan hanger-on who gets dressed down by blanchett and hick type on the side of the road gere talks to are both local actors and friends of mine.

-- s1ocki

Yeah, I know one of the guys who was in the band that played The Band, although I haven't been in touch for a while.

i thought this was pretty great

kim gordon lol!

What's hilarious is that her lines would have worked as a spoken-word bit on A Thousand Leaves.

"Do your early stuff!" (Beyond looking like him Cross not very Ginsberglike tho)

the heath ledger segments were the ones i thought droned on a bit

I thought the Christian Bale parts were the weakest, he played Dylan like a half mute zombie hunchback

xpost - that scene was serious lols

^that's not a bad description of Protest Singer Dylan!

this was a lot of fun. altho the overall portrait it paints is one of a very unhappy person.

He's a person?

xp

or who is unhappy in public. the Ledger role is the only one with much 'interiority'.

Every scene suggested that "Bob Dylan" is a nullity.

unhappy maybe in a sort of myth of sisyphus way. i have a hard time thinking of dylan as happy or unhappy. i get the sense he's managed to enjoy himself more than your average tortured genius.

sure - which begs the question why someone would want to BE a nullity

x-post

"Those are yuppie words, happiness and unhappiness. It's not happiness or unhappiness, it's blessed or unblessed."--Bob Dylan, 1991, Rolling Stone

but HE (Robt Zimmerman) is not a nullity

I get the feeling that he just follows his enthusiasms and synthesizes them into his own art

just because he cultivates mystery and doesn't put his private life out there doesn't mean he's soulless

the negative reviews of "I'm Not There" that I've read (Edelstein and Lane) have focused on the fact that you don't get to know "the real Bob Dylan" but the main thing I take away from the movie is that Haynes is saying that the art is the life -- all the info that Dylan wants you to know about him or about "America" is in the work

that paragraph I wrote sounds pretty hack, sorry

No, it makes sense. Whatever insights he's learned he probably got from staring out a tour bus window and reading the Torah in 1978.

I'm still waiting for any overheard moviegoer remarks by people who were expecting something closer to Walk the Line.

There's a couple lines in Dont Look Back (and the hour of outtakes Pennebaker compiled for DVD, 65 Revisited) where Dylan sez stuff like 'I'm not me' or calls his act a "gimmick."

(he'd already been outed by Newsweek? as a middle-class Jewish boy from Minnesota)

there were two young women, early 20s i guess, walking out of the theater behind me. one of them said something like, "i don't know, maybe if you were alive at the time it would make sense? like, people were laughing at all these things that i didn't even know were jokes. the only time i laughed was when that british guy was on tv and someone said 'he's an asshole.'"

were there a lot of laughs at the theaters you guys were in...? Me and my friends were pretty much laughing through the whole film, there were so many visual jokes and asides, but the rest of the audience was fairly subdued.

I saw it at Lincoln Plaza and everyone standing around yakking right afterward seemed to like it

xp

My audience was "reverent." Nobody else recognized "Blind Willie McTell" though.

yeah i saw it at lincoln plaza fri. nite, and most of the crowd seemed in on the jokes.

yeah, "reverent" aptly describes the aging hippie crowd we were in as well. I think the Hard Day's Night ref got the biggest laughs. that and maybe the appearance of Ginsberg on his moped.

its a great explosion of biopic conventions - Haynes is very much at home with the whole "its just an ARTIFICE - geddit?" theme. Felt this was definitely of a piece with Velvet Goldmine and Superstar. I like Haynes best when he's dealing with music and theatricality and the illusory nature of media.

Haven't seen this yet, but over the weekend I did read the Luc Sante thing about Chronicles which had several interesting things to say about Dylan and his identities.

thx tipsy! those young women sound like the ones I heard nonplussed at Chelsea Girls. (I bet they didn't laugh at Julianne's Baez caricature)

Blanchett delivering Bob's trademark mysogyny lines = laffs

Baez caricature was great, very precise.

and it wasn't mean-spirited either. It captured that still-bitter-all-those-years sanctimony that Baez exuded in No Direction Home and her Live Aid apperance.

love & sex do fuck ppl up most, except on ILX it's records and what bar to go to.

I'm surprised you didn't say "Hillary."

It was a huge waste of a Saturday night for me. And the creep who just had to sit next to me couldn't keep to his own space and belched garlic for 2.5 hours. I don't like people enough to go to movies in theaters anymore. As a fan of neither Dylan (yes yes heretical I know) nor Todd Haynes, the movie came over as an incoherent pastiche. Though I did laugh at Moore's take on Baez.

It probably didn't help that we watched Help! the night before.

its far from incoherent wtf

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...? since its basic conceit is to be structured by reference points?

Didn't say I hate Dylan, just never been a fan. Went b/c Mr. Jaq wanted to see it, and I was home for a few days.

(I bet they didn't laugh at Julianne's Baez caricature)

yeah i imagine they were bewildered when the laughing started at just the sight of her.

I wonder if Haynes thought about asking Kristofferson to play Billy ... again?

# 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