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List Price: $29.99 | | Label: Weinstein Company, The
Salesrank: 406
Released: May 6, 2008 |
| Our Price: $14.16 |
| Used Price: $10.94 |
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MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Media: DVD |
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Editorial Review:
Inspired by the life and songs of Bob Dylan I'm Not There is "a profoundly personal and passionate film" (A.O. Scott The New York Times) that captures the essence of this elusive genius. Six different actors - including Heath Ledger Christian Bale Richard Gere and Oscar nominee Cate Blanchett in a "soon-to-be-legendary performance" (Peter Travers Rolling Stone) - each embody part of the Dylan legend: from Greenwich Village folk singer to electric guitar trailblazer to born-again preacher. Directed by Academy Award nominated writer/director Todd Haynes (Far From Heaven) I'm Not There is "unquestionably the year's most original American movie" (Thelma Adams US Weekly).System Requirements:Running Time: 135 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: DRAMA/BIOGRAPHY Rating: R UPC: 796019810906 Manufacturer No: 81090
Description of I'm Not There (Two-Disc Collector's Edition):
Unapologetically audacious, I'm Not There is more post-modern puzzle than by-the-numbers biopic. A title card sets the scene: "Inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan." Yet the film features no figure by that name. Instead, writer/director Todd Haynes presents six characters, each incarnating different stages in the artist's career. Perfume's Ben Whishaw, a black-clad poet, serves as a slippery sort of narrator. The action begins with the wanderings of an 11-year-old black runaway named "Woody Guthrie" (Marcus Carl Franklin)--his raucous duet with Richie Havens on "Tombstone Blues" is a highlight--and ends with a silver-haired Billy the Kid (Richard Gere) watching the Old West die before his eyes. In the interim, there's the folk singer-turned-preacher (Christian Bale), the actor (Heath Ledger), and the rock star (Cate Blanchett, who has Don't Look Back Dylan down to a science). The chronology is purposefully non-linear, and editor Jay Rabinowitz cuts rapidly, Jean-Luc Godard-style, between cinéma vérité black-and-white and saturated color, Richard Lester-like slapstick and Fellini-inspired surrealism (Ed Lachman served as cinematographer).
What makes the picture fun for Dylan fans--and potentially frustrating for neophytes--is that every album and movie bears an alternate title. Ledger's Robbie, for instance, stars in "Grain of Sand," actually a reference to the Pete Seeger song. As in Haynes' glam rock reverie Velvet Goldmine, the trickery involves the entire cast. While Julianne Moore plays former lover Alice, a dead ringer for Joan Baez; Michelle Williams embodies elusive scenester Coco, i.e. Edie Sedgwick. If I'm Not There is less affecting than Control, the year's other big music film, it rewards repeat viewings like few biographical features. The soundtrack mixes originals with covers, like Jim James's heartfelt "Goin' to Acapulco." --Kathleen C. Fennessy
I'm Not There (Two-Disc Collector's Edition) Reviews:
Painful 
2008-07-22 - This movie sucks! Artsy-Fartsy nonsense. Don't waste your time. An insult to real Dylan fans.
vivid and imaginative 
2008-07-14 - In making a movie about the legendary musician/songwriter/poet/social activist Bob Dylan, filmmaker Todd Haynes could have hired a single actor to impersonate his subject and then related the key events of his life in standard chronological order. But Haynes clearly had something deeper and more complex in mind when he envisioned this work. The result, "I'm Not There," is a boldly original movie that is part truth and part deliberate fiction, part straight-forward narrative and part pseudo-documentary, part stark realism and part surrealistic fantasy. And while all of the elements don't work equally well together, the movie as a whole still provides a fascinating portrait of one of the key artists and musicians of the second half of the 20th Century.
Haynes breaks one of the cardinal rules of biographical storytelling right off the bat by having no fewer than six actors - Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger, Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw and Marcus Carl Franklin - portray Dylan at various stages of his career and life. And, in an act of even greater audaciousness, he has assigned each of these roles a different fictitious name (and it isn`t because Haynes feared he might be sued for his efforts since Dylan himself okayed the movie). Haynes, with the assistance of co-writer Oren Moverman, then arranges the various pieces into a time-shifting mosaic that allows us to see Dylan at all those discrete moments in his life virtually simultaneously. Finally, he incorporates many of Dylan's songs on the soundtrack to serve as a sort of running commentary on both the character and the times in which he`s living.
Haynes makes it clear that Dylan was as much a product of those times as he was a shaper of them. The film shows us his early days as an idealistic young singer/songwriter (here named Woody after Dylan's boyhood hero and role model Woody Guthrie), who has just escaped from a juvenile detention facility and is now riding the boxcars, his guitar in hand, strumming out protest songs in defense of the underprivileged and working classes. We then follow Dylan through the various stages of his life: first, as Jack (Bale), a rising young folk singer in Greenwich Village; then as Jude (Blanchett) an anti-establishment pop culture hero, singing and speaking out against social injustice and the Vietnam War; later (still as Jude), as a press-hounded "celebrity" often denounced as a "sellout" for adopting the very elitist lifestyle he'd earlier railed against in his works. The roles assigned to Ledger and Gere provide even more radically oblique takes on the Dylan persona. Ledger plays Robbie, a Hollywood actor who's portraying Jack (i.e. Dylan) in a film on his life, while Gere represents an aging version of Dylan, envisioned here as Billy the Kid, living in the wild west and taking on the legendary Pat Garrett in an effort to save a small town from being subsumed by an evil corporation (this is definitely the most "out there" of all the storylines in the film and, without a doubt, the least compelling and effective).
Of the actors, Blanchett gets to play Dylan at what is probably the juiciest and most provocative period of his life (at least from a character standpoint), the time when he alienated many of his earliest fans by "reinventing himself" as it were - turning away from traditional folk music in favor of a much edgier rock'n'roll sound, and transforming his own image from that of a jeans-wearing man of the people to that of a sunglasses-sporting, Carnaby-clad - and now quite remarkably cynical - pop culture celebrity. Blanchett`s vivid performance captures the tormenting self-doubt of a man caught between being a "spokesman" for a social movement and a simple human being trying to survive in the very world he's being called upon to denounce. The movie raises the question of whether it is ever possible for an artist to remain a social iconoclast after he has attained the level of a cultural icon - with all the attendant compromise that comes with such a status.
Next to Blanchett, Ledger gives what is probably the most fully-rounded performance in the film, fleshing out the domestic side of the public figure in his thoughtful portrayal of Dylan as husband and father.
Haynes' eclecticism involves the mixing together of not only various time periods but of wildly varying filmmaking styles as well. For instance, some of the stories are shot in black-and-white while others are done in color, just as he uses a traditional narrative technique in some sequences yet documentary-style reportage in others.
The film does suffer from a number of serious, though nowhere near fatal, flaws. As noted earlier, the Richard Gere section comes across as too arbitrary and tacked-on to feel fully a part of the rest of the film. And the movie does run on a trifle longer than it needs to in order to make its point. Moreover, the overly objectified style of the movie, impressive as it is, nevertheless, has the perhaps inevitable effect of distancing us so much from the subject matter that the heart, as opposed to the head, is never really fully engaged in what it is showing us.
Still, for the sheer unadulterated love Haynes demonstrates for his medium and the insight the movie offers into a beloved cultural icon, "I'm Not There" is a work very much worth savoring, faults and all.
Pompous, Self Conscious, and False 
2008-07-10 - What happens when Major Money Men and Hollywood's most bankable stars want to make an art film? This mess happens. Artsy fartsy in the truest sense of the word. Cate Blanchett does not seem/project/look like, or act like Dylan at all. Not even a little bit. Worse, she smashes her strengths as an actor (robust, sincere presence and a great voice) in attempting to. At film's end, nothing about Bob Dylan is there. Every single performance shrieks for attention in an embarrassing way (with the possible exception of Christian Bale, who at least captures the humility of Dylan the born-again preacher).
At least the soundtrack is first rate.
Not even slightly recommended.
Who Was There?
2008-07-10 - I have long admired Bob Dylan. He is a part of our culture. They'll be selling his music long after this film is only available at yard sales, sharing boxes with lava lamps. This film is a confusing waste of fine actors. They should have used the production costs to feed the hungry.
True, some of the pieces of this puzzle are better than others. But when you put it all together, it's obvious that Dylan's creative genius had nothing to do with it. I'll give it a star because you have to give it a star. There is a lot of good music and Richie Havens was great.
Great for the Bob Dylan fans!
2008-07-07 - My dad is a true Bob Dylan fan and is very happy that he can add this movie to his collection.
