I think we've had similar experiences with Bob Dylan. Oh, really? Oh, really? Yeah, so I sang it must have been third, fourth grade. We learned "Blowing in the Wind" in music class. Well, see, that was my introduction to Bob Dylan as well at primary schools. One of the teachers taught us to sing "Blowing in the Wind" for a school assembly. Perfect song for kids. It's perfect. I loved it. Well, is it-- I mean, maybe it's a perfect song for kids, but when I was a kid, I didn't get it at all. I remember at the time thinking, but what's "Blowing in the Wind"? I don't get it. But does it just mean it's too windy to hear the answers to the questions? What are these roads the guy is supposed to walk down? I don't get any of this. The problem wasn't helped by the fact that it was like 30 kind of truculent, reluctant school children who were all mumbling the words, and it was all kind of, "I walk down." But is Dylan the same sort of icon in the UK that he is in the United States? I would say no. But only from my personal experience, because I like you, and I don't get to say this about very much, but I am too young for Bob Dylan. So when I was starting to understand what music was, Bob Dylan had already kind of come and gone and was sort of yesterday's man. He lived across, or he lives, across this massive breadth of time at this point. I thought you were going to say across the road from me. I wish. That's what I thought you were going to say. I'm looking across the street, and I don't see him, but I don't get to see Bob Dylan in his own neighborhood. As you take in the milk, can you think he's all right? I doubt he lives the house anymore, but yet he's been doing it for 60 something years. So he's got a very, very long career. So there aren't that many people alive now who can say, "I didn't live in the times of Bob Dylan." Well, I didn't realize until this week was that in the 60s, Bob Dylan was like Prince was in the 1980s, and so far as if he'd written everybody else's songs. I didn't realize until this week that all along the watchtower was written by Bob Dylan, or knocking on Heaven's door. I just assumed that those songs were by the original artists, and they were not. They're all his. Well, you're knocking on Heaven, the door was by Guns N' Roses, of course. Well, and then Bob Dylan covered it. It was a prequel cover. He went back in time to cover it. And his unforgettable cover of "Welcome to the Jungle" on the B side, yes. I can't believe we're doing a podcast about a 60s musician, and we're making gags about 80s musicians. Please, please keep the jokes for the 21st century if you can. [Music] Welcome everyone to the two reels of Bob Dylan Cinema Club. My name is Andres Laurenti. And I am James Rosico, and as you have just suggested this week, we have watched a musical biopic directed by James Mangold, which is not "Walk the Line". We've seen a film about a major American star of popular music from the 1960s, but it's not "Walk the Line". We've seen the film this week about a troubled singer who can't cope with fame, and he's not good to the women in his life, but it's not "Walk the Line". We've seen a film that has Johnny Cash as a central figure, but it's not "Walk the Line". We've watched a complete unknown. The new James Mangold Bob Dylan biopic with Timothy Chalamet. I was told off over dinner for mispronouncing Timothy Chalamet's name. Apparently it's Timate, Timate Chalamet. Is it? And then we had a long conversation about rhyming names and why that's a bad idea. Did you should have had a movement at the dinner table to have everyone go back and re-jig their names so that they rhymed? Ezekiel. Yeah, nothing rhymes with that. There is no end of conversation then. Very short one. It's nice to see Timothy Chalamet. I'm going to mess it up for the whole podcast now. Timate Chalamet. Timothy Chalamet, it's nice to see him not fighting giant sandworms. So that's good, at least. I'm sort of taking the mic but actually the take home from this first section of the podcast should be the first film is good. It's pretty good, isn't it? I enjoyed this week's film. Oh boy, are we that? Are we that harsh, huh? I think it's better than good. I'm super biased on this one, but I think this is a great film. I loved it, I loved it. You're taking the lead on this one. I guess so. Maybe that means we don't even need to talk about it. People should just go see it. She's going to sit. Put your phone down right now and head to the cinema. Absolutely. Everyone's got their phones up all the time. Well, the risk of spoiling people's enjoyment of the film, which they are inevitably definitely going to see after they listen to the podcast. Do you want to tell us what the story is? I will, I'll tell you bits and pieces but there's a lot of stories. So I'm not sure what's true and what's not. That's what makes it a great experience, I think. But this film, suddenly I had this anchoring to see walk the line. What, what, why is that? What have you done to us? This film opens on a Woody Guthrie song. It's playing in a, like a, kind of, if it's a cab or a station wagon. Years 1961 and Bob Dylan sort of looking backwards out of a car, rear windshield or windscreen, depending on where you are, that crosses a bridge into New York City and delivers him to a fate in Greenwich Village. I'm going to stop you there because opening image. We always talk about opening images, Bob Dylan, crossing a river. And I think that is kind of the theme of the whole film, isn't it? To a certain extent, yeah, yeah, yeah. But anyway, right, continue, continue. I also like the looking backwards because the closing image is kind of the opposite. The opening image, he's being transported somewhere and looking backwards in the closing images. He has his own form of transportation looking forward. But oh good, yes. I hate to get too, like, analytical about these silly metaphor images, but that is our job. And it's our job. Pete Seer is on trial for leftist activities and he's singing provocative songs. And then more Woody Guthrie emerges. So Woody Guthrie is a stone. He's a touching stone in this film. He emerges when Seager sings Woody's, this land is your land on the courthouse steps to his adoring fans, then Bobby goes to visit Woody Guthrie, who's in a hospital suffering from Huntington's disease. And Pete Seager is there by his bedside. Dylan sings for Woody. He's got a song for Woody. And the older men are amazed. I mean, Woody Guthrie sort of then capable of really speaking much at this point. He's very ill in bed, but he loves Bob's music. Bob ends up staying with Pete and his family in the countryside outside Newark City. And then Seager sort of introduces Dylan to the New York City folk scene. There's a club scene where Joan Bias has just raptured the crowd. And then Dylan comes on. He too is very impressed so much so that he tells the crowd, she's pretty and sings pretty. But maybe too pretty and Joan Bias is not happy about that. But then she, like the rest of the audience at night, is impressed by Dylan, as is the entire crowd and the hit making agents and producers who are there scouting Bias. Dylan goes on to play absolutely everywhere, including churches, where he encounters Alan Lomax, played by friend of the pod, Norbert Leo Butz. Lomax is responsible for archiving live. Wait a second. It's that guy friend of the pod. He's a friend of me, way back, way back. And you are so well connected. I often forget that you are so well connected. I haven't heard from Norbert in years, but it's great to see him. He's great. And as Alan Lomax, he's great. And Alan Lomax is this, I don't know if he's self-appointed, but he's responsible for archiving live acoustic performances of the American folk scene and preserving its purity. At that church, Dylan meets Sylvie Russo. They have a relationship. She goes on a three-month trip to Europe. So she's gone and he hangs out in her apartment. And by this point, their relationship has sort of entered a fragile stage because Dylan's just his impending notoriety, is driving them apart. And the theme here is really clearly stated, which I like about this film. People change, transition is important, and there's even related talk of past musicians and their changes. While Dylan's hanging out in her apartment, the Cuban Missile Crisis emerges, and people just go nuts. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan sort of hook up at a coffee house where he's just played Masters of War while the City of New York is just going nuts. They have eight night together. And despite some creative sparring, they seem blowing in the wind together. Hey, just like you and I in different years on different continents. We sang blowing in the wind together. However, Joan Baez makes it beautiful. But will Baez make the rest of his life beautiful? Will Bob go electric at the Stade Newport Folk Festival despite protestations of Pete Ziger and Alan O'X? Will Dylan find answers blowing in the wind? Does he want answers? Or does the wind blow both fact and fiction and very few concrete answers? Answer. Don't think twice. It's all right. And more. This film is definitely more than all right. Any initial thoughts before we. I think it takes to be the Debbie Downer of the podcast. I really enjoyed this film. I'm not sure I enjoyed it quite as much as you did. That's impossible. Oh, what I wrote in my notes here. I just wrote, and this comes out like a much worse pun than it was in my head before I wrote it down. This film sings when Dylan picks up a guitar. But it goes a bit flat when he puts it down. But happily, he does spend a lot of the running time singing and playing. There's a lot, yeah. The songs in this film are absolutely where it takes off. And I could quite happily have watched four hours of Timothy Chalamet. Pretending to be Bob, and singing. And anyway, I think he carries it off very well. He's got the hair. He's got that kind of a lanky, thin, boyish figure. He's a little bit better looking than Bob Dylan. But he's. I think he makes a very good fist to the performance here. Very watchable. And especially just enjoying the songs. I absolutely loved it. Outside of the songs, I mean, I think you all right, I've written a little note here that this is not a documentary. Truthfulness is kind of not relevant. And so I didn't necessarily go in expecting to learn a great deal about what really happens so much is just another retelling of a self-mythologizing man. But outside of these incredible, fantastic songs, I think it's a slightly well-trodden story of the tortured artist. So when all those bits are good, I thought the tortured artist bits maybe weren't actually quite as good as Walk the Line, which has a very similar shape. But no songs like Dylan's songs. You know, there's a fantastic that I loved. Suddenly, I want to see Walk the Line again. What's happening? I feel like this podcast is being co-opted by naysayers. I probably said this in the opening. I have a massive bias on the huge Bob Dylan Fanny. So I grew up with a poster of him in my room from age 10 on or something like that. Oh, enormous fan. I agree with you on the music. It's amazing that Timothy Chalamet and Margaret Barbaro. I forget who the other Monica Barbaro. Monica Barbaro. They're fantastic. And they re-recorded all that music. So that is their own performance in every moment that Dylan sings or drum by his things or the two of them sing together. So I agree with you wholeheartedly that I think the music is great. The songs are great to hear them. I saw this on the big screen very loud and it was just fantastic. So just to ideal conditions again. I did see it about four, almost four weeks ago now. I've been listening to Bob. Nothing but Bob Dylan for about four weeks, I'd say. And I've just, I keep thinking about it. I really liked it. I really liked it. So I think, for me, yeah, I think one of the appeals is that it's not a straight biopic. It doesn't follow his entire career. It really focuses on these four or five years where he's really just getting started. And he is, you know, for a short time, he's a complete unknown. It's true. But we still don't learn a whole lot about him. And that's the beautiful mystery of the film, I think. I thought performances were great though. I thought Edward Norton was fantastic as pizza. Yeah, it is great. There was no acting that was off or incomplete or insufficient anyway. It was all great acting. I'm still really impressed by the musicianship and the singing. You know, we've had our discussions recently about, "Did that person really play that instrument and that movie?" There's no question here. And I love the idea of Timote Shalame doing Dune. He was making Dune when he was learning this part and learning guitar. That's how far back the project goes. So on that Dune set, he was actually, maybe that's why Dune's not so good, because he was really focusing on the Dylan film, which was a better choice for him anyway. So it's very hard to tune a guitar when you're dressed in a still suit. You can barely move your arms, I'm sure. So one of the things that really appeals to me from this film is, I think the story world, it's beautifully realized. It looks great. But especially during the first half of the movie, interestingly, James Mangol kept showing me places where I would love to be in. It's just like the East Village in the 1960s. There's a scene fairly early on where Dylan and Sylvie go to a Chinese restaurant with this big circular table around the chef in the middle of the room. It's a bit grungy and a bit down at heel and a little bit dirty. And you could smell how tasty the food was. I really wanted to go to that restaurant. And then later on, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, like the folk bar that he's playing, it has this full notice on the wall that says dramatic readings every Tuesday night, something like that. I would love to have a folk bar in walking distance of my smart Manhattan apartment that has dramatic readings every Tuesday night. Oh my god. So it was a lovely bit of fantastical tourism, especially at the first half of this film. I would have loved to have gone to those places. And part of the reason why we go to the movies is to go to places that we cannot go to or go to places that do not exist or don't exist anymore. I wish that were my neighborhood. It seems wonderfully romantic. And beyond that, the clothes, the attention to detail, the capturing of that early 60s vibe is pretty immaculate. It's been tremendously well done. It's authentic while at the same time, slightly amplified in that kind of cinematic manner. So it's slightly hyper-real in a way that a dream or a memory is, which is exactly the tone I think that makes a film like this a success. Yeah, great story world. Ultimately, a love letter to New York City in the early 60s, I would say. And to a lesser extent, Newport and the folk festival there. Yeah, gorgeous. I loved you all. All the Greenwich Village stuff is great. The apartments are fantastic. The streets with the old-school aluminum garbage cans. I mean, those kinds of details are just fantastic. Because it covers four or five years, there are some... There's a little bit of a character arc for the city itself, I suppose, too, in terms of the cars that are going by. And how it grows a little bit more chaotic. But it's amazing that they captured New York City so well. You definitely feel like you're in the city. I think that was the... You're in the story world, which was a great tip of the hat to the filmmakers, because you definitely felt real. Even if the story is not always real. But talking of the story then, so maybe this can segue into my very small day-by-down complaints about the film, which is that they are beyond these incredible songs. We have the story about Dylan, who starts out being a little bit wide-eyed and naive, pretty idealistic and pretty driven. But has he become successful? It becomes more stressful for him. And I must say, I came away at the end feeling like the stakes weren't particularly high, I think, for Bob Dylan. In so far as... You know, I got to the end of the movie and thought... I wasn't entirely sure what he had to sacrifice or what he had to lose. You know, like a few people shout out him for playing electric guitar. You know, and his old lovely, lovely friend, Pete Siegel, who's always very kind to him, is a bit disappointed. But the whole thing is that you're pretty low stakes. And especially given that we in the audience know that Bob Dylan went on to have tremendous, incredible success, is a household name, won the Nobel Prize. So it's a little bit difficult to watch the film and feel particularly bad for him, for any of it. It probably is stressful, isn't it, when people are banging on your taxi door window and holding little drawn portraits of you up against the doorway. But I came away feeling like it all came maybe a little bit more easily than I expected to for Bob. You know, and maybe that's how it really worked. You know, and there's no denying he's tremendously talented and you know, you didn't have to be genius to spot that. But I felt like he didn't sacrifice a great deal and what he did lose, because he lost Sylvie. He didn't seem tremendously upset about it. To me, it was all kind of handed to him a little bit on a plate, which I felt then led to a little bit less tension, a little bit less uncertainty, you know, a little bit less of a price to pay for what you gain, which means a little bit less dramatic in my eyes. It's a complicated set of stakes though. I think you have a great point. It's not as if he's broken a leg and he has to learn how to walk again or something like that. I think the stakes here are really existential. And I think that's harder to show cinematically, but I think they do a great job of it. And I guess my point would be this film is all about transition, change, and limitations that are imposed upon someone who has a very public. You know, he struggles with the notoriety to this day. I think he's not really happy about the fame. And then you're under this microscope when you want to make changes or you want to exceed someone's limitations that have been imposed upon you. That's difficult. So that's not yet. That's not cinematic stakes, I don't think. But I think, for that reason, the music really helps because the music is spelling out that I think existential struggle for him pretty well. So in terms of like really tangible stakes, you're right. It feels a little inflated when the Newport Folk Festival is a big deal and oh my God, is he going to go electric? He'd already played electric. There's a band that was electric and preceded him, I think, on the stage. Yeah. He's actually much less, as I have read recently, he's even much less worried about him going electric. He said that the sound quality was terrible. So what he was doing is electric was not coming off as good as it should have been. So I think those are the artificial stakes that I think a movie maker will probably raise in order to try and get more drama. For me, it's much more of an existential struggle. And I think it's done. We can talk about some of the moments that I think really underscore that. But I think that's done really well. And I think this film is laser focused on personal change. And I think that that is the theme. And then sporadically you get these fantastic musical moments, which actually show that artistic change and that musical development. And I think that's why it's such a strong film. As usual, you have watched and interpreted the film fastly more deeply than I have. I've my notes here. I wrote, "The theme, colon, success makes you an ass." It's why I wrote because I felt like that was the underlying message that I took away from the film. You know, part of it is because the real Bob Dylan, I think he is not an easy character to like. He's a pretty tricksy, spiky, difficult person. You know, and that certainly comes across on screen. Yeah. But people like that are hard to spend time with, either in the fictional world or in the real world. So maybe if you are spiky and difficult, you're asking quite a lot of the audience to really sympathize with you when you go through your journey. I think the problem with your theme is that, and probably Bob Dylan would agree with me a little bit on this film. He was already an ass. So it started with success with me and an ass. It said he was already an ass then became a visible ass. But he's, I mean, again, I love Bob Dylan. So I think he's, yeah, cantankerous and difficult. He needs a trickster and, you know, those elements of his personality that have made him such a mystery and such a master at the same time. So wow. Success amplifies your ass, maybe. That's the real thing. If I were to realize your theme, I would just make that one little change, yeah. There's one other other note I wrote. So I, you know, really don't know Dylan very well at all. And like you, I thought I'd do a bit of homework. So I've been listening to Bob Dylan this week. Yeah. And it's, you know, been a bit of a musical revelation. I've spent most of the week looking at myself in the mirror, saying, well, Bob Dylan, where have you been all my life? These songs are incredible. Yeah. I think the songs are absolutely amazing. But here's the catch, which is how brave do you have to be to decide to write a movie about someone who has won a Nobel Prize for their writing? You know, that is a big ask. And I think, I think in this picture, you know, the structure is broadly sound, but the writing can't really match Dylan's. So you have these tremendously well crafted, beautifully written, perfect songs. Yeah. And then in between, I found some of the writing a bit kind of on the nose. Towards the end of the movie, there's a scene where he and Johnny Cash are hanging out near the Newport Folk Festival. And you know, Dylan tells him something like, ah, I got this gig coming up. And I don't know if people are going to want to hear what I want to play. And it's all kind of, you know, he's just repeating the same plot point for the benefit of those people who went out to the toilet during the previous 10 minutes. Yeah. It's pretty on the nose. There's like a, here's this kind of cute date with Sylvie. And they have that kind of meat cute in the church. But then, you know, there's like a 30 second scene where they walk along the street. She tells him what she does at the weekend. You know, he asks her out, she rebuffs him. Then she gives him her phone number and explains where she'll be. It all happens in about sort of 30 seconds. It's very, very kind of, it feels very much like it's a scene about giving information rather than developing character. I think there are a few scenes like that that are kind of a bit matter of fact, a bit explicatory, if there's a word, when the writing on the songs is so subtle. There's one other one I wrote in my list after Dylan gets. But we haven't ranked spoiler bell. Should we ring a spoiler bell? Yeah, absolutely. As soon as you possible to spoil the film? Yeah, it's just a blow a little harmonic or something like that. Okay, okay. Well, I'll see if I can find a harmonic. I've got a harmonic, not far from my desk, but it's not right on my desk at the moment. In the absence of a harmonic, I'm going to ring the spoiler. Yeah, yeah, just do the old spoiler bell. Imagine that was a harmonic, imagine. Okay, so like about halfway through the film, after Dylan, he goes out and he gets beaten up during a frucker in a bar, and he gets to Sylvie's place to try and recover. And she opens the door to him and she says, "We broke up, remember." And that's one of those kind of really kind of crushing lines that sounds so heavily written for the audience and not the people in the scene. And anyway, I'm prepared to believe that maybe they did extensive testing and the audience didn't understand that they had broken up, and they had to ADR a little dialogue in there. And maybe I can't remember whether her back is to the camera where she's on screen, where she says this. I mean, maybe not. Maybe it's something which has been inserted because test screenings show that people didn't understand what had happened. But it just rang this very tiny little alarm bell in my head of this kind of quite on-the-nose writing. But oh man, you know, just like writing, how brave do you have to be to write a movie about Shakespeare? I feel this is in the same cubby hole. Yeah. It's a brave writer who takes this on. The writer incidentally, James Mangold himself in Jay Cox, who's done a lot of work with Martin Scorsese. He wrote gangs in New York, the age of innocence, last temptation of Christ. These kind of Scorsese pictures. So I'm not saying he's a bad writer, but I didn't quite ring through. So yeah, I think when compared to the excellence of the music, it's hard for the writing to stand up. I think that's what you're sort of saying, right? Yeah, excellent. This is why you're a better writer than me, because you've just summarized it in six words. So I took 15 minutes to say yes, exactly. But I think there's a lot of context too. On that, the scene where you're talking about, when he goes to Silly's apartment, that's quite a night because he's under the microscope. He's at this party where everyone wants to hear, you know, the hit songs or whatnot. And he plays with Pete's Secret, this party. And then he meets Newmark in the elevator on that night. Then he goes to hear Newmark's playing in a band, somewhere else at a pub, right? And that's where he gets punched. And then he goes to the hotel. So it's this crazy night where, you know, he feels like, and he, oh, he was with a woman. He broke up with someone else on that very night, right? Oh, yes. There's a lot that's happening. And then to me, it does make sense that he goes there. And it almost makes sense that she would say something like that, because if she's a scorned lover, but then she might say something like that. It is kind of a cheap line. But she says something, you know, he's looking for some kind of, I don't know, validation or insight into his own world, because I think he's really wrestling with that. And she says this one thing to him. She says, they wonder why the songs don't come to them. Like other people are jealous of him or just curious about him. And they don't, they want to know why they don't come to, you know, why they don't come to the others. Why do they come to you? You know, it's like, why you, why you? And it's just, it's this wonderful. And when you think about getting punched at a bar by someone and then going to an ex who's going to spurn you as well, it's like, it's a pretty grim moment for him, I think. There's a, she's got a boyfriend maybe or someone in the next bed, in the bedroom who's groaning. So now he knows that he's with someone else. I mean, it's quite a, it's quite a deflation that whole evening. So it's, it's an interesting moment. And it's like, yeah, I don't think that's, it might not be a great line. It might not be a, you know, again, this is probably completely fictional, right? I'm sure this did not happen, but, but Dylan did look at the script. Dylan even did a reading with James Mangold and others. So he, he approved it. He liked it. And I think he, you know, knew Timothy Xiaomi was going to be doing it and was pleased with the choice. So, and Xiaomi does a great job. He really does. He does. So there, and then, you know, there, there are the women things. Like we see at least what three girlfriends or partners in this film and Joan Baez is coming in and out and they, yeah, they hook up again at the Chelsea Ortell right before they're supposed to tour together and she kicks them out again. And then one of the next scenes is when they're singing, all I want to do is baby friends with you, which is a great moment. And all of those duet moments are phenomenal. I think, yeah, I don't listen to a lot of Joan Baez. I did go back and listen to Joan, some Joan Baez. I don't really enjoy her music, but what she does or what Monica does to her music and her contribution to dealing in this film is unbelievable. And again, you're right. You're absolutely right. Those moments stand out so much. If you want to go see, it's better than I've seen Dylan a number of times. He's terrible. God, I hope he got listening. Very mercurial. He can be a, you know, he's, I've never heard him say a word to the audience. I've never heard him say a good evening or thank you. And some nights he just stops playing songs if they're not going, well, and all of a sudden you were going to an hour and a half concert and it's 45 minutes. I've been to one of those. I've been to some other nights where he was brilliant. So he's just very inconsistent. So to actually be able to see these guys really recreate the performances, I've seen some documentary footage and we'll talk about that when we get to the next film, but where he was great, but he's really changed over the years. And I think he's become very isolated. And the funny thing is he loves touring. It's not like he's putting on great shows night after night, but he just tours, tours, tours. I just wonder if he has anything else going on at this point. He's been touring almost nonstop for 50 years or something like that. So it's odd that he loves performing so much when he's not fan friendly, let's say. See, it sounds like he hates touring, but he's continuing to do it. I think if you stopped like, well, if you stopped 20 people in the street and asked them, tell me a Bob Dylan fact, probably 10 of them wouldn't have anything for you. But the other 10, or pretty much all of them would be able to say, oh, yeah, he started out playing folk. And then when he went electric, a whole bunch of people got very cheesed off and shouted, you just had him from the audience. That's right. So this is like the one best known fact that most people can quote about his career. And maybe that is the obvious sort of focal point around which to write a story for a biopic. So maybe they've chosen the low hanging fruit. They've chosen the most obvious thing. Yeah. And I think that's a wise choice because with a 60 plus year career, I think you've got to focus on one thing. And that's actually one thing that I really enjoyed about this film. I love the fact that it focused on just four years. They're pretty consequential years in his career. They seem pretty honest years too. I love the point where Dylan walks off stage when he's playing with Joan Baez at one point, and she's just start singing one of his songs without him. I love the moment when he arrives at Newport and they're going to sing, what is it, Ebay, but I think before he comes on stage, she's performing lonely. She gives him the finger from the stage. It's a wonderful moment. I think there's a lot of honesty in here. And obviously again, he signed up on this production. So I like that part about it that I think he is honest, even if the film and even Dylan himself are not always honest. But it does strike me. So it's a little bit like making a film about Neil Armstrong. You're going to make a biopic of Neil Armstrong. And you spend an awful lot of the film debating you, are people going to go to the moon? Will there possibly be a moon landing? Who can tell? There probably won't be, but maybe there will be. And everybody in the audience knows that he went to the moon. So this is the wrong thing to act as a bit of suspense. And in the same way, I think the whole second half of the film is building up to this supposedly pivotal monumental moment when he picks up an electric guitar. I sort of feel like most of the people watching the movie with me know what's going to happen. And we know what's going to happen well enough that it doesn't justify dominating the second half of the picture. I do understand why it's an important pivotal moment. And I do appreciate that it didn't happen like that. I love this notion of people not knowing whether he's going to play amplified instruments or not. With the idea, and then when he does start playing applied instruments, there's amps and there's an organ. And there's all these enormous instruments, which couldn't possibly appear from nowhere. You need a week's notice to ship all those onto the... It's not a mystery thing that you whipped out from your back pocket. So that whole thing kind of doesn't quite work. I'm aware that he was playing these acoustic and electrics of double sets for a long time before the Newport Folk Festival appearance. So it feels a little bit artificial. I wonder whether this, will he, when he sort of theme is overly dominant when I would personally probably prefer to see a little bit more detail of other bits of his life. But I mean, I'm being childish here. I really enjoyed this film. I had a great time watching this. And at the end, I turned to Rachel and said, "That was great." Yeah. So what more can you ask? Yeah. I think the moments that you're critiquing are ripe for critique. I don't disagree with you at all because that's one of my biggest complaints with biopics in general, is that if you know anything about the person, there aren't going to be many surprises. So for me, again, no surprises in this film. But it's the deviations from reality that kind of make it interesting, I think. And I'll point to one is that it's one of my... When I first thought I didn't like the scene, but it's the Johnny Cash scene, I think you've alluded to it where in Johnny Cash, apparently we're writing back and forth a little bit. And Johnny was encouraging him to track some mud on the carpet as he says, you know, race some hell and then do what you want to do. When he went electric, Johnny Cash was not at Newport. I think they met at the Newport Folk Festival the year before. So it's actually not a true scene by any means. But there's a scene where Dylan wants to get away on his motorbike and his motorcycle. And he's sort of been blocked in and Cash just happens to come out and tries to move his car, but to liberate Bob Dylan. I mean, it's very obvious symbolism there, but it's wonderful. He ends up destroying these two other cars with his big-ass car. And he's an e-breaded, I said, "Think." And he's not even going anywhere because he just kind of eventually turns off his car and leaves it where it is. But sure enough, Dylan can get his motorcycle out. So it's kind of very much on the nose, but it's a great scene of, you know, again, giving someone the artistic space, the artistic license to go do what they want to do. And it's followed up not long after that when I think they do two or they do Maggie's farm, a couple songs, maybe like a Rolling Stone before leaving the stage. They've done this electric set and there's this moment where Johnny Cash, all he's doing is holding out an acoustic guitar for Bob to go back on stage and do. It's all over now, baby blue. And it's wonderful that Johnny was like, "Yes, go do your thing." But then when the crowd's kind of booing and they haven't had enough, all he doesn't say anything to me is just holding the acoustic and then Bob goes and grabs it in place. And I think it's just, those are really quite visual scenes and they're fantastic. They're not true. It's absolutely bull crap, but I loved it. And the songs were great on either side. The electric tunes were pretty good, I thought, even though they intentionally made the sound weak. And I'll say you've got this all, this fake drama you write about Alan Lomax and Pete Ziegert either trying to cut the electricity off or stop the show, even though that's not what happened historically. I agree with you. I think the stakes of the drama, it's not really that tense, and it's not very real at all, but still makes a good story. I think it ends well, too. So Bob gets sort of back on his motorcycle. He's loud and rumbling and trying to leave Newport and heading to the next stage of his life. There's this great moment where he, his motorcycle is making noise and comes back up on the sort of the site of the festival. And there are people picking up trash and stuff, and Pete Ziegert hears him, and Pete Ziegert's just the good guy. He's helping him with that. He's putting away chairs. He's picking up trash, and he sees Bobby in his glasses. It's kind of a goodbye to the old Dylan, and he rides back to visit Woody, and he's going to keep Woody's harmonic, even though he tries to offer it back to it. And he's going to carry on this tradition and two new plays. And then all of a sudden, we start hearing another Woody song, so long it's been good to know you. And I think you're going to bookends, both on the Woody songs and on the images. He drives away on his motorcycle, looking forward down the road and into the future. And I think it's very good contrast from the beginning where he was being delivered somewhere and looking backwards to the past. And now he's looking into the future. God. Yeah. I mean, that's craft, isn't it? That's craft. Yeah, that's craft. In the same way, with those Johnny Cash moments, that's that classic good. That's good screenwriting of character expressed through action. Yeah. That's exactly what it is. So, you know, I am wrong to complain. There are a lot of great moments in this. I'm just being a... I don't think you're wrong to complain. I think I am intentionally blindfolding myself to some of the weaknesses. Because in other parts, I just thought, I did write this in my notes. I think this is a film that doesn't really make many missteps. I think there are some weak moments, but I don't think there are any like glaring holes or glaring accidents. And I think that's important. I love the final image too, because allegedly, Bob Dylan got in quite a motorcycle accident, which took him out of the public eye and out of music as a little one. Shortly after the events of this film, I think, wasn't it? I think it's a lie. I was reading this week and there's no evidence. Apparently, there are no hospital records of him going anywhere. And it's possible that he just decided to take a little vacation away from the public, away from fame. So, I mean, it's another one of these Bob kind of myths that's just out there. And I think he did the same with the Scorsese documentary a couple of years ago, like Sharon Stones in there having known him as a teenager, and that never happened. She was even too young, but she's on camera talking about how she met in backstage one night. So, I mean, there's just this, the mystique of Bob Dylan. He's the first one to really play it up and play into it and create it. So, that, yeah, I was thinking, "Oh my God, are we going to end on the motorcycle accident?" And then there's going to be a sequel. I'm glad there wasn't. So, yeah, I'm definitely biased. I love the film. And yeah, I think it's, it's all about Dylan. Is he going to be allowed to be Dylan? I think, and that's when I was talking about the existential thing before that, that's it. Like, the stakes for me aren't, is he going to play electric or not? You're right that those are the stakes in the film. But I think the subtext is, is Dylan going to be allowed to be Dylan? It's not that, is he going to be allowed to play electric? So, I think that's the real moment. That's the real story behind the story. And I think that's hard to show, but I think they do a pretty, pretty good job of it. But then that, there is no one Dylan, is there? No. I mean, he's had like a whole bunch of pseudo-names, at least on all sorts of different work. And he's kind of, he's veered between genres and forms. Yeah. There is no one Dylan. No, and I, again, I've been listening to nothing but Dylan for weeks now, and there's some 80s and 90s records that are just not so good. But again, man has hundreds of great songs and dozens of great records. So, but he's, the thing is, you know, he's done gospel, he's done like absolute, like Christian music, he's got country music in there. He's done films, you know, he's really, he's written some films, he's definitely scored some films. I mean, he's, he's not held back by some sort of limitations that people are going to put on him. And I think that's, that's the story right there. Ah, good for him. More, more Dylan in a minute, but in the meantime, it's probably, I reckon, it's probably too late to phone the police about Bob Dylan's possibly fraudulent motorcycle accident. But I would still be inclined to drop a dime to the other police squad that we regularly call. I'm going to put in a call to the cliche squad because real life is the biggest cliche of all. For all that I've introduced the cliche squad, I've only got one cliche in my list this week. I'm sure there were a whole bunch of others and you're usually much more perceptive about these than I am. There was one that stood out to me a little bit, which is quite early on in the movie, um, when Pete Seeger is giving Bob Dylan a lift back from the hospital when they visited Woodie Guthrie, and he turns on the radio and it's nothing about any time anyone ever turns on the radio in a movie. There must immediately be something which is relevant to the theme of the film on the radio. So like, yeah, he turns the radio on and there is immediately a news report about Vietnam protests, I think. Never ever happens in real life when it always, always happens in films. That goes stood out to me a bit. Did he spot any other cliches this week? Well, I'm glad you caught that one because 1961 is pretty early for the action in Vietnam, or at least the awareness of what was going on in Vietnam. So it's a little out of context. Mine, it's funny because I have this cliche and I wrote it down before I watched Don't Look Back, so it's almost invalidated by Don't Look Back. Mine was executives with eccentric smoking habits. Alan Grossman is constantly smoking. He's got these smoking, you know, those little holders and things like that and people are smoking cigars everywhere. It always seems like you know someone who's got money and power and they're influential in their industry if they have eccentric or maybe excessive smoking habits. But then in Don't Look Back, boy, and we can talk about how real that film is too, but Alan Grossman's smoking a lot in that film. There are a lot of people smoking a lot in that one. There are a lot of people smoking in both of these films. They were smoking in lots of films back in the '40s, '50s, '60s. It was an advertisement for the cigarette industry. That's it. Those aren't banffiches, I guess. Poor Philip Morris. Okay. Well, overall, I think see it, hear it. I think I'm getting that. See it, see it, see it. A complete unknown. It's on the buses at the moment all over London, currently. You could do a lot worse. James Mangold bounced back from Indiana Jones of the Dial of Destiny and made this, which is a thoroughly enjoyable, finely crafted film. No, it's not perfect, but what is? I think it's, for all my snidey comments, it's a pretty terrific film and I enjoyed every minute. And that's an impressive bounce back too. So here to you, here's James Mangold. That is, yeah, that is quite a bounce back. Right. Well, should we have a break? And then we will come back and we'll look back at another Dylan film. This time, The Real Dylan, in Don't Look Back. No, we can't look back. It says don't look back. That's what's on there. Nothing wrong. This episode of The Two Real Cinema Club is sponsored by Money Tizer. Friends are the most important things in life. Friends will stand by you. Friends will see you through the good times and the bads, and we all know that you can't buy friends. But what if there are a way to turn the power and the wonder of friendship into money? 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We'll help you to set up your very own borderline fraudulent meme-based crypto coin so you can flog it to your friends. No SEC regulation to slow things down. Just because you're there, your friends, doesn't mean they aren't also suckers. So get Money Tizer because a good friendship is an investment and we'll help you to cash out. And we are back. I feel like we shouldn't be back because we've been told not to look back, but we are back. It's funny, the last couple of years, two years ago, we were told not to look up, right? Wasn't there a film called Don't Look Up? Now we can't look back? What the hell are we supposed to do? I had agency. I had agency. I can do what I want with my eyes. You see, but that's what they do. That's just what they want you to think. We have also watched another Bob Dylan film this week. So we've watched 1967's Bob Dylan Colon, Don't Look Back, which is a black and white documentary by D.A. Penny Baker. Is it Penny Baker, Penny Baker? I think it's Penny Baker, yeah. Penny Baker. Who has made, basically off the back of this, all of the big rock documentaries from the '60s, the '70s, the '80s. He's made Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders from Mars, Otis Reading Documentary, Depeche Mode, Live, Alice Cooper Live, Little Richard Live, all these big names. I think he largely got all of those gigs by making this, which is a film about Bob Dylan in the UK. But before we talk about it, we always got to have to ask the question. You choose this one. Oh, how come? Do you have any other questions for Lee Katz? Oh, boy. I thought it would be good to see a document. I'm going to put that in quotation marks. I'm sorry. A documentary film with Bob Dylan that might be just as fictional as a complete unknown is. I don't know. I don't know if there's any difference in terms of what's real and what's not between the two films. I'm looking forward to discuss it. I saw this. I think I've seen it twice. A long time ago, when I was a much younger man and probably more willing to swallow and believe everything that Bob Dylan said he did, and now to come back to it, especially after seeing this one as a complete unknown, I think it has new context. I looked at this film in a very different way. It was good to see it. It's not that long. It was an hour and a half or something like that. From D.A. Penny Baker's interesting, he made the War Room 2, which is a film about the Clinton Cabinet. This guy has films that were probably spent 40 or 50 years or something like that. Quite a career. I don't know why he was invited to do this or chose to do it. That's probably a story on its own, but I'm sure you read the book. I did read the book, but I tell you about that. That's it. That's in my back pocket. I've been saving that one up. It's for my surprise. I thought for sure you hadn't read anything. Geez, I'm crawl, I'm always reading stuff. So don't look back. Shot in April and May 1965, while Dylan was touring in Britain. It was only released in May 1967. A lot happened in those two years. It is available for free on YouTube, if you want to watch it. But the YouTube version is missing the opening three minutes. You have to watch those separately. It opens with the pop video for subterranean homesick blues. So you have to watch that separately, and then you can watch the rest of the movie on YouTube. I'm very impressed that you've watched this twice. I think I would be challenging myself if I wanted to watch this film twice. I didn't find it an easy watch, but shall I tell you the story? You should, you should, because I think there is a story there. I got to take your word for it. So Bob Dylan, Colon, don't look back, is a shaky cam, black and white, cinema verite documentary about Bob Dylan. It's 1965. And after an opening that is more or less a pop video for subterranean homesick blues with cards that have lyrics written on, Dylan arrives in the UK for a tour. We follow him and Jim Byers, his manager, Albert Grossman, a whole bunch of other musicians, as they have interviews, play gigs, ride in taxis, chat backstage, negotiate television appearances, and eventually at the climax of the film, Dylan plays to 6,000 people at the Albert Hall. And you know, I haven't put a question at the end of the synopsis. I've got a question for you though. I'm all ears. Why isn't he at the Albert Hall in the beginning too? What was the first concert? Yeah, I think it opens with him sort of diddling about in the changing room at the album, and then it closes with that same venue, I think. I think that is just the magic of film editing. So I think he tells the north of the country first. I think he goes to Liverpool and Manchester first, and then finishes off at the Albert Hall. So could be wrong. Well, no, I think you get a teaser of the end of the film at the beginning. It's not so clear because of the documentary, and then I think they come back. I think the Albert Hall concert is the end, but what we see at the beginning is Albert Hall. And I say that in part because of the review that a news reporter or an art critic calls in, and I thought he said, "Oh, yes." To fill the Albert Hall. Yeah. So where do we begin? If you're allowed to look back, do you look back to beginner? Do you look ahead to beginner? I don't even know where to go. I was trying to figure out how I would explain what this film is to somebody who hasn't seen it. And I think basically this film is like going to a teenage party or a kind of an early 20-somethings party as the designated driver. So like you turn up and everybody else is kind of drunk and sort of off their face, and you sit on the sofa and you have to be kind of sensible, and you're just watching, or your friends have these idiotic conversations. And then somebody gets into an argument about who threw a glass and there's a bit of argy-bargy. And then one of the neighbours comes in to complain about the noise. And someone's dad comes and tells them to f off. And I think "Oh God, Nathan's dad is turning the neighbour to f off. That's embarrassing. I don't know." And he thinks he's so cool. Am I the only super person in the building? I guess I am. There's a lot of bad adult behavior in the film. I think the older people are worse than even the younger people at some. Yeah, it's called "Don't Look Back." And that's taken from Illyric. I think that's in subterranean homes like blues, but I don't know that it really suits the film. I guess this is a part of dealing not to look back on, and that's why they're saying "Don't Look Back." I mean, this is the past Bob Dylan, and by '67 he's changing, he's doing different music. It's a peculiar title in some ways. But yeah, I enjoy it, I think, similarly. I don't want to waste consent this size later, I guess. But I mean, again, the music kind of represents the high points, I think, in the film. There's this cameo, Alan Ginsberg, in the opening scene that you're talking about. He's in the background, he's dressed as some sort of acidic scholar or a rabbi or something, and it's just very bizarre. It's like a road construction scene, and he's just talking to some other guy. Well, Dylan's flashing all the cards, and the card scene has amazing... It's just round the back of the Savoy Hotel. That card scene always amazes me because there must have been a hundred or more of these cards, and he's holding them in one hand and pulling them down, and it's just amazing how many... He's a strong guy, that Bob Dylan. He had all those pieces of paper, but it's sort of like one of these things that has become a meme and has been done again and again. It has, doesn't it? It actually sort of has that moment, doesn't it, too? Wonderful thing. I think about the Beatles for two reasons. This is almost like the Beatles in reverse. England going to America and experiencing the mania there, and I think Dylan's almost trying to maybe even hype up him going from the states to England and experiencing the same kind of mania. So it's his kind of hard day's night film on a certain level, except... Okay, yes, yep. Not nearly as inventive and probably, I'll say, less fictional than a hard day's night. So I think it's just... There's a zeitgeist to this film, I think, is that he probably felt like he needed to come out with a movie as well, because I think hard day's night might be 1960 for something like that, and then you're right. I keep thinking this is a '65 film, but it actually was shot then and then took a couple of years to be released. And I think... Oh god, I don't want to try. I'm sort of alluding to some synthesis stuff here, but the stakes here seem to be on the Donovan front. We see Donovan's review and the newspaper or something like that, and Bob Dylan says, "I'd like to meet Donovan," and it's the kind of thing where you think, "Okay, they were always going to meet up at some point," and then they just turn it into this little fictional piece where pursuing Donovan becomes this thread, and they eventually do meet in a hotel, and it's one of the worst scenes for Bob Dylan, because he's a yelling at managers, and he's drunk, and everyone else is drunk, and someone's throwing a glass out. We don't know that, we didn't see it, but allegedly someone threw a glass out a window, and Dylan's mad at the guy, and they have these drunken conversations that are not worth shooting, whatever it was, 8 millimeter, 16 millimeter film. Film! Minutes and minutes of trying to drink in guys, yelling at each other, and you're running film? Oh my god. So this is before a video. I mean, I think the thing is, what you're looking at now is probably mastered, it's probably a reprint to a video that's been remastered, so it looks pretty good, but... If they meet this film now, it basically would be a live stream, wouldn't it? It's just a great long kind of unfiltered, meandering, pointless, aimless conversation. Just kind of going on and on around the houses, and the same thing comes back up again, and people are slurring a bit now. It's just, I don't know, I found it quite hard to watch, and even the people who are professional interviewers, there are a bunch of proper journalists in the film, and even they seem excited to meet Dylan, but utterly unable to really get at the core of him. We're asking any genuinely interesting, clever, insightful questions. I think if there is anybody who interviews Dylan at all well in the film, it's a bunch of Mancunian school girls, or they might be living partly in school girls, but it's just some school girls earlier on in the movie. You get them to sign a record, and then they're chatting with him, and their conversation is honestly more enlightening, more human, more interesting than anything that the journalists come. They don't know what to ask Dylan, and they haven't figured him out. And again, to me, that's felt a little bit like a setup. You've got this fairly good footage of them going down on the street, and I think maybe they saw the kids down there, and they started interviewing, and then they bring them up. It's still set up. I don't think it's not that organic. I'm glad you talked about it like a livestream, because this is an early version of reality television. It's got these invasions of privacy into these really unremarkable moments. It's inventing reality. I think when you put a camera on people, they're acting. You've regarded it as a documentary. People are acting. It plays into Dylan's strengths really well, but I think he's intentionally obtuse in all the interviews, and he's just taking the piss out of all the interviewers. I'm not even sure any of those were real reviewers. There's this Time Magazine editor or writer whose Bob is just totally annoying, and they're talking about what's true and what's not, and do you care about what you're saying and all that. It just seems like a setup as well. But Time Bob done this kind of being like a 1965 Edge Lord, isn't he? He reminds me of the kids in school who used to spend all of their energy trying to derail the lesson, or when they would talk to an adult, they would very cleverly turn around. Everything the adult said to mean the absolute opposite, and they feel very smug about themselves being so clever, outwitting an adult, when actually they just kind of a bit of a book. I read up a little bit about the Time Correspondent. He attempts to humiliate, I suppose. This guy's called Horace Freeland Judson. He was correspondent for Time. He went on to become a fairly well-respected science journalist. I think he was like historian of molecular biology. But in the '60s, yes, he was his gig for Time was Culture and Science. That's what he covered, which is, what a gig that is. After I read this, I was just imagining the phone call from the editor, where the guy was supposed to go up and say, Horace, we want you to cover some things for Time. Can you cover Culture? Well, all of it, yes, yes, all culture, yes, pop music, yes, art, yes, literature, yes, opera, yes, yes, and dance, everything. Oh, and one more thing, Horace, you have to cover science as well. It's unbelievable. But then I was kind of thinking, but this is the '60s. I bet, I bet, in the '60s, there were basically five Time journalists in Britain. There was one guy for Science and Culture. There was one guy for Politics, and there were three, he would cover the Royal Family, I bet. If the Queen did something interesting, they'd get a few more journalists to cover the Royal Family. I think that's that's Britain in the 1960s, isn't it? I'm glad you did a little research on that, because that interview seemed so pointless, and he seems like a science editor, or science reporter covering Culture, because it's not very great questioning, but also, you're dealing with Bob Dylan, who's got his own agenda, I think, and this is a funny document, historical document, because this is about as public as Bob Dylan gets, I think. I mean, we don't see other documentaries where he's talking, as I said, as a public citizen, he's not that open, and I don't think he's very honest ever, so he doesn't do a ton of interviews anymore, I don't think so. I mean, this is kind of like this real public record of the person of Bob Dylan. And there is that opening scene, or early scene, where another reporter is calling in, he's calling us review, which also doesn't seem staged to me. He's calling in a review, he's just basically talking into the phone, and reading his review of Bob Dylan's concert at Albert Hall, and he has this quote. He says, "The times are changing when a poet, not a pop singer, fills Albert Hall, which is very funny." I like that, but sadly, I think those times have changed back. I mean, you're not going to see a poet filling Albert Hall. Yeah, oh my god. Yeah, can you imagine? Which is kind of a rubbish place to hear music, by the way. I've been there a number of times for concerts, and it's too big and echoey, and it was not made for that. I think Albert Hall was made for livestock shows or something, right? No, surely. I think it's an exposition kind of building. I think it was, I mean, I've seen tennis matches in there, which are kind of strange. I've seen ballet there. I've seen the orchestra there. I've seen some rock music there. It doesn't do, and it's a beautiful building. It is a beautiful building. It doesn't really do anything very well. I don't think. That's the funny thing. Not sure if Victorians had a very clear idea of what acoustics were. No, well, yeah. There was no amplification then, barely any electricity, I suppose, at that point. But that's an interesting scene, because, you know, again, is this... I couldn't tell if that was real. I mean, obviously, the reporter's not cited as being or many newspaper, anything like that. And that's something you could easily stage. So you start to really question reality, I think, when you're watching this film. And even those altercations, why are they yelling at these hotel managers and hotel people? And there's nothing to... They're saying some really weird things. They're being very rude to people. And I wonder if after the Penny Baker cuts the film, say, "Oh, God, I'm sorry, man. I didn't mean to call you an idiot, Tom." It was just for the film, man. Just for the show. Just for the show. Or the extraordinary money from BBC, Grossman, Elba Grossman, smoking away... Good old Grossman, he's smoking lots of cigarettes and haggling with the BBC for a higher fee to do some sort of like half-hour on air. And I looked it up, Tito Burns is the person who's the middleman. He knows... And he's a jazz musician. Did you know this? He was a jazz musician in Britain. And I don't know that he would be there. It's almost as if they just got someone who was kind of known, and then they put him in the set up. Again, it's all telephones. You're not hearing other voices, really. It could be very easily just made up. So now that you say this, this feels like a very, very bob Dylan way to make a documentary. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Quite possibly a lot of it is made up. Yeah. It's one other thing which really surprised me, which may not be so obvious to a North American viewer, I don't know. But my goodness, everyone in this film is so posh. People talk so posh. I think the only people who don't sound like they work for BBC Radio 4 are the Manchester school girls. Otherwise everybody sounds incredibly posh. No one talks like that now. Even the King doesn't talk like that now. Those voices now have utterly disappeared from British culture. They do not exist. Well, the times they are are changing. I don't know that anyone's... Oh, that's good. That's ridiculous anymore, yeah. Frustratingly, you get to hear a few songs towards the end of the movie, but almost all of them are cut short. You get one verse, and then it kind of fades out and you go to the next one. It's almost like it's a documentary made for people who you want to learn about Dylan, but aren't prepared to sit through a song. That's better. Yeah. Obviously, the sound quality isn't as good as the future film that we just watched. So it is a letdown, but those are still sort of the high marks of the film, I think, or when he's doing stuff. And not electric. There's not this drama about is he going to do electric or not. You know, you would have played some electric shows by this point, but again, like Albert Hall is a strange place for a guy with a guitar in a harmonica to sing to 6,000 people or whatever it is. Or there's that wonderful scene. I think it's in Liverpool where the PA systems are not working well, and they're just sort of unplugging things and plugging things back in, and eventually he starts working again. It's a... And there's a spinal tap moment here. The spinal tap is in... This is spinal tap. There's a scene of the band trying to find the stage. And this is a think part of it. He's trying to get out of the building, I think, and you're escaping these fans in this mania, and they sort of get lost in the bowels of some auditorium and Manchester or something like that. It's just these wonderful scenes. I think it's not that interesting. You're right. And I think... I don't know if it's intentional or not. It's like the opposite of Hitchcock, right? It's all the boring parts are put in, right? And I think... I'm going to talk about existentialism again, because I think there's all these moments of waiting for something to happen backstage and stuff, even though there's always something kind of happening, even if it's people throwing glasses out of windows or typing on typewriters and stuff happening. It's just not that interesting and they're waiting for it. It's just the most banal stuff. Yeah, yeah. So we look back at all these... It's... I found it odd to look back at something that's happened what 60-something years ago with interest, even though it's all just nothing. And in fact, we do look back. We look back on life as being more interesting. I think as we are mental editors, ultimately, we really overlook a lot of the boring bits and then make a film in our mind of what our memories actually are. And that's a good thing, because otherwise you get just films with nothing happening, so... Well, talking about entertainment where nothing happened. I saw I did read the book this week. So I did get No Direction Home by Robert Shelton, which I said, that is like the definitive biography of Bob Dylan. And it is 700 pages long. So sorry, I had to take a reality check. So I got through about 60 pages and realized, wait a second, I'm not going to finish this before Easter. So instead, I read Bob Dylan's own novel, Tarantula. Have you ever read this? No. So this is like his... Well, it's kind of published as a novel. It's like a sort of prose poem. It's only 149 pages long. Even better with a very long introduction, which I just skimmed read. And the bits I read from the introduction were admirably honest, because the introduction was written by the publisher. And they say basically that we were persuaded to publish a book by Bob Dylan. We had no idea what it would look like, but we were pretty sure that it would look like money. So they just sort of agree to publish something that Bob Dylan would send them. So it's written in 1965 and 1966. And it was kind of like available, as a kind of bootleg for about five years, which again is very, very Bob Dylan. There's no notion of a bootleg book to go with bootleg tapes. It wasn't officially published until 1971. And it's kind of a mess. It's certainly not a novel. The thing it reminded me of, there's a famous story about, and I might have told this story before, about AFEX Twin, his commission to do a remix for Radiohead on safer music ground now. And he basically was asked to do this thing, got the money, completely forgot about it, is how the story goes. Until one day, the courier turns up saying, "Oh, I've turned up for the tape of that Radiohead remix." And so AFEX Twin said, "Hold on, wait there." And he goes upstairs and he runs off a tape of whatever he happens to be working on that day and hands it over. And Radiohead take this tape and I say, "Oh, great, yeah, put it on a B-side." I think Tarantula is about the same. It's like somebody offered Bob Dylan some money for a book, and he agreed, and then it sort of forgot about it. And then someone turned up needing the manuscript. So he panicked, and he handed a notebook that he keeps by his bed, in which he would write dreams and the occasional snatches of song lyrics and little jokes and things like that. And so he just handed them that, and then they published that. And worse than that, they dropped the book on the way to the publisher. And all the pages fell out and then got reassembled in a random order. So it's like, it is as dense as poetry or song lyrics, but it's really completely shapeless. It's kind of, it's dreamlike, it's exhausting to read because like every word is equally important. So like the critics will tell you, it's a response to James Joyce. And he keeps name checking the same people. He names Chex, Aretha Franklin a lot, and E.E. Cummings a lot. There is a chapter called "Fandals Took the Handles." It's sort of full of little fragments of Bob Dylan's songs, but kind of rearranged. And the other thing it reminded me of is confederacy of dunces, if you've ever read that. Because it's a kind of stream of consciousness, ground level look at the kind of detritus of 1960s American society. So it's all about kind of bums and drunks and people getting into fights and hanging out on street corners, at least kind of little tiny snippets. Ideas that might possibly have become songs or might have been taken from songs, it's peculiar. You could take each page and rearrange it, and it would make about as much sense. And I did get to the end of the book and I thought, well, that's two hours I'm never getting back. I think Bob Dylan himself is even a bit embarrassed about it now. And frankly, I think probably he should be. Well, it's interesting. It's another side of the man. You are disparaging a Nobel Prize laureate. You are right. Who the hell am I? You are exactly right. I have nothing to counter him. I take my hat off to him. That one must have gotten by the committee. They probably didn't read that little bit. It can't all be good. It can't all be good. As you're saying that, I'm reminded of one of the great lines from the film. They applaud this kind of bullshit. It comes towards the end. I think they're in a cab leaving the Albert Hall gig or something like that, or that's what the setup looks like. And that's what they should have called the film. Yeah. Makes more sense, I guess. And Grossman says at one point, you were all there calling him an anarchist offering no solutions. Like lines like that just sound like that. Again, it sounds like it's written and fed to the person to say on camera or something. But this is the same thing we said last week when we watched Beaverland, isn't it? What's the difference between documentary and a fiction film? Nothing. Nothing. You know, Joan Baez is in this film, and that's probably worth mentioning. She's gone on this tour with him and doesn't do any shows with him, I don't think. I think they're just friendly at that time. And she's singing whenever he's typing in a hotel room or a backstage or whatnot, she's singing. And these hangers are hangers on or hangers or rounders. I don't know how you would say these people just kind of part of his posse at the time. And a lot of entourage stuff. And of course, there's one part of that. But not a lot of happens. A lot of people, not a lot of happens. A lot of smoking. Again, a lot of smoking. A lot of smoking. Yep. There are some themes coming out, aren't there? It seems incredible now that someone who makes their money largely from their voice is determined to smoke as many cigarettes as they can squeeze in and 24 hours. Well, we've kind of alluded to the synthesis already. I can already feel you kind of champing at the bit. Well, we should we should bring these two films together. They are not so very different. But before we do, I'm going to, as always, force you to play my favorite game. We'll have a quick round. Yeah. Of who am I? Who am I? I go first. I go first. Oh, go ahead. I am Bob Dylan. This never happens. I am Bob Dylan. We're in the same way that you are Spartacus. Yes. Well, everyone has to say I'm Bob Dylan. There aren't a lot of characters that otherwise have much time in either of these films. Really. I'm going to say I'm Bob Dylan. Yep. I want to be love the guy. Don't understand the guy. He's been a fundamental part of your life. How can you not be him after watching? Yeah, yeah. I don't understand him any more than anyone else does. But when he's good, he's great. And he just seems like he's from another planet. I mean, he's just he's something else. So yeah, I'm Bob Dylan. Who are you? There's no doctor. Are there doctors? Well, I haven't watched these films. I kind of hope I'm not Bob Dylan. I mean, I thoroughly recognize I am no Nobel laureate for enough. But neither of these films make Bob Dylan look like an awesome stand-up great guy. No doctors in this week's films. No. One bad tempered nurse. But I didn't feel particularly like him either. I reckon if I am, if I'm going to identify with anybody that I've watched on screen this week, it's probably Terry Ellis, who is like the very British sounding record label founder. Oh, yeah. He talks a complete load of BS with Dylan during Don't Look Back. I think Dylan is working out a song on the piano. Yeah. And this guy, he's kind of basically, he just sounds like an utter idiot telling him, oh, I'm a scientist. And I have very deep thoughts. I am very deep with big thoughts. Because I there's this voice at the back of my head, which is worried that, you know what? That's what I sound like after four beers. So I think sadly, maybe I am a little bit more like Terry Ellis than I would like to admit. Yeah. Interesting. You know, that guy went on to found chrysalis. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. So that guy is actually responsible for quite a lot of the records. I listened to when I was a boy. Yeah. It wasn't really clear why he was in there. Maybe he was starting to think about a record company at that point. But he was, I think he taught him as if he was a student, right? Yeah. Yeah. Another hangar on. Yeah. And then it's funny because that that's a long conversation. That's probably five minutes in the film I'm guessing. And it's not super interesting. It's not like a deep conversation by any means. And it's in there. It seems like it's in its entirety. I mean, imagine, I bet the actual conversation, if there was one, probably went on 30 or 40 minutes. But it's also, it's 75% Terry Ellis, who is by far the less interesting person involved in that conversation. Why are we listening to him? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And enigmatic man, that piano player. Yes. Well, we've talked about it. We should do it. Let's see if we can, we can do a synthesis, draw these two films together. Well, I openly acknowledge you know a lot more about Dylan than I am. I am all ears. You will have something more profound. Well, this happens every week. You'll have something more profound to say than me. But especially this week, you'll be doubly profound. Yeah. I don't know. No, actually, I've written very little for a synthesis. For me, the biggest question is what is true and what is not. And I don't think the documentary is any more honest than the narrative film is. And the narrative film is based on a book. And I think they've made it, it's funny because it's probably less dramatic. I love the fact that you were talking about the stakes in a complete unknown. And they're artificial, I think. And I think that is zeroing in on the willy go electric or not is it's convenient, but it's not dramatic. And it's actually not very true either. So that just makes you think like what's real in Bob Dylan's life and what is not. And he had control of both of these pictures to a certain extent. I mean, I think he kind of had to sign off on a complete unknown. He liked it. He read it with man gold and even made suggestions on dialogue and stuff. And having seen some other Bob Dylan films, it's not a good idea to have him work on it. But I think it's called Masked in Anonymous is a film from must be like early 2000s. I don't recommend it, but it's the same thing with both of these films. I think the music is great. A lot of the bits in between, they become filler bits. And as a result, it changes the film in both cases, it really changes the film. And you know, like I felt like a complete unknown had enough music. I would have gone for more, but that's just because I'm a junkie. Whereas don't look back actually doesn't have enough music. And that's why it's not as strong. And it's an hour and a half. I mean, it should be pretty tight and it should be a lovely viewing, but it's not. It's not an easy thing to watch. And in part because he doesn't come across very well, his team doesn't come across very well. And you're wondering, well, why would you make a film where you don't come off that well? And so you wondered like, to what extent Penny Baker, I mean, it's hard to really get a sense of what he did otherwise, just cinema verite, where he's shooting all these things and turning it into a documentary. So who's in on the joke, I guess, with Bob Dylan? That comes to me in both films. But his relationship with people, I think it's a struggle for him in general. But the Joan Baez in, the Joan Baez in a complete unknown, I mean, Monica Barbaro does a fantastic job. She's magnetic, and she really shows what Joan Baez could do for his music and how she inspired him. In the end, I look back, she's really just kind of in the background all the time, and I don't remember. I don't think they perform together and don't look back. Don't think so. Yeah, she just sings a little bit backstage, isn't she? And I never, I didn't think I would ever say this. Maybe that film needed more Joan Baez. People don't say that. People don't say that. But that's where that film took me. Mentally, it's like, I want to hear what the real Joan Baez is popular and collaboration was like. And I would direct people towards no direction home, which is, I think that's probably Scorsese also. I think Scorsese made both documentaries on Dylan there. So I would direct people to that. I think that's a bit more interactive with Bob, so you get more of his musings on his own life. But again, I don't think he's that trustworthy, I don't think he wants to be. And I think it's intentional, because again, life can be pretty boring. So I never thought that I'd talk about so much existentialism with these two films, but that's what these films are for me. So I think they're both worth watching. I think it was a good pair. It's good to get that. There were other things we could have watched, I think, in hindsight, like Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which Dylan's in, he acts in. It doesn't music for. I think that would have been an interesting watch. So there's some other, there's plenty of Dylan material out there, and I think it's like just listening to his music this last month. A lot of it is amazing, and it'll just make you go wild. And then a lot of it is subpar, but you gotta do both. I mean, the reason he's great is because he's done so much, and he's experimented so much. And I think that's ultimately the lesson of a complete unknown is that he's got to be liberated to do what he wants to do. And sometimes he's going to make absolute crap, but very often or just as often he's going to make masterpieces. As usual, your synthesis, considerably more sophisticated than mine, I wrote down, I think both films suggest that fame makes an ass off you. Or at least it does of Bob Dylan, anyway. But then maybe he was just an ass anyway. I mean, a lovable ass. I mean, I think he's done some good. Look here, real. Yeah, I mean, some of the moments that I love the most were early Dylan, because he gets a little quieter, but he was very much into civil rights in the 60s, and some of those songs are very political. You think of masters of war, times they are changing, blowing in the wind, even. He's much more politically engaged and active at that part of his career. And some of those songs are great. I think the best moment in don't look back for me is this, it's actually another filmmaker. Down South, he's playing at a, either people registering to vote. These are field workers in the American South somewhere. And he's singing about Medgar Evers, political tune, the old school, like Woody got through the acoustic guitar and a guy with a harmonica just out in the field somewhere. And it's a really, it's archival. It's a real piece of history. And I think that's a powerful moment. And you get some of that, I think, in a complete unknown as well. I mean, coffee has scenes in Greenwich Village are great because they just take you right there, but also chose a different side about Dylan, the early political side. I mean, I think the other big takeaway from watching these films back to back is that their highlights are clear for both of these films, the highlights are some of the finest songs ever written. I kind of think that's enough, isn't it? You know Bob Dylan fastly better than I do. So I feel like I'm coming to this almost as a new cover. And these songs are pretty remarkable. They seem so simple from the outside. It's just a few chords. The way he sings, there's barely a melody sometimes. The rhymes, after you've heard them, they seem so obvious. It's songs that they feel like, it feels like the song has just written itself. Like some of these songs are so good that they are like a part of the fabric of the universe. They've just precipitated out of the place and the time where we live. They're almost like they are too fundamental to have possibly been written by a human being. I think some of these songs are just absolutely incredible. You know, I can utterly understand why, you know, that sort of rather on the nose, but I guess thoroughly necessary dialogue about how, you know, people ask, where do the songs come from? But what they really mean is, why didn't the song come to me? These songs seem so simple that people say, why didn't I think of that? It's so obvious after you've heard it. And yet, you know, well, that is what, I don't use this word very often and it's considerably overused, but genius, I think. Those Nobel prizes, they don't give them out to anybody, you know. When I first heard that Bob Dylan was going to get the Nobel Prize, I was a little bit quizzical about the whole thing. But, you know, now you realize, oh my goodness, yes, you know, these songs are pretty remarkable. My synthesis this week is, Bob Dylan, where have you been all my life? So I was listening to subterranean homesick blues while preparing dinner tonight. And just as dinner was ready, that came up with my headphones. And I thought, everyone's got to listen to this. So I put it on the speaker and turned it up so that everybody in the house could listen to it. Yeah. And when children came down to eat dinner, I said, so have you ever heard of Bob Dylan? My daughter looked at me and she said, yes, you never stop going on about him? Because that's sort of all I've talked about this week. I think that's kind of my take home from watching these two films. Blimey, how Bob Dylan? Blimey? Yeah. I've got one question for you, though. True. And this is another very film schooly type question. Who is who for the new film? Who is this film? Four, do you think? Oof. Great question. I mean, the people who would have bought Bob Dylan's, you know, people who would have bought Highway 61 Rooves as it did. I'm probably too old to go to the movies very much now. I don't think there are other people buying the tickets. We went to the local audience and I didn't spot anybody over 75 in the audience. So I don't think the film is four people who listen to Dylan when he was around playing the music that we see in the film. So who is it for? I think to a certain extent is for for Dylan fans, for sure. It's kind of, I mean, it's got you listening to the back catalog I've been doing at all week long or all four weeks long. I think it's for Americans, though, to a certain extent. I think we're looking for some meaning over here. And it's great that it focuses on his more revolutionary and political side in the early 60s. I love that scene where he's playing Woody Guthrie's guitar and it has that this machine kill smash sticker on it. Exactly. I was glad to see that. So I think it's, I think there is a political undercurrent to this film and it makes sense for this time, I think, tunes like Masters of War and Times of Our Change, in which I think appear in both films, but certainly a complete unknown. The thing about Dylan is that I think we all want to know more about him and we're never going to know that much more, I don't think. And he's just one of our own. He's, it seems like he's an extraterrestrial, though, the way that he can produce that much music and just hammer stuff out and tour endlessly. He just seems like he's from another planet, but he's just a Midwestern guy, you know, Minnesota. I think he still lives in Minnesota. I'm not sure we spend most of his time, but he's one of us. He's an American original and he's just so influential, even if we don't think he's influential in our lives. He's written so many of those great songs, as you mentioned, that you didn't even know he'd written. So I think it is for, I think it's for people over here right now. And I think it's a, I think it's a master stroke to try and introduce him to the next generation. Because I think there's just so much junk out there right now. And I think there's a, there's not a whole lot of meaning. There's not a lot of complexity to lyrics on that level. He is, he's a poet, you know, and that's why he wins the Nobel Prize, I think, laws, and particularly for some of his earlier work. But I think we need more of that. And there's this one scene actually and don't look back. I think he's doing, it's all right, Ma. And he's basically rapping. You know, he's like, he's this bridge character. And I think he does bring a lot of people together just because he's so talented. And he's really worked in, as I said, earlier gospel and blues and rock and roll and folk music. And a lot of those lyrics, you know, he's rapping in the early 60s to get his messages out there. So I think it is, it's a film for this time. It doesn't, I know it doesn't seem that way on the surface, because everything that happens is 60 years old or so and more. But I think it does resonate with all Americans somehow. And that's why I'm very curious to know, I was asking you earlier, I think about like, is he as big in the UK? Or do the Brits understand him the way we don't understand him? And I think, it's very often you know, you want what you can't understand or you want to know death on some level and you want to know these mysteries. And I think Bob Dylan will always be a mystery for us. So I think it's definitely made for the fans, but I think it's made for all Americans right now. Yes, that's a true profound sad. Well, on that happy note. Before I pick up my this machine kills fascist guitar, we have just got time to talk about what else has been playing at this theatre. I'm curious to know what is in your theatre. Well, this and this week we actually went to see why you're a proper film. Oh, we went to see Conclave, which is the Rafe Fiennes picture about. So it's all about the campaign to elect a new hope. So it's directed by Edvard Berger, who directed all quite on the Western Front, which we enjoyed a couple of years ago. Written by Peter Strawn, based on a book by Robert Harris, weirdly, which doesn't feature any Nazis. There can't be many Robert Harris books, which don't feature any Nazis, but this is one of them. And it was, it was very okay. There's stuff to enjoy, I did enjoy the look of it. I tell you what I really enjoyed was watching Rafe Fiennes dress up as a priest. The film is basically packed full of men of a certain age, having an absolutely, absolutely great time dressing up as priests. Not his first time, I don't think. He wears the costume. Well, I mean, I love those kind of Vatican costumes, the other fabric and the shapes. I think they look great. I can really see the appeal. So yeah, the film looks good. And I do enjoy watching Rafe Fiennes do almost anything, but it does suffer from that classic screen writing type problem where more or less nothing happens. Or at least, I mean, you will find it's difficult to believe, could you believe that during the election of a new pope, there might be a bit of politicking and people trying to discredit each other and unruin each other's reputation. And basically, that's it. Sorry, spoilers for anybody who was going to go and see it. But that is it. And I was just assuming, the film kind of early on, it alludes to a kind of sex abuse scandal. But never ever really goes there. This is a film that really needs a conspiracy. It needs a big secret. It needs a murder or something like that. And there just isn't one. There's a bunch of sort of middle-aged men trying to ruin each other's reputation. And that's it. So yeah, a bit of an anti-climax. Looks great. Could do with the story. What have you seen this week? I've seen two films. Oh, you've been busy. One on 16 millimeter at my good friends over at Kinonic 12 Angry Men. Oh, fantastic. Oh my god. Yeah. What a cast. What a film. Just great. And also very, very relevant for today. I mean, there's definitely a lot of undercurrents of racism and prejudice throughout it. But again, like a proper debate, fantastic filmmaking. I think it's Sidney Lumet's first feature film. I think he'd done television before that. Really smart feature film. Oh my god. Imagine starting with that. Oh my god. It's amazing. I mean, again, a play should not be a great film, but it works. And it's classic first feature director material because it's one space. Basically, there's a little courtroom scene and then a little courthouse stairs scene. But most of it's one room, just fantastically photographed and just a huge cast of great actors. And go see that if you haven't seen it. If you can see the 16 millimeter with all the cigarette burns and the jamming reels and the better sound and yeah, try and see it. I saw at the Museum of Art here a Danish film, one of these massive like European co-production. So a lot of people were involved, but it's called The Girl with the Needle. I don't know if that's appeared in England at all. That I've seen, no. Fantastic. I would, if we could, I'd love to do it on the pod at some point. I don't know if it's going to show. It's probably beyond, it's not streaming here yet, but so we saw it in the museum. So this is a vaccine film, yes? To a certain extent, yeah, there are a lot of people. Oh, that was supposed to be a joke. They're a number of needle metaphors and needle uses, I'll say. It is a beautiful, it's black and white, sort of what, 19. I think they talk about the end of World War I. So 1918, something about the Great War coming to a close. So it's very industrial. It's about a garment maker. And it's a lot more than that. The thing about this film is it constantly surprises. So it wrong fits you a lot. There are a lot of subtle little details you have to pick up on. And then it just, you're always guessing, I really, I was shocked how much I liked this film. I thought it was really, really well done. So look out for that, the girl with the needle. Nice. Okay. On the list, it goes. Yes. On Instagram. Are we still, are we, I see, I'm now I'm worried that we shouldn't really be on Instagram anymore. We might have to find a new home. I don't know. The meta thing, you mean? Yeah. So on Instagram, currently we are still at Two Real Cinema Club. You can read the blog, that's pretty neutral, which is Two Real Cinema Club.com. WordPress hasn't gone all the right wing yet. Comment on our YouTube channel or email us at Two Real Cinema Club at Gmail.com. Next time. We're still on YouTube. We haven't been kicked off entirely then. We're clinging on by our fingernails. Yes. Just waiting to be censored and struck off any minute now. Next time. Next time is Return of Jesse Eisenberg. It is. We're watching a real pain, right? With Kieran Gulkin and Jesse Eisenberg, I think wrote, directed, acts in the film. Very exciting. We're seeing it with one of my personal favorites. It's a Rosalini picture journey to Italy, or voyage to Italy. I feel it should be called Via Gio in Italia. I think it is. As always, I will defer to your immensely better European pronunciation. Ingrid Bergman in an Italian classic, a truly fine film. Looking forward to seeing that again. Next week, we've got a quiz. Join us at the popcorn counter for our quarterly movie quiz, and then back for a real pain in two weeks time. Thanks for joining us. As always, and we will see you next time. We'll see you on the road to journey films. Traveling together. Bye, everyone. Bye. Fit. [BLANK_AUDIO]
