[Heccubus]

I saw I'm Not There on Friday night with my fiancee and a friend, and have to say that it was one of the worst movies I've seen in a good long while. My exact words as we were leaving were "pretentious, self-important art-school-dropout bullshit". It was borderline offensive.
Much like Gus Van Sant's pseudo Kurt Cobain film Last Days, I'm Not There was the sort of useless, boring, long-winded exercise in visual masturbation that I would imagine a first-time filmmaker to churn out in a vain effort to pay tribute to one of their favorite musicians. The not-at-all-connected multiple plots cut in and out of each other with no warning, and in some cases are really grasping to even connect to the "inspired by the experiences and many lives of Bob Dylan" blurb at the start of the film. An 11 year old black delinquent roams the country looking for musical success, a self-absorbed actor neglects his wife and children, Billy The Kid finds out his quiet little village home is being bulldozed to make room for a highway (or something), a Bob Dylan-esque figure waxes poetic in front of some kind of interrogators, another Bob Dylan-esque figure rises to fame and ultimately leaves folk stardom to become a preacher, and another Dylan experiences tumultuous experiences with friends, drugs, model ex-girlfriends, and the press while acting like a complete asshole.
Ignoring the three stories that actually seem to interpret some facet of Dylan's career (mostly visually, I found, without much material taken from the man's actual lifetime) three of these seemed to have absolutely nothing to do with the musician. The actors and actresses themselves did a good job, and as standalone films these six stories could have been great. Cate Blanchett as a 60s-era, drugged out, egotistical, irreverent Dylan did a remarkable job, even though one rarely loses sight of the fact that you are watching a very effeminate woman in men's clothing, and not a doppelganger for the singer himself. She may not have fit the bill exactly, but those moments mostly came when she took off her sunglasses. Christan Bale also did a fantastic job as the mumbling, introverted early Dylan that stared at his feet during interviews, and rarely made eye contact with his audiences. Ben Wishaw, similarly, put on a strong effort, making darkly humorous remarks and mumbling his lines with the nasally shuffle that Dylan is known for when speaking. And while the three stories seem completely disconnected from the Bob Dylan side of things, Richard Gere, Heath Ledger and Marcus Carl Franklin did well in their respective roles.
So the problem here is not with acting, the problem lies in directing, and in editing. Even by mashing all these stories together, they could have at least been moderately entertaining had they been told in a linear fashion, rather than just randomly jumping back and forth. The other problem I had was the length of the film. At two hours and fifteen minutes, it's just way too long to sit through for what it is. Adding to this is the fact that on approximately seven or eight occasions, the movie felt like it was ending, only to jump back at you and into another of the six plots. Every time this happened, you could hear the completely detached, uninterested audience begin to rise and gather their coats to leave, only to sit back down for more of this celluloid torture.
As a Bob Dylan fan, I was completely let down by this movie. I knew it wasn't a point-for-point retelling of his life, but I expected more than casual name-dropping, inside-references, Dylan-esque musical performances, and dashes of the man's actual songs in the background. Thoroughly disappointing.
And I should note that I am being remarkably polite here. A review that reflects my disappointment a bit more accurately should be up on heccubus.com soon.

[Despondent]

Wasn't Hayden C in that piece? I heard about it on Projectionz and wasn't really interested. Saw an awful Dylan performance in 94 or so; did they represent that glorious era?

Incidentally, I strongly dislike it if a movie goes too long and it's unwarranted. Last week we saw Knocked up, and I kept thinking at 100 minutes + "You're a freaking comedy. Will you just END already?".

[Heccubus]

I loved Knocked Up. I didn't find it overly long, but there was some definite filler there.

No they didn't focus on any latter-day Bob Dylan eras. It pretty much only covered the 60s-era superstar stuff.

[Heccubus]

As promised:

http://heccubus.com/?p=15