Meanwhile, ohohhh my fucking god, I mean I know you've covered this already, but I just watched the trailer for A Complete Unknown, because why not, I like trailers, and what if Chalamet pulls it off against all odds, considering all his reported obsessing over getting Dylan just right, maybe he was just miscast in Dune and has matured enough to... I mean hasn't 2024 been characterized by the spirit of hope against hope...  only to discover the truth looks soooo much worse than we could had even imagined! No way would I be so tasteless as to post the trailer here. It doesn't look like just another drab biopic, it looks uncommonly awful, in numerous ways, not the least of which being the portrayal of Joan Baez. More than just cookie–cutter contrivances about the underdog artist tropes, it seems to entirely omit the social activist and antiwar sentiment altogether, implying that Dylan's only focus was upward ambition in stardom, with the social and political messages seemingly diminished to mere gimmicks he deploys in a bid to exploit the social wind–change for his own cynical ends. It seems to leave out the broader folk movement altogether, not a whisper of the roots in American labor, and anti–fascism, and "people power." Instead it's all about power [i]over[\i] people, celebrity power, demagoguery. This has got to be an insult to Dylan fans. Not to mention Joan Baez fans. Barrrf.

Saw A Complete Unknown and have all sorts of conflicted feelings about it.
I think everyone who is suspecting this will be shit, can already guess what a lot of the problems are with it. It commits a lot of the standard biopic sins. You know, like actually having a scene where New York has people going screaming mad in the streets over the Cuban Missile Crisis, while Joan Baez steps through all this paranoia to find Dylan singing Masters of War for the first time in front of a rapturous C'est Wha audience. And then they share a first kiss.
But it also has a lot of good moments.
And it actually has the nerve to not make Dylan a particularly likeable person, nor does it really try to explain him, which I actually kind of appreciated, even if I think many would find that to be a flaw.
 

Jinnistan wrote:

I've already read a fact-check about this one, included with a list of all of the other liberties taken in the film, and this seems to me to be outright unforgivable.  I understand the needs of narrative expediency, but I have less tolerance for fabricating actual historical events like this

What it struck me as wasn't so much narrative expediency as a complete distrust in the audience that they would understand what the Cuban Missile Crisis was or how it affected the country. It wouldn't be enough to simply have a character mention their concern or use archived news reports. Unless the audiences sees people running around and screaming, they couldn't possibly understand what would motivate someone to write a song like Masters of War. It was a depressingly bad scene that undid a lot of the tepid good will I was giving it up until that point.

My main issue though, beyond any moral one, is that it just is a really badly done stupid scene. It's like it was grafted on from a Godzilla remake or something. In a movie that was trying to be soberly realistic, to have such a hysterical and badly rendered emotional moment like this, was kind of astonishing in its badness.

Although just about everything here is wrong as well, these are examples of biographical details which are more acceptably malleable for narrative purposes.  But I still think it's slightly galling, considering how much information is available, that it still gives a sense of laziness or indifference.  If you're going to commit all of the time and resources to a project like an expensive film, why not do at least a little research when writing your script?  Narrative expediency aside, there's little to be gained from misplacing this meeting (it was Gerdy's not Cafe Wha?).  But, yes, Baez met Dylan earlier in April '61, Dylan was then more interested in Joan's sister, Mimi, and Baez and Dylan would not engage romatically until at least May '63, and, although clearly inspired by it, Dylan would not write "Masters of War" until well after the Missile Crisis - it was such a late addition to Freewheelin', promo copies did not include it.  This might sound like nit-picking, but it only took me about 15 minutes to double-check all of those facts.  Again, much of this time-compression may be excusable, but, personally, I would prefer to see the Baez-Dylan courtship portrayed as closer to the slow-burn it actually was.

I don't care at all about getting these kinds of factual details right. As long as the film can find an honest emotional centre to it, and doesn't pander, I'm completely fine having these biopics use their subjects as launching points for nearly pure fiction. As long as at its core their seems to be something true. And tagging on such a Hollywood moments into a film about Dylan, just betrays what the film itself seemed to be going for. Which is a consistent issue with the movie, its seeming desire to play like a slice of life drama, than these occassional dodges towards easy applause moments as if it doesn't trust its more subdued intentions. It leaves the whole thing just hanging in limbo where one can neither surrender to its stupid big moments, or trust its more subdued ones.

I don't see "likeability" as such a binary.  It's fine to show how Dylan could frequently be unlikeable, but more importantly is to show his allure, which does involve his sphinx-like charisma.  People must have liked Dylan for a reason, personal reasons, despite his being an occasional little shit.

I don't see it as a binary either. This was just about my assumption that it would try and turn Dylan into some kind of cryptic teddy bear, who in the middle of the night will cuddle next to Joan Baez and talk about how he thinks songs can really change the world, and how much it hurts that people think he's just singing gibberish. I'm talking about the film dodging some of these kinds of films worst impulses (the Queen and Elton John one's being supreme examples of this). So I appreciated the movie just mostly observes him being a bit of a mystery with a bit of a bad attitude, and it doesn't have a real need to absolve or resolve either of them.

But...

Essentially you mention what is the biggest issue about Chalamet's performance. It is completely without spark or intention. He says some stuff that is vaguely Dylanesque. He mimics all sorts of gestures you can find in all of the documentaries. And he sings, not particularly well or convincingly as Dylan, but it's not the easy embarrassment it easily could have been (because let's be honest, I don't think many actors could do this well without totally falling right on their face). But, behind all of this facade there doesn't appear to be anything there. Nothing in the eyes. No fire in that way he moves. He comes off as being sulky and dull. No venom. No wit. And without either of those, no Dylan.

I do appreciate one writer who I read recently who claimed that the greatest Bob Dylan movie is Inside Llewyn Davis, despite that "Dylan" barely appears at the end, it's the fact that his presence hangs over the film as it does.

This is definitely not the Dylan film he deserves. It's a serviceably made movie that might convert some people completely unfamiliar with him to his music. But for fans it seems almost designed to come up short (which is one reason why I'm absolutely shocked at how many people on Dylan fan boards are absolutely gushing about it....making it clear that Dylan fans not only have pretty mushy taste in films, they have pretty mushy taste in what makes Dylan Dylan)

Because it wasn't the absolute train wreck that I expected though, I was passably entertained by it, and there are a handful of moments that I did like (his first meeting with Guthrie, a completely fake television show where he jams with a completely fake bluesman, some of the scenes with him and Baez, some of the concert footage). And it also has had the positive affect of making my girlfriend much more accomodating to me playing his records, since I guess it does familiarize the unfamiliar with what his music was kinda, sorta getting at.

Steven Soderbergh has two new films coming out in the next two months.  The first, Presence, looks like A Ghost Story had that film been an actual horror film.  The Second, Black Bag, looks like a corny redo of Mr. and Mrs Smith, but even when Soderbergh has released corny-looking films in the past (Out of Sight, Haywire, Lucky Logan) they tend to come out alright.  Not to mention that this is the same guy who announced his retirement from filmmaking over a decade ago.








And the new redband for Oz Perkins' The Monkey.




 

I have to take the underdog tale here.  For those unaware, Warner Brothers has been pretty negligent to their efforts at appropriating their classic Looney Tunes characters as of late, including the relatively recent cancellation of the presumably finished Coyote Vs. Acme feature, and now WB decided to dump another feature film based on these classic characters, and I guess we should at least be thankful for this, that they deemed to allow the hard-working filmmakers to release not with WB money or advertising, but on their own (via start-up Ketchup Entertainment) opening this Friday.  Apparently WB was appalled by the notion that they didn't want to do it in 3D, and that the creators decided to dedicate a throwback to the Bob Clampett-style of early insanity-based truly Looney Tunes Cartoon, mixed, as the filmmakers have said, with an Ed Wood-esque sense of '50s camp.

Clearly WB has no faith in the project, which is why they allowed it to be franchised out, and I haven't yet seen the film, so I have no idea of its quality or integrity to the classic era it seems to be invoking.  But I admire it simply based on these terms.  And I would suggest to support it, for anyone who wants to take some kids to the theaters this weekend, strictly on GP.




 

New Ari Aster film, described as a "contemporary western" but looks like a conspiracist-saturated satire. 



 

New Lanthimos





Final Eddington trailer for next month's release.