Sunday, December 16, 2007

Movie Review: I'm Not There

I'm not a huge Bob Dylan fan. I saw him live in 1989 and understood 3 words the whole night. Really, that's not an exaggeration, I counted. 3 words. And two of them were the same. I gained much more appreciation for Dylan after seeing Martin Scorcese's biography No Direction Home but I saw it over 2 years ago so I had forgotten many of the details.

I went to see Todd Haynes' I'm Not There mostly because Cate Blanchett is getting such rave reviews and I liked Haynes' previous film Far from Heaven. I also thought I'd like the idea of six different people playing Dylan in six different parts of his life. However what I wasn't expecting was a complex, allegorical interpretation of both his life and his music. The scene that sums it up for me is when Cate Blanchett as Dylan is in an abstract night club kind of setting with video projected on the wall. At one point an old man says "The sky isn't yellow, it's chicken". At the time I was in no mood to try to figure out what this meant. A little googling and I find Toombstone Blues contains the lyric:

The Commander-in-Chief answers him while chasing a fly
Saying, "Death to all those who would whimper and cry"
And dropping a bar bell he points to the sky
Saving, "The sun's not yellow it's chicken"


Maybe I remembered it wrong and maybe it was different. I don't care. So go read a review by Roger Ebert or Owen Gleiberman, they are much more qualified than I to comment on it.

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