I’M NOT THERE: Bob Dylan Not at the Venice Film Festival 2007
September 5th, 2007 by Andre Soares
Rachel Williams in The [London] Guardian:
"Critics in Venice have been astonished by [Cate] Blanchett’s performance [in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There]. She is one of six actors playing characters meant to represent [Bob] Dylan at different points in his career, and hers is not the only unorthodox casting: a black actor in his early teens, Marcus Carl Franklin, plays the musician as he arrives as an unknown in New York at the age of 20, while 57-year-old Richard Gere represents him at the age of 32. Heath Ledger and British actors Christian Bale and Ben Whishaw take on other periods."
Richard Gere’s Picasso vs. Dylan quote in the above Guardian article must be read to be believed. (And then actors complain that people don’t take them seriously.)
Eugene Novikov in Film Blather wasn’t all that impressed with I’m Not There, which he caught at the Telluride Film Festival:
"Haynes’ direction is a clusterfuck — people will contend that it’s instance of the film’s form attempting to imitate its subject, but that strikes me as akin to the argument that The Thin Red Line is a great film because it’s long and boring, and so is war. Pulling a [Steven] Soderbergh, Haynes color-codes the segments, which range from pastoral (Woody Guthrie) to grainy black-and-white (Blanchett). The conceptual disaster hits a nadir when [Bruce] Greenwood — the persistent, uncomprehending journalist from the Blanchett storylines — reappears in old-man make-up as Billy the Kid’s nemesis. Like much of Dylan’s work, this made me actively angry: I’m Not There seems to want to conflate skepticism and rationality with oppression and destruction. Well, here’s some skepticism for you: Bob Dylan cannot sing, and never could."
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I’M NOT THERE: Bob Dylan Not at the Venice Film Festival 2007
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THE GRAIN OF LIFE: Great Cinema at Venice 2007
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dylan never could sing? do you even know what you’re talking about?
That’s a question for Film Blather.