Word: bobbed
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Question: How much freight should a '60s musical icon have to carry? (Another question: How'd we get through that decade without using the word icon to refer to every pop star?) Forty years ago, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and a lot of other talented young folks, wrote and performed terrific songs that opened the minds of people my age, expanded the pop-music vocabulary and generally made listeners feel smarter, cooler, better. And now we have two ambitious movies - Julie Taymor's Across the Universe and Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, both of which played this...
...Someone who looks a lot like the mid-'60s Bob Dylan - except that he's called Jude Quinn and is played by Cate Blanchett - is lounging in a London hotel room, reading what he thinks are exaggerated news reports of his behavior. "God," he mutters, "I'm glad...
...There, they're not him: the six actors who impersonate some aspect of Dylan. The young, Minnesota Bob is played by a charming black kid, Marcus Carl Franklin, who gives every indication of being a blues-guitar prodigy. A 19-year-old Dylan, spouting aphorisms at a court hearing, is London stage actor Ben Whishaw. Blanchett plays prime-time Bob, the electrified folk-rock star who's getting annoyed by fame. The '70s, counterfeit-cowboy Dylan is Richard Gere. The movie leaps further into fancy by inventing Jake Rollins (Christian Bale), the Dylan character in a Hollywoodish '60s biopic called...
...nobody can say for sure who or what Dylan is, an outsider - Haynes, say - has the right to make his subject a him or a her, here or there or none of the above. He does give the film the subtitle: "inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan...
...through a cut of I'm Not There if it were twice its current length, or half. At 135 mins. (about the same as Across the Universe), the film almost dares a viewer to choose favorite parts, and others for pruning. The section in which Gere as an older Bob hunts for his lost dog baffled and bored me; the Franklin and Bale parts I found quite moving; Blanchett is worth watching through her character's triumphs, disasters and longueurs. Overall, I'm glad I was there...