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All Six Of Capone’s Personalities Weigh In On I’M NOT THERE!
Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here.
Forget SOUTHLAND TALES. This is the litmus test movie of the fall. Todd Haynes has made something that demands your participation as an audience, and the result is something that you don’t just watch... you lose yourself in it.
I’ll have a lot more to say about this one when I write it up, but for now, here’s Capone with his own words of wisdom on the trippiest film of the fall...
Hey all. Capone in Chicago here.
I'm not the biggest Bob Dylan fan in my family; that would be my brother, who somehow manages to find a new piece of information about Dylan (past or present) to share with me at least once a week. That being said, I'm a huge admirer of not only Dylan's musical output, but also the way he's lived his life and managed (or mis-managed his career), constantly doing, in some cases, the exact opposite of what was expected of him. He seemed to hope that his fans followed him, but in the end, I don't think it mattered to him one way or the other. The simple fact is that no matter how much Dylan knowledge you have going into Todd Haynes masterpiece I'M NOT THERE, I promise you that you have never seen a musical biography (or any biography for that matter) quite like this one.
You don't need an encyclopedic understanding of Dylan to appreciate this film, but if you happen to have one, I think you'll love it even more. Haynes approach actually makes Dylan's life make more sense and possibly even helps decipher some of the man's more strange directional shifts. For once, the born-again Christian era in Dylan's path seems less like a lark and more like necessity. If you've heard anything about this film before today, you probably know that six different actors play the many faces and phases of Bob Dylan. In one of Haynes' inspired choices, none of these six versions of Dylan are actually called “Bob Dylan.” This opens the gates for Haynes to get creative with the biographical details, while still sticking remarkably close to the facts.
The actor getting the most attention for playing Dylan in this film is Cate Blanchett, and if you see her career-defining performance, you'll understand why. She's simply becomes the man in black-and-white footage covering the era popularized by the documentary DON'T LOOK BACK. This was in a time when Dylan actually put himself before the world press and was the definition of confrontational. Blanchett also gets to play the legendary moment where Dylan played electric with The Band in front of a hostile crowd in London. Haynes painstakingly re-creates this moment in music history, and we feel the audience's resentment in our bones. Personally, I was particularly moved by Christian Bale's portrait of two phases of Dylan: the young troubadour first coming to New York and the born-again man who attended small church services and performed to small groups of the faithful. It's a moving moment when he plays before these people as a humble man delivering a simple message in song of survival and overcoming obstacles.
Health Ledger plays Dylan as if his career choice changed from musician to actor. This Dylan is the consummate Hollywood asshole, who meets a remarkable woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and breaks her heart. Richard Gere plays the toughest Dylan to pin town. Taking on the persona of an over-the-hill Billy the Kid in hiding from Pat Garrett, Gere's version of Dylan seems to represent the recluse, the man in self-imposed exile. Some might consider him the Dylan of today. Some of what Haynes gives us is fact, and some draws from the mythology that has formed around the Dylan legend over the decades. His meeting with Woody Guthrie, his pissing off of Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival by going electric, his first meeting with the Beatles, with Andy Warhol's factory crew (especially with an Edie Sedgwick-like party girl played by Michelle Williams). And trust me when I say, you haven't met Allen Ginsberg until you've seen him played by David Cross.
Haynes also borrows his visual cues from the films of the various eras he's portraying. Some of this footage is made to look like a documentary about Dylan, some borrows from D.A. Pennebaker's footage in DON'T LOOK BACK, some looks like a classic '70s Western, and it all looks fantastic. I haven't met a Todd Haynes film I didn't like, from his unauthorized biography of Karen Carpenter told with Barbie dolls (SUPERSTAR) to SAFE with Julianne Moore (who appears briefly in I'M NOT THERE) to VELVET GOLDMINE to his devastating last film FAR FROM HEAVEN. Haynes has a gift for peeling back the fiction to show you the truth, but he also loves adding layers to the legend in an effort to provide insight and clarity. I haven't even mentioned the remarkable music choices he draws from, not the usual collection of familiar Dylan tunes, but an array of largely lesser-known works that enhance the stories being told.
I'M NOT THERE is clearly a labor of love, but it is also an essential example of how to tell an artist's story without limiting yourself to one aspect of their career. To use recent examples, Johnny Cash and Ray Charles both had many phases and musical directions in their long careers. So why didn't their biopics show us that? Probably because the filmmakers thought the task to daunting and sweeping. Haynes shows that it's possible by simply getting creative and possibly a little obsessive about your subject matter. I've said it a couple times recently, and I'm sure I'll say it again before the year is out, but this is one of my favorite films of the year.
Capone
I'm not the biggest Bob Dylan fan in my family; that would be my brother, who somehow manages to find a new piece of information about Dylan (past or present) to share with me at least once a week. That being said, I'm a huge admirer of not only Dylan's musical output, but also the way he's lived his life and managed (or mis-managed his career), constantly doing, in some cases, the exact opposite of what was expected of him. He seemed to hope that his fans followed him, but in the end, I don't think it mattered to him one way or the other. The simple fact is that no matter how much Dylan knowledge you have going into Todd Haynes masterpiece I'M NOT THERE, I promise you that you have never seen a musical biography (or any biography for that matter) quite like this one.
You don't need an encyclopedic understanding of Dylan to appreciate this film, but if you happen to have one, I think you'll love it even more. Haynes approach actually makes Dylan's life make more sense and possibly even helps decipher some of the man's more strange directional shifts. For once, the born-again Christian era in Dylan's path seems less like a lark and more like necessity. If you've heard anything about this film before today, you probably know that six different actors play the many faces and phases of Bob Dylan. In one of Haynes' inspired choices, none of these six versions of Dylan are actually called “Bob Dylan.” This opens the gates for Haynes to get creative with the biographical details, while still sticking remarkably close to the facts.
The actor getting the most attention for playing Dylan in this film is Cate Blanchett, and if you see her career-defining performance, you'll understand why. She's simply becomes the man in black-and-white footage covering the era popularized by the documentary DON'T LOOK BACK. This was in a time when Dylan actually put himself before the world press and was the definition of confrontational. Blanchett also gets to play the legendary moment where Dylan played electric with The Band in front of a hostile crowd in London. Haynes painstakingly re-creates this moment in music history, and we feel the audience's resentment in our bones. Personally, I was particularly moved by Christian Bale's portrait of two phases of Dylan: the young troubadour first coming to New York and the born-again man who attended small church services and performed to small groups of the faithful. It's a moving moment when he plays before these people as a humble man delivering a simple message in song of survival and overcoming obstacles.
Health Ledger plays Dylan as if his career choice changed from musician to actor. This Dylan is the consummate Hollywood asshole, who meets a remarkable woman (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and breaks her heart. Richard Gere plays the toughest Dylan to pin town. Taking on the persona of an over-the-hill Billy the Kid in hiding from Pat Garrett, Gere's version of Dylan seems to represent the recluse, the man in self-imposed exile. Some might consider him the Dylan of today. Some of what Haynes gives us is fact, and some draws from the mythology that has formed around the Dylan legend over the decades. His meeting with Woody Guthrie, his pissing off of Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival by going electric, his first meeting with the Beatles, with Andy Warhol's factory crew (especially with an Edie Sedgwick-like party girl played by Michelle Williams). And trust me when I say, you haven't met Allen Ginsberg until you've seen him played by David Cross.
Haynes also borrows his visual cues from the films of the various eras he's portraying. Some of this footage is made to look like a documentary about Dylan, some borrows from D.A. Pennebaker's footage in DON'T LOOK BACK, some looks like a classic '70s Western, and it all looks fantastic. I haven't met a Todd Haynes film I didn't like, from his unauthorized biography of Karen Carpenter told with Barbie dolls (SUPERSTAR) to SAFE with Julianne Moore (who appears briefly in I'M NOT THERE) to VELVET GOLDMINE to his devastating last film FAR FROM HEAVEN. Haynes has a gift for peeling back the fiction to show you the truth, but he also loves adding layers to the legend in an effort to provide insight and clarity. I haven't even mentioned the remarkable music choices he draws from, not the usual collection of familiar Dylan tunes, but an array of largely lesser-known works that enhance the stories being told.
I'M NOT THERE is clearly a labor of love, but it is also an essential example of how to tell an artist's story without limiting yourself to one aspect of their career. To use recent examples, Johnny Cash and Ray Charles both had many phases and musical directions in their long careers. So why didn't their biopics show us that? Probably because the filmmakers thought the task to daunting and sweeping. Haynes shows that it's possible by simply getting creative and possibly a little obsessive about your subject matter. I've said it a couple times recently, and I'm sure I'll say it again before the year is out, but this is one of my favorite films of the year.
Capone
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+ Expand All
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Well, she is.
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Beaten once again. Grrr.
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Its been almost 3 months since I saw I'M NOT THERE in Venice and I still think about it. I think it will be one of those films that you could watch over and over again and still get something new out of it.
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Nov 22, 2007 5:18:03 AM CST
I would do Cate Blanchet as Bob Dylan
by guy who got a headache and accidentally
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Nov 22, 2007 5:18:21 AM CST
I would do Cate Blanchet as Captain Kirk
by guy who got a headache and accidentally
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Nov 22, 2007 5:18:39 AM CST
I would do Cate Blanchet as Indiana Jones
by guy who got a headache and accidentally
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Nov 22, 2007 5:19:24 AM CST
I would do Cate Blanchet as The Elephant Man
by guy who got a headache and accidentally
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Accent perfect "over years, brother."...and I've just caved in and tried to make a funny post using AICN catch phrases instead of *actual* humour or wit. How low have I sunk? :`(
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Capone totally hits the nail on the head. Both of those films told the story of a great and hugely influential American musician yet neither film is about the music or the artistic process. You get no insight into what made Ray Charles or Johnny Cash great artists or what made their music so important and influential. There is a maddening scene in Walk the Line where June Carter asks Cash how his band came up with their signature sound and Cash just says they sound that way because they don't play very well. I am excited to see this as it seems like Haynes has come up with an unconventional way to explore Dylan as an artist.
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I was so bored through long stretches of this film, and I probably know more about Dylan than most people. I think people must be getting caught up in the idea that this whole approach is somehow unique, without bothering to examine what the hell it all means. I dunno. To me, the film was actually pretty routine, and relied on truly trite cliche' in scenes that should've been a hell of a lot more revealing. I can't remember the last time I had such a disconnect with critical opinion on this site. Bizarre. But outside of Blanchett, I just want to tell anyone who ends up seeing this and feeling the way I did...hey, I warned you.
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As I said in the other I'm Not There thread, it's my favorite movie of the year. (Review: http://www.ghostinthemachine.net/005066.html) Can't wait to see it again.
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I'd like to see his take on Wonder Woman.
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i know that bit about cash's signature sound sounds lame, but it's actually near verbatim from his autobiography. they got that sound because he wasn't that great of a guitarist and it was the only way he could play.
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He'll figure out a way to gain all the weight
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I need to read that book some time.
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The answer my friend.........you know the rest.
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It just sums up my feelings better than anything I've read (or tried to say, for that matter). "Just as you’re wondering how much farther from the art of Bob Dylan this movie is prepared to stray, up pops Richard Gere.
This, I fear, is where my patience snapped, and I doubt whether that of Dylan fans will prove any more elastic. Gere plays Billy—a nod to Billy the Kid, and thus to the music that Dylan contributed to Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” (1973), in which he also acted. But the Gere rendition is little more than a lazy gloss on the legend of the vanishing West; as a rule, any film that offers cameos to circus performers and random zoo animals has reached the point at which invention becomes desperation."
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But I wouldn't fall asleep.
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is not the DON'T LOOK BACK era, which is on his last acoustic tour of England. The era shw is in is the gone electric/EAT THE DOCUMENT era shot in the same style as DON'T LOOK BACK was.
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Fucking Awesome.
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