I'M NOT THERE

[Guest sharpie]

Saw this over the weekend. Six actors play various aspects of Bob Dylan. Cate Blanchett is amazing, the 12-year-old black kid almost as good, Heath Ledger and the other two guys who aren't Richard Gere were fine, Richard Gere was awful. Well, he wasn't awful but the parts of the movie that had him in it were.

Other than the Gere stuff I liked it a whole lot and thought it a more enjoyable picture than "Ray" or "Walk the Line" or other conventional biopics.

[Guest AG/DC]

Be honest. Richard Gere was so awful.

He sort of plays Dylan walking across a American anachronistic mythological landscape. A whole movie like that might have been interesting (with somebody else) but since they were committed to that part being even less linear and coherent than the rest, it'd probably be a disaster.

Most of them seem to play him during different chronological chapters, but the Christian Bale and Heath Ledger characters are pretty much contemporaries before and after Cate Blanchett's Dylan plugs in and goes to England. Bale seems to be Dylan co-starring in a movie in the early sixties with Heath Ledger, but then they seperate and live parallel lives as two aspects of Dylan.

Seeing Heath playing an asshole who would never connect with his daughter was a little too real.

[Guest sharpie]

I did say "other than Richard Gere.." Yes, I agree, he was awful as the Pat Garrett/Basement Tapes Dylan. I thought of Heath Ledger as the Blood On the Tracks Dylan and Bale the Slow Train Coming Dylan.

[Guest Vince Coleman Firecracker]

Really liked the Cate Blanchett, Ben Whishaw and Heath Ledger parts. I even enjoyed the visual silliness of the Gere scenes and I thought David Cross was the perfect Ginsberg. The movie's a wild pastiche and, I think, worth watching. I'll take it any day of the week over some literal biopic snooze fest.

[Frayed Knot]

I was with this flick early and enjoyed the inventiveness of it but it kind of lost me as it went on - only some of which can be attributed to Gere.