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Post by RhodoraO on Feb 17, 2017 6:17:45 GMT
Discussions, reviews, news, etc.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 9, 2017 20:11:42 GMT
From David Edelstein's NYMag review: - He segments his protagonist into seven different characters (played by six actors), each of whom embodies one of Dylan’s “lives,” then tells the artist’s story in more or less chronological order but with plenty of syntactical stuttering—echoes, fantasies, flashbacks, skip-aheads. For all the busyness, though, there’s a feeling of loss, a hint that Dylan is a kind of Christ figure—that he has sacrificed some core of earthly stability and happiness to be able to embody and evoke the restless spirit of America.
- ... Bale is a stiff.
- Either Haynes doesn’t know where the drama is or he doesn’t want to know. That would mean settling down and giving the film a present tense.
- That’s the piece that’s missing from I’m Not There—and I say that not out of ethnic pride but out of a sense that this transfixing, bewildering, exhausting movie leaves you feeling hungry for something that is there. Haynes’s anti-psychological view ... both over-exalts Dylan and belittles him without coming close to illuminating his mystery.
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Post by RhodoraO on Mar 10, 2017 5:12:59 GMT
From a pre-release talk with Bale (@ nymag.com/guides/fallpreview/2007/movies/36619/): And then there is Bale’s double role in what is undoubtedly the most mysterious of this season’s much-anticipated films, I’m Not There, by Todd Haynes. He’s playing “two incarnations of Bob Dylan,” alongside Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, and Richard Gere—all of whom are also starring as Bob Dylan. But if these actors play various manifestations of Dylan’s notoriously elusive vibe, Bale gets to embody him at his most direct: as sixties political prophet and eighties born-again evangelist. Haynes calls Bale’s parts “two halves of that essentially morally determined Bob Dylan.” Bale calls them “two men on a real quest for truth.”
The film is the fall’s biggest artistic gamble, in the spirit of Dylan at his most playfully provocative. “There’s definitely an attraction to seeing somebody putting themselves on a target range—and targeting their audience at the same time,” says Bale of Dylan. “He was creating a battlefront.”
Bale says he’s filmed a scene in which Dylan is “given an award for being the mouthpiece of his generation—and he stands up there and says a big fuck-you, very poetically.” He admires that kind of stance. “Since I was a kid, I’ve always had this image of Jimi Hendrix playing his guitar so much that his fingers are bleeding—and there’s probably no truth to it, but it doesn’t matter. I just remember thinking what a great image, somebody loving something so much they don’t even feel the pain.”
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Post by Admin on Mar 14, 2017 22:52:23 GMT
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Post by Admin on Mar 14, 2017 23:36:44 GMT
From a set visit report on the film, Bale talks his role and working on a Haynes film: Bale’s Dylan is a slow-speaking folk-singer Dylan, the Dylan that seems to be searching and pondering. “In the film I’m playing a guy on a kind of fervent quest to find the truth,” Bale told me. He is one of the many people working on the film who has collaborated with Haynes before — in Bale’s case, in “Velvet Goldmine,” Haynes’s homage to glam rock. So he was prepared, he said, for the audacity of the script, for so many Dylans, so many different kinds of films within one film. Whereas a lot of people in Hollywood said, “Did you read that script?” and scratched their heads, Bale was ready. “I started reading the script, and I just started to laugh,” Bale told me. He also likes the way a Haynes set works, even on this, his last day, where it all feels like the end of a race. “With Todd’s films, it’s a homegrown affair,” Bale says.The article is quite interesting and detailed full of lots of behind-the-scenes stuff: www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/magazine/07Haynes.html
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Post by Admin on Mar 14, 2017 23:52:32 GMT
A detailed article / talk with Heath Ledger, tied to film's promotion but also touching on his acting approach in general: www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/movies/moviesspecial/04lyal.htmlExcerpts:: One of the things that struck him most about the Dylan who emerges in “I’m Not There,” he said, was Dylan’s continual effort to resist easy categorization and his willingness to “recreate himself and not conform to people’s ambitions to put him in a box.”
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Making the role all the more complicated was that Mr. Ledger’s character is meant, in a way, to be a Dylan twice removed. In the movie Mr. Ledger is not playing Dylan per se, but an actor famous, in the fictional world of “I’m Not There,” for portraying Dylan in his early years as a singer-songwriter of protest music.
But because Christian Bale, the actor who plays this early Dylan in the film, was scheduled to film his scenes after Mr. Ledger, Mr. Ledger said he was faced with “playing an actor portraying Christian portraying a Dylanesque character, and not being sure what Christian was going to do.” Or, to put it another way, “Who was I playing when I was acting?”
It all tied him in knots. “I stressed out a little too much,” Mr. Ledger said.
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Post by Admin on Mar 15, 2017 0:05:40 GMT
From A. O. Scott's quite cognizant review: www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/movies/21ther.htmlAmong its many achievements, Mr. Haynes’s film hurls a Molotov cocktail through the facade of the Hollywood biopic factory, exploding the literal-minded, anti-intellectual assumptions that guide even the most admiring cinematic explorations of artists’ lives. Rather than turn out yet another dutiful, linear chronicle of childhood trauma and grown-up substance abuse, Mr. Haynes has produced a dizzying palimpsest of images and styles, in which his subject appears in the form of six different people.
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Devotees of Dylan lore will find their heads swimming with footnotes, as they track Mr. Haynes’s allusions not only to Mr. Dylan’s own music but also to the extensive secondary literature it has inspired, from books by David Hajdu and Greil Marcus to films, including D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” some of which Mr. Haynes remakes shot for shot.
But the film is anything but dry, and like Mr. Dylan’s best songs, it is at once teasingly arcane and bracingly plain-spoken. Mr. Haynes, switching styles, colors, film stocks and editing rhythms with unnerving ease (and with the crucial help of Jay Rabinowitz and Edward Lachman, the editor and the director of photography), has held his cerebral and his visceral impulses in perfect balance. “I’m Not There” respects the essential question Mr. Dylan’s passionate followers have always found themselves asking — What does it mean? — without forgetting that the counter-question Mr. Dylan has posed is more challenging and, for a movie, more important: How does it feel?
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Post by RhodoraO on Apr 12, 2017 4:11:21 GMT
Found this interesting part about the Bale portion of the film in a "non-review" piece by Tom Breihan at The Village Voice: www.villagevoice.com/blogs/things-i-learned-watching-im-not-there-6385867But the Dylan I like best is generally regarded as the hopelessly pre-cool one, the one who allowed himself to be co-opted by the self-righteous conservative dickfaces who turned on him as soon as he plugged in. That early-60s downtown folk scene, from what I've read, was just stupefyingly lame, but Dylan had transcended it long before he consciously flipped it off. Christian Bale plays that Village Dylan here, and plays him as a slumping bag of tics, which seems about right. And the movie covers the whole Bale sequence as a fake documentary, making all the same mistakes as most real documentaries make in the way it shows people effusing about how great the kid was instead of showing us any actual evidence of that greatness. I actually really liked the Bale sequence, which has fun showing how contradictory Dylan was from the start.
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Post by RhodoraO on Dec 8, 2018 5:36:21 GMT
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Post by RhodoraO on Oct 19, 2021 3:25:26 GMT
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