American Wedding/Buffalo Soldiers/Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over/Hotel/Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life/Masked and Anonymous

Bob Dylan in Bob Dylan: Dont Look Back (1967)

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese

Bob Dylan in Rolling Thunder Revue (2019)

Val Kilmer, Christian Slater, and Verne Troyer in Hard Cash (2002)

Jeff Bridges, Noah Wyle, Morris Chestnut, and Jon Abrahams in Scenes of the Crime (2001)

Sharon Stone, Jeff Bridges, and Nick Nolte in Simpatico (1999)

The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival

Bob Dylan in The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival (2007)

Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Penélope Cruz, and Luke Wilson in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

I was always a singer and maybe no more then that. Sometimes it's not enough to know the meaning of things, sometimes we have to know what things don't mean as well. Like what does it mean to not know what the person you love is capable of? Things fall apart, especially all the neat order of rules and laws. The way we look at the world is the way we really are. See it from a fair garden and everything looks cheerful. Climb to a higher plateau and you'll see plunder and murder. Truth and beauty are in the eye of the beholder. I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago.

Luke Wilson in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Christian Slater and Chris Penn in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Jessica Lange in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Giovanni Ribisi in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Bruce Dern in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Jeff Bridges and Penélope Cruz in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Penélope Cruz in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Jeff Bridges and Luke Wilson in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Bob Dylan and Laura Harring in Masked and Anonymous (2003)

Bob Dylan

John Goodman

Jessica Lange

Larry Charles

A singer, whose career has gone on a downward spiral, is forced to make a comeback to the performance stage for a benefit concert.

Masked and Anonymous

Gone Feral

This movie will mean little to you if you aren&apos;t my age (late fifties). That&apos;s because you actually had to be there when Bob Dylan was the most powerful man in the west, exchanging leadership with the merged Lennon and McCartney. Together they led us like no one had or has since in terms of immediacy.

I&apos;m talking about the period between his protest singing and his collapse into fundamentalism. From &quot;Tambourine Man,&quot; to &quot;Twist of Fate,&quot; with the John Wesley Harding period being his most profound. His method was simple, to let himself go and trust what he saw on the edges of his vision. It wasn&apos;t that he engineered himself to be at the front of us. Instead he advertised a small bit of conceptual thinking for the pop mind and we grew into it, in his direction almost as if by accident.

The point is that he was important, but never knew why. His insights and art were far more intelligent than he was. And when he fell into the fundamentalist stupor it probably seemed like a reinvention following all the others.

This business of not knowing is crucial to whether you should actually listen to him when he tries to say something.

So go and watch &quot;Renaldo and Clara&quot; which he co-wrote with one of our two greatest living playwrights. It has a grand shape, multiple people playing the same character; multiple characters played by the same person. Scintillating realities, shifting fundamentals. That&apos;s the Sam Shepard part. The Dylan part is so juvenile, so obtuse, so plain artless it carries its own message.

And that&apos;s what we have here too. Except this time, the grand shape is by a cartoon writer instead of a master playwright. So we start with vapid notions of profundity. This writer believes that Dylan is still the man most thought he was 25 years ago. Even that was wrong: he simply saw rather than understood even then.

Well, so we have this vast stroke of fate, Jake Fate (Twist of Fate, see?), this notion of the son of a broken God (John Wesley Harding, get it? nudge, nudge) and along the way scads of characters drawn to illustrate the various ways mankind has broken itself.

The good news is that many of these are played by first rate actors. Sam Shephard&apos;s wife has the role of &quot;presenter.&quot; But they are drawn so cartoonishly they miss any target they could have hit. They are not cinematic. This guy has no cinematic skills. They are not Dylanesque. Dylan has a very specific and consistent imagination that is more &quot;Hitchhiker&apos;s Guide&quot; than &quot;Seinfeld&quot; and &quot;The Tick.&quot;

We could have gotten an ensemble piece where talented actors synthesized their impressions of Dylan. Now that would have been cool, but they are kept separate.

So what we end up with is a lost soul who once was king, playing a lost soul who once was king, tries to recover  thinks he succeeds, fails miserably in front of our eyes and doesn&apos;t know it.

Ted&apos;s Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Theatrical Trailer from Sony Pictures Classics

Masked And Anonymous

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/M/MV5BNTQyYzgxOGYtYzNiOS00MWNhLWEyMGEtZDE1ZjE1YzdmMjIwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyNzU1NzE3NTg@._V1_.jpg

This movie will mean little to you if you aren't my age (late fifties). That's because you actually had to be there when Bob Dylan was the most powerful man in the west, exchanging leadership with the merged Lennon and McCartney. Together they led us like no one had or has since in terms of immediacy.

I'm talking about the period between his protest singing and his collapse into fundamentalism. From "Tambourine Man," to "Twist of Fate," with the John Wesley Harding period being his most profound. His method was simple, to let himself go and trust what he saw on the edges of his vision. It wasn't that he engineered himself to be at the front of us. Instead he advertised a small bit of conceptual thinking for the pop mind and we grew into it, in his direction almost as if by accident.

The point is that he was important, but never knew why. His insights and art were far more intelligent than he was. And when he fell into the fundamentalist stupor it probably seemed like a reinvention following all the others.

This business of not knowing is crucial to whether you should actually listen to him when he tries to say something.

So go and watch "Renaldo and Clara" which he co-wrote with one of our two greatest living playwrights. It has a grand shape, multiple people playing the same character; multiple characters played by the same person. Scintillating realities, shifting fundamentals. That's the Sam Shepard part. The Dylan part is so juvenile, so obtuse, so plain artless it carries its own message.

And that's what we have here too. Except this time, the grand shape is by a cartoon writer instead of a master playwright. So we start with vapid notions of profundity. This writer believes that Dylan is still the man most thought he was 25 years ago. Even that was wrong: he simply saw rather than understood even then.

Well, so we have this vast stroke of fate, Jake Fate (Twist of Fate, see?), this notion of the son of a broken God (John Wesley Harding, get it? nudge, nudge) and along the way scads of characters drawn to illustrate the various ways mankind has broken itself.

The good news is that many of these are played by first rate actors. Sam Shephard's wife has the role of "presenter." But they are drawn so cartoonishly they miss any target they could have hit. They are not cinematic. This guy has no cinematic skills. They are not Dylanesque. Dylan has a very specific and consistent imagination that is more "Hitchhiker's Guide" than "Seinfeld" and "The Tick."

We could have gotten an ensemble piece where talented actors synthesized their impressions of Dylan. Now that would have been cool, but they are kept separate.

So what we end up with is a lost soul who once was king, playing a lost soul who once was king, tries to recover  thinks he succeeds, fails miserably in front of our eyes and doesn't know it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

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