I'm Not There - Bob Dylan biopic

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moviegeek dilemma:

this morning i ordered tix to see this at the NYFF in October.

this afternoon i found out i have access to a screener of this film.

the screener will inevitably be timestamped and 'possibly' not the absolute finished version.  i will go see this at the NYFF either way (assuming i even get tickets), but do i have the willpower to save my first viewing for the fest?  or should i just break down and watch it now?

(i also have access to a screener of Control, which i am going to be watching this week.  i heard it's great).

[©brad]

moviegeek dilemma:

this morning i ordered tix to see this at the NYFF in October.

this afternoon i found out i have access to a screener of this film.

the screener will inevitably be timestamped and 'possibly' not the absolute finished version.  i will go see this at the NYFF either way (assuming i even get tickets), but do i have the willpower to save my first viewing for the fest?  or should i just break down and watch it now?

(i also have access to a screener of Control, which i am going to be watching this week.  i heard it's great).

for movies i care about, i am emphatically anti-screener. my vote would be to wait.

[MacGuffin]

Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes would want you to wait to watch on the big screen as intended. Harvey Weinstein would want you not to wait in order to get the word out.

You decide.

[Pubrick]

(i also have access to a screener of Control, which i am going to be watching this week.  i heard it's great).

i have seen control (at my local film festival which is not big enuff to warrant its own thread) and the very LEAST anyone can say about it is it's the most visually stunning black and white film of the year. in the sense that every shot is almost distractingly beautiful in composition. DO NOT watch the screener. see it on the biggest screen you can find. the story drags on a bit, but that's another matter.

regarding I'm Not There. Don't Go There.

[MacGuffin]

The many sides of Dylan
In a new biopic, six actors - including Cate Blanchett - portray aspects of the superstar's life
Source: The Observer

In a Hollywood with a reputation for liking things safe and bankable, a bizarrely cast film about the life of one of the most controversial singers of all time, opening in just four cinemas in all of America, would seem unlikely to be at the centre of the biggest Oscar buzz of the year.

Yet I'm Not There - a biopic about Bob Dylan being released in November - is doing exactly that. There is nothing normal about the movie, which delves into the fascinating life of the singer-songwriter and promises to be one of the strangest films of the decade.

It boasts six actors playing Dylan, including a woman and a black boy, so its opening marketing campaign was hardly likely to be conventional. But by any standards, opening in only four cinemas is remarkable. Usually that means that a studio thinks its movie might be a disaster, yet I'm Not There has generated nothing but good news.

Industry figures have been surprised by the move. 'It depends on the film. Sometimes you just start small and build on word of mouth,' said Karen Cooper, director of Manhattan's acclaimed arts cinema Film Forum, which is one of two New York cinemas that will screen the film. The other two are in Los Angeles.

The film is backed by the Weinstein Company, whose founder, Harvey Weinstein, has not been shy of touting the work, despite planning its slow release. He has admitted wanting to generate a slow burn of reaction before taking the film national.

'I'm going to play every major city in the United States with this movie,' he said last week. 'I'll play 100 cities at least.'

It is a tactic that has worked before. When Weinstein opened Good Will Hunting he put it in just seven cinemas. That film went on to make Matt Damon and Ben Affleck famous and clocked up $140m (£70m) at the box office. It seems something similar is being tried with I'm Not There. Certainly those few who have seen the film praise its quality.

'It leaps off the screen. The director has created something here that is just so unusual,' said Cooper.

Director Todd Haynes has come up with one of the most surreal biopics of a musician ever. Though the genre has had huge success recently - with movies such as Ray and Walk the Line - this film is on a wholly different plane.

Instead of telling the straight story of Dylan's life, Haynes has opted to split the movie into separate chunks, each one dealing symbolically with a stage of Dylan's career. In each bit of the film Dylan is played by a character who represents what he stands for rather than an actual human being.

Which is why the greatest buzz around the project centres on Dylan's portrayal by Australian actress Cate Blanchett.

'Blanchett's performance as the mid-Sixties Dylan is amazing,' said Cooper. Weinstein agrees: 'If Cate Blanchett doesn't get nominated [for an Oscar] I'll shoot myself.'

But Blanchett, looking eerily like Dylan, shares the role with other A-listers. Richard Gere plays the Seventies Dylan as a cowboy; Christian Bale plays him as he emerges into fame in the early Sixties; Australian actor Heath Ledger plays him as his music took an overtly Christian turn; British actor Ben Whishaw plays a Dylan fused with the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud. The unknown Dylan who arrived in New York in 1961 is played by Marcus Carl Franklin, a black child actor.

'If they pull it off, then I think it will work. It seems a unique way of looking at him, and that is suitable because he is a unique artist,' said Caroline Schwarz, co-director of the Bob Dylan Fan Club. Though Dylan himself gave the film his blessing, he had no input in it. Perhaps he thought that having six actors playing him was enough.

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if the timecode is anything to go by, that could be towards the end. so retroactive spoiler warning to anyone who doesn't want to see the end of the movie.

its not.  its about halfway through. 

yep, i have no willpower.

[MacGuffin]

Clip:

http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1808725287/video/3885943/

[MacGuffin]

Richard Gere Thinks Bob Dylan Will Like 'I'm Not There'
Source: MTV

Don't believe the new trailer for Todd Haynes' "I'm Not There." Sure it says Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett, Richard Gere, and Heath Ledger all are Bob Dylan. But at least one of the stars disagrees.

"There is no Dylan in it," Gere told me a couple days ago. And that reason, for one, is why the icon will like it, Gere believes. "I think he'll like it because it's not attempting to be him. It's a fever dream. I think that's probably the only way you could tell the story of an artist that extraordinary."

Gere said he's seen the film and likes it a lot, calling it "a bizarre script" and "much more expressionistic than people are thinking."

[mogwai]

Sonic Youth record Bob Dylan cover for film

Sonic Youth have announced that they recently recorded a cover of the Bob Dylan track 'I'm Not There' for the forthcoming film of the same name.

The band recorded the song for the Todd Haynes-directed film at their own studio with John Agnello and Aaron Mullan of Tall Firs.

Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo laid down additional tracks for the film with an all-star lineup of guest vocalists including Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, Karen O of Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Stephen Malkmus and Tom Verlaine.

'I'm Not There' is due out later this year and features seven different actors portraying Dylan including Christian Bale, Cate Blanchett and Richard Gere. Each actor is meant to embody a different aspect of the legendary musician's life and work.

[MacGuffin]

Blanchett was scared to play Dylan says director

That Cate Blanchett found her latest screen role "very scary" comes as no great surprise. She was playing Bob Dylan.

The unusual casting was made by U.S. director Todd Haynes, whose movie "I'm Not There" is a complex portrayal of the singer-songwriter using six performers to play Dylan, including Australian-born Blanchett, a young black actor and Richard Gere.

In competition at the Venice film festival, where its world premiere is on Tuesday, the biopic seeks to avoid reducing Dylan to an easily definable type, and gives a sense of how difficult the ever-changing musician is to categorize.

"Cate was scared. She told me many times that this was a very scary challenge for her," Haynes told reporters after a press screening of the two-and-a-quarter hour film. Blanchett, 38, was not at the briefing.

"I think it took her a long time to commit to the role and she's a very busy actor and had to balance it with her schedule, but mostly I think it was due to fear, which is completely understandable."

Blanchett, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in "The Aviator," plays Dylan at a time when he shocked folk followers by embracing amplified rock and struggled with the media which sought to define him as a folk protest singer.

In her black-and-white sequences, Blanchett's hair is dark and frizzy, and she adopts some of the mannerisms of Dylan, although the performance is not meant as a direct mimic.

DYLAN APPROVAL

The open-ended nature of "I'm Not There" meant the film was the first dramatic portrayal of his life Dylan had ever approved, Haynes said.

"I do think it was because of this open structure, something that would keep expanding who he is and what he's about and not reducing it, which I think is the tendency in the traditional biopic to do."

Also playing Dylan are Gere, young black actor Marcus Carl Franklin, Christian Bale, Heath Ledger and Ben Whishaw.

Old-style, black-and-white footage is mixed with color sequences for Gere and Ledger and with real news footage of U.S. protests in the 1960s and scenes from the Vietnam War.

In production notes for the film, Haynes said these were his way of channeling anger he felt over the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

The relatively obscure Dylan track "I'm Not There" was used for the title to portray the singer retreating from public life in the 1960s.

Gere plays Dylan as the fabled outlaw Billy the Kid, who after finding refuge in the town of Riddle is forced to abandon his sanctuary and move on.

"He (Dylan) had been living ... in the world where every step he took, every breath he took was monitored, discussed, debated," Haynes explained.

"Then he had his motorcycle crash ... and he settled in Woodstock, disappeared, raised a family, went into the basement and recorded all this mysterious music with The Band and basically in a weird way he almost never came back again.

"He never reentered that central spotlight again."

[MacGuffin]

Just like a woman: Blanchett's take on Dylan has critics raving
· Surreal biopic wins praise at Venice film festival
· Gere among five other actors portraying singer
Source: The Guardian

With hair teased into the familiar bird's nest of frizz, cigarette dangling from lips or fingers and impenetrably dark shades fixed in place, Cate Blanchett's portrayal of Bob Dylan is already being tipped for Oscar success. Yet as Todd Haynes's surreal biopic I'm Not There was premiered at the Venice film festival yesterday, the director revealed that the Australian actor's decision to take on the role had been far from instant.

The prospect of tackling the legendary singer had, in fact, terrified her.

Critics in Venice have been astonished by Blanchett's performance. She is one of six actors playing characters meant to represent 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.

Dylan, 66, has given his blessing to the project. It will initially open in just four cinemas in America.

Yesterday Haynes said "Jude", the representation of Dylan in the mid-60s when he was becoming an international star and shocked folk followers by going electric, was always meant to be played by a woman. "I felt it was the only way to resurrect the true strangeness of Dylan's physical being in 1966, which I felt had lost its historical shock value over the years," he told reporters.

He added: "Cate was scared; she told me many times that this was a very scary challenge for her. It took her a long time to commit to it ... I told her it's good to be terrified, that you're taking a risk and sometimes that's really when the surprises happen. I guess it at least convinced her to give it a shot."

Dylan's approval was perhaps down to the film's open-ended nature, he said. "There have been documentaries but this is the first dramatic film about his life which he has ever given his consent to," Haynes said. "He has a tremendous sense of humour about the way he has been characterised. I think that's a really healthy attitude and he saw something similar in this film."

Gere described the script as "bizarre" but said he jumped at the chance to be involved. "I think Dylan is probably the only artist in our time who will still be considered 200 or 300 years from now. It's not Picasso, it's Bob Dylan," he said. "No one has had more effect on the world of art."

The film, backed by the Weinstein Company, mixes black-and-white footage with colour sequences and real news footage of American protests in the 1960s and scenes from the Vietnam war.

Haynes said of its unusual structure: "The way we look back on our own lives is in fragments. Music is a way that we do time travel, that unlocks moments in our past. The best and most enjoyable way to watch the film is to let it wash over you like a dream."

[MacGuffin]

Cinematical's interview with Tood Haynes:

[MacGuffin]

6 Bob Dylans Emerge in `I'm Not There'

Bob Dylan is not at the Toronto International Film Festival. But six shades of Dylan are present with "I'm Not There," a swirling, shifting ramble through the many lives of one of the most enigmatic figures in music history.

Different actors including Richard Gere, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale and Cate Blanchett play incarnations of Dylan at various phases of his public and private life.

Among the personas: an 11-year-old black boy (Marcus Carl Franklin) riding the rails with a guitar and calling himself Woody Guthrie, Dylan's early inspiration; a surrealist sage called Arthur (Ben Whishaw) speaking in symbolic riddles, representing Dylan's fascination with poet Arthur Rimbaud; and old coot Billy the Kid (Gere) traveling the Old West in self-imposed retirement from the modern world, a parallel to Dylan's rootsy sojourn as a reclusive country squire around Woodstock, N.Y., where he hung with the Band and recorded "The Basement Tapes."

Weird and wild as it is, Dylan liked the concept and gave co-writer-director Todd Haynes the rarest of gifts: the rights to use his music in the film, both in his own versions and many covers.

"I still really can't believe it, given who he is and how ornery he can be and how much he doesn't want people to continue to do this to him," Haynes said in an interview at the Toronto festival, where "I'm Not There" played in advance of its November theatrical release.

Haynes, whose films include "Safe" and "Velvet Goldmine," was a Dylan fan as a teen but had not listened much to his music again until his late 30s, when he began the screenplay for his 2002 drama "Far From Heaven."

As he burrowed back into the music, Haynes began reading biographies of Dylan and was struck by the man's transformations.

"The thing I just kept hearing from every account of Dylan was about this life of serial change, in a way far more profound to a culture than David Bowie's different chameleonlike changes or Madonna's that would come decades later. These changes had deep intellectual, cultural, almost physical effects on Dylan's audience," Haynes said.

"He undermines the things you count on, your touchstones. He shakes up the things that people used to build their own selves on. Every time you grab on to him, he's somewhere else. I thought the only way to do anything in a film about him would be to dramatize that fact, to use that as the sort of principle to organize the narrative, or many narratives."

So the formative Dylan is a black kid tramping about the country, insisting he's Guthrie, until a kindly woman tells him, "Live your own time, child. Sing about your own time."

Bale plays a figure named Jack Rollins, exploding onto the folk scene doing early Dylan anthems such as "The Times They Are A-Changin'," then turning his back on his career and re-emerging years later as a singing pastor, representing Dylan's born-again Christian era.

Ledger's a '60s movie star named Robbie Clark who rose to fame playing folk god Rollins, with the actor's fractious personal life and failed marriage tracing Dylan's own faults and missteps.

"It's not a puff piece on Bob Dylan," Haynes said. "There's different characters, and they can be really nasty, misogynistic, and again, because there's no final say, there's no single winner."

Though played by a woman, the musician who goes electric in the mid-1960s presents the closest parallel to the real Dylan, with Blanchett delivering a remarkable personification of Dylan's look and mannerisms as he is challenged by critics and scorned by once-adoring fans.

Blanchett's Jude Quinn, an acoustic hero to folk devotees, plugs in at a New England music fest just as Dylan did at Newport, shocking and even enraging his audience. "I'm Not There" handles the slap in the face to fans with an opening salvo that features Jude and his band blasting the audience not with electric guitars, but machine guns.

Later, a legendary 1966 Dylan show in Britain is recreated faithfully, with a fan shouting "Judas!" Jude responds just as Dylan did, exclaiming, "I don't believe you!"

From the start, Haynes had planned the gender switch for that period of Dylan's life.

"It was really smart of Todd to cast a woman to play it, because I think it increases that break," Blanchett said. "The distance, the enigma of Dylan and the performer.

"It's very mysterious and incredibly poetic, and if the audience is expecting a straight narrative, then they're going to be surprised. It's kind of true in a way to his music, which is what Todd really tried to do."

Haynes has yet to meet Dylan, having worked with him only through intermediaries. Dylan also has not seen the film, which Haynes is sending to him.

"I can't wait. I'm really excited about him seeing it," Haynes said. "Maybe I'm being foolishly naive, but in terms of that sense of humor about himself and in terms of that sense of wanting to stir things up and change the sort of authorized views of himself, I think he will appreciate at least what we tried to do."

[NEON MERCURY]

Blanchett was scared to play Dylan says director

That Cate Blanchett found her latest screen role "very scary" ...

  it's okay cate....if you fuck it up the other 5 dylans will pick up the slack...

rest easy you beautiful sheep


btw- this film looks good

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