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i must have seen a different film!!

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

A different way of telling a story

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

I am a HUGE Dylan fan, but this movie was a train wreck. It was so bad I had to watch it until the end. Kept hoping it would get better. It didn't. Even all the great cast members were flat in their roles. None of them could impart any emotion in their characters. Heck, I couldn't tell if it was a drama or a tongue in cheek comedy. The story line was weak and it was hard to figure out why most of the characters were even in the story line. Guess I'm just not that intellectual like those that gave this a high rating. The reason I gave it 2 stars was for the the music in the film. Which there wasn't enough of to keep me happy. If you have nothing better to do, I recommend that you do watch this flick. It's amazingly awful. Just like a train wreck. Sorry Bob, I've been to at least 10 of your concerts and your music has made me cry tears of joy, but acting is not something you were born to do.

In MASKED AND ANONYMOUS, the 2003 movie by Larry Charles. Bob Dylan plays Jack Fate, a singer who is bailed out of jail (for an unspecified crime) by a couple of promoters, Sweetheart and Nina (John Goodman and Jessica Lange), to play a benefit concert (again unspecified) in an unnamed country. I felt that it was Central American country. Maybe like Nicaragua or Honduras. A dictatorship where the President is on his deathbed and parties are lurking for a takeover. Fate seems to know them all. Fate is hounded by a reporter, Tom Friend (Jeff Bridges) and aided by one of his close friends Bobby Cupid (Luke Wilson). There are various cameos by some rather famous actors, probably friends of Dylan and Charles who just wanted to be a part of the movie. Most of the action takes place in a large convention hall with a stage and a trailer for the 'promoters' , managers and band. Dylan and his band play tunes from his album 'Time Out of Mind' and various others from over the years.I imagined that Larry Charles left it to Bob Dylan to provide dialogue. Well, I felt like this was a memoir, travelogue. Bob Dylan has been around the world a few times, had the ear of and listened to many people, including more than a few politicians. I felt like the characters were composites of these people. Sweetheart and Nina, the business people, Tom Friend the press. The President and and his successor Edmund seemed be the politicians. I bet more than a few asked Dylan's advice. And of course he got to address you and me. And such music! Above all Bob Dylan is a master musician.

Bob Dylan is certainly one of the great songwriters of the second half of the 20th century, or at least the most pleasurably enigmatic. His songs are poetic, but he doesn't consider himself one (or does, depending on what IMDb quote you read that contradicts another), and like Jean-Luc Godard his output from the 1960s is consistently groundbreaking and with a lot that holds up for the right fan. But this goes without saying one thing: he can't write a screenplay for s***. Sorry to curse, but it's apprporiate. The rules that might apply, if any, to screen writing can't be carried over into film-making. This is probably not a new thing to Dylan- he apparently wrote (and directed) a film in the 70s that almost didn't even get released in most sections till it was cut to just the songs- but he doesn't know how to keep from having his characters go on and on and on about this or that, making platitudes for something that is meant to make him (playing a character named Jack Fate, ho-ho) look all mystical and wise or just confused at not responding to anyone. If it is even written- sometimes it looks like the actors might be making it up as they go along- it is one of the worst screenplays of the decade.It goes without saying that it isn't all Dylan's fault. In fact, him and co-writer/director Larry Charles (usually of the much more spot-on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld and Borat terrain) do have the occasional scene or line that does work, in its own Dylan-esquire way (which is to say, I can't explain why it works except that a line is read truthfully or doesn't sound completel s****y). Plot: not much, except that Fate is let out of prison early in order to do a benefit concert as the bottom-of-the-barrel pick of John Goodman's indebted promoter and Jessica Lange's shallow TV producer, and is hounded by the press (or rather *a* press member, as a weird amalgam of Dylan's frayed connection with the press via Dude Jeff Bridges), while getting ready for a disaster in the making. This sounds substantial, but it isn't by that much. The compensation is that there are, of course, a lot of Bob Dylan fans out in Hollywood, so there's a lot of guest stars. Val Kilmer mumbles a lot, till making a great point about death and animals, while handling a snake. Giovanni Ribisi plays a quixotic Mexican rebel. Christian Slater's in for a couple of scenes. Don't forget about Like Wilson. And then there's Cheech Marin, and...oh, forget it.Strange thing is, I didn't necessarily outright hate the movie. It's more complicated a reaction than that. Dylan seems to be making his flaws here as unique as he would accomplishments; seeing a scene like the one where he and Charles muck up a perfectly moving scene with a little black girl singing "Times They Are a Changin'" by the whim of a brutal mother making her little girl memorize all Jack Fate songs like a robot by suddenly putting over it a flashback of Fate getting roughed up years before with a mumbling voice-over, couldn't happen in any other movie. And, to be sure, when Dylan and his band plays, sans the incomprehensible Dylan singing, it's still pretty good. But the problem is less outright hatred of the material but disdain for the self-indulgence. You can tell the actors and the people behind the picture think there's grand statements being made behind what looks like a mysterious Dylan-esquire fable about greed and socio-political status in the media and music and culture. But behind it is really pandering to the ideas without questioning them. Maybe there is more than I saw in the material, yet is there enough time during the day to give another viewing to look deeper, unlike Dylan at his best with his songs? I'm not sure.

The "mask" could be Dylan's face so stoically does he hold his expression. And the "anonymous" could be any tin horn banana republic dictator. As The Who phrased it years ago: "The new boss, just like the old boss." The surprising thing about this film is how good it is. Clearly experimental in form (which often equals boring) Masked and Anonymous is instead a fascinating work of art with outstanding performances amid a meandering chaos replete with cunning little speeches that defy analysis. I was not really surprised to learn that credited screenwriter "Sergei Petrov" is really Bob Dylan. Kudos to him and to "Rene Fontaine" (actually Larry Charles of "Seinfeld" fame) for coming up with this little gem.However I have to say that without Dylan's music and the fine cast this could have been an unmitigated disaster.One of the things I love about Bob Dylan is the intensity. It's always there. He never stops. It's as though the next lyric will be the line to end all lines (pun intended) or that the next musical hook will exhaust the music.Like Emily Dickinson he invented a new kind of poetry that confounded the poetic establishment and confused academia. When I first heard Dylan's lyrics in the sixties referred to as poetry, I was an undergraduate at UCLA and thought (apparently along with Carl Sandburg): this ain't poetry. It's all clichés. And it is. But what Bob Dylan did was to use the phrases and the clichés and the rhythms of our world as the poet uses words. The clichés became the building blocks of his poems. And of course they filled his head to overflowing, echoing and ricocheting around in his mind like the wares of Quinn the Eskimo running all around his brain. And they had to get out, and he tossed them out with tune after tune and a lyric to string them together, and he ended up writing some of best poetry of the latter half of the 20th century. But of course his poetry, like that of all song writers does not stand entirely alone without its music. Still his phrases that look into our soul and chronicle our times are as indelible as the color of our skin. It is no coincidence that in the age of the soundbite, Dylan wrote his poems in soundbites.Like the 19th century academics who wanted to edit Emily Dickinson's poetry and improve her meter and adjust her "imperfect" (slant) rhymes and normalize her punctuation, the academic world of the 20th century wanted to get Dylan to eschew cliché. But what they missed is the poet knows the language better than they and his clichés are in the modules of our minds. They are the wings of the zeitgeist and the linguist's meme.Goodman was perfect as Uncle Sweetheart who might be a deeply buried persona of Dylan with his cryptic one-liners and his desolation soul, his corrupted heart and his huge appetite for life. And Jessica Lange was also excellent as were the cameos by all sorts of name actors appearing on stage to confront a stoic Dylan. In a way they were intriguing and perhaps nothing more than that. Like Shakespearean players they came and had their time upon the stage and were heard no more.Yes, this film seems to signify in the final analysis not much, but, isn't that the point of life: there is no point. Life is that tale by an idiot signifying nothing.Here's a nice string of quotes from the cynic, Jack Fate, Dylan's alter ego: "I was always a singer and maybe no more than that. Sometimes it's not enough to know the meaning of things, sometimes we have to know what things don't mean as well...Things fall apart...The way we look at the world is what 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 don't pay much attention to my dreams...I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago..." I have only one criticism of this film: I wish there had been a lot more of the hauntingly beautiful Penelope Cruz.(Note: Over 500 of my movie reviews are now available in my book "Cut to the Chaise Lounge or I Can't Believe I Swallowed the Remote!" Get it at Amazon!)