I recently watched "I'm Not There", the film about Bob Dylan with a number of actors portraying Dylan at various points in his career - Cate Blanchett is phenomenal. To say the film is kaleidoscopic would be an understatement but if you know Bob's music it all fits together. Highly recommended for Dylan fans - all others beware as it will make very little sense.
Below are a couple of musical moments from the film I particularly enjoyed:
John Hinderaker at Powerline has this take on the Academy Awards. It sounds about right to me:
"This year's Oscar ceremony had the lowest television ratings on record, with only 32 million tuning in in the U.S. That's a smaller audience than watched the first American Idol show this year.
Part of the explanation is that most of this year's nominated films were not popular. They were not popular because they were bleak and violent. Hollywood has been losing customers with what I would consider mainstream tastes for a long time.
I think, too, that the politicization of the awards in recent years has hurt the audience. Hardly anyone wants to listen to hosts making partisan jokes, actors lecturing us on politics, or Michael Moore doing anything at all. (Yes, Moore was nominated again this year.) I watched a good part of the show with my wife and two of my daughters. We turned it off when some goofball started talking about Abu Ghraib. There's a pretty simple lesson here: if you don't care about your audience, at some point the audience will stop caring about you."
I think JD Johannes pretty well summarizes my feelings about the recent spate of Iraq war films - as well as why I won't be in the audience:
"Every morning I go to the gym and run on the treadmill.
Every morning I am subjected to at least a dozen commercials for the new anti-war movie 'Lions for Lambs.'
Despite spending several million dollars on advertising and marketing, 'Lions for Lambs' will flop--just like 'Rendition' & and 'Valley of Elah.'
They will flop because the human psyche, especially the American variety, prefers real heroes--like the original hero of the Valley of Elah, a young shepherd named David who killed Goliath then cut off the giant's head.
In the latest round of war movies the heroes are not the Soldiers and Marines who every day fight and defeat a vicious and barbaric enemy--the heroes are reporters, lawyers and activists.
And since every story requires a villain, the real enemy--Mohammedan Jihadists--are replaced by neo-cons, politicians, Soldiers and Marines.
This substitution of the traditional mono-myth away from a hero who faces physical danger and conquers an enemy is a result of cowardice of the modern story tellers."
