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New Scorsese Dylan Film

Started by DukeDeMondo, June 03, 2019, 11:41:37 PM

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DukeDeMondo

I didn't know where to put this, really, but it's here now. I am so fucking excited.

Scorsese has made another documentary about Bob Dylan, this one covering the Rolling Thunder Revue and all the shenanigans surrounding it. Ties in with the release of a gargantuan Rolling Thunder box set which is far more affordable than I thought it was going to be, it turns out.

Anyway, I cannot wait. Scorsese's previous Dylan film, No Direction Home, is one of my favourite things to ever have existed. I watch it two or three times a year.

Oh, and it's a Netflix deal, this new one. Here's the trailer. I hope it lasts for six hours.

12th of June, it's out. Drops on June 12th, you'll say.

Cannot wait.

Also, it would have been a good time to let Renaldo And Clara back into the world, this, you'd have thought. But there's still no sign of it.

Regardless. This is going to be phenomenal. I know it.

BlodwynPig

Queen, Elton John, Bob Dylan, just Springsteen to complete the Q magazine 1990s edition set.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: BlodwynPig on June 04, 2019, 12:05:33 AM
Queen, Elton John, Bob Dylan, just Springsteen to complete the Q magazine 1990s edition set.

Here you go. I can't fucking wait for that either.

Glebe


SteveDave

They must've used a load of Renaldo And Clara in the making of this though? I'm looking forward to it. I like listening to Bob speak now. With his voice like a creaking door on 60 a day.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: SteveDave on June 04, 2019, 04:46:12 PM
They must've used a load of Renaldo And Clara in the making of this though?

Yeah, I'd say there's going to be a fair bit of it in there. I can't tell, really, if any of the stuff in that trailer is lifted from it because the best I've ever been able to do, far as R&C goes, is a grubby Nth generation job with all the non-concert stuff removed. So I dunno.


SteveDave

Quote from: DukeDeMondo on June 04, 2019, 04:55:08 PM
Yeah, I'd say there's going to be a fair bit of it in there. I can't tell, really, if any of the stuff in that trailer is lifted from it because the best I've ever been able to do, far as R&C goes, is a grubby Nth generation job with all the non-concert stuff removed. So I dunno.

I've got a 2 disc DVD (taped off of Channel 4- some idents remain) and it's quite clear and all the music's there. I've never gotten to the end of it though.

DukeDeMondo

Fuck me! Someone uploaded it to YouTube last October! (Renaldo And Clara, I mean, not the Scorsese number)

Christ. The quality isn't great, although some sections seem to be better than others, whatever the reason (it's uploaded in 8 parts), but fucking hell. I've ripped it in case it gets blasted to bits before I get a chance to watch it.

ZoyzaSorris

Quote from: BlodwynPig on June 04, 2019, 12:05:33 AM
Queen, Elton John, Bob Dylan, just Springsteen to complete the Q magazine 1990s edition set.

Old Spielberg Dire Straits Film

grassbath

Can't wait to watch this. Love this era of Dylan. This painted-face carnival thing. Rocks so hard.

Look at this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81N7y-wOwps

kalowski

I am freakily excited about this MN I also wish it were 6 hours long.

Sin Agog

I remember being hoodwinked into buying what I thought was the original Renaldo & Clara by a wiry old hippie in a head shoppe that no longer exists.  It was on a couple of CD-Rs and the guy who sold it to me held them like they were uranium or something.  Anyway, when I got home it turned out he'd sold me one blank disc and one with a couple of Traveling Wilburies vids on it.  Was too lazy to seek him out again and get a refund, which must have been what he was banking on.  Looking forward to seeing the next best thing tomorrow. 

Was just reading Joe Boyd's book which mentions an encounter with a young Scorsese who was trying, unsuccesfully, to put together a tangled jumble of close to unusable footage for a musical documentary on The Merry Pranksters.  That Marty's clearly one of those odd guys who hangs onto ideas for decades.

Ant Farm Keyboard

I've seen it.

Let's just say that Martin Scorsese is involved in a partial Casino cast reunion that no-one would have seen coming.

DukeDeMondo

Heh. Well. It's kind of difficult to talk about this without ruining it for folk, really, isn't it? I certainly regret reading anything about it before I saw it. Very much wish I'd gone in blind.

But, I didn't go in blind, so I can't really say whether it does the thing that it does especially well or it doesn't. I guess expecting something like this to remain unspoiled for more than 15 seconds in 2019 is a huge flaw in itself. But I'm aware that I might have felt differently about it had I not been at least partly primed for what I was about to get from the off.

Spoilers below, then.















I thought it was a misfire. Massive waste of an opportunity.

Trying to sift the "was" from the "wasn't" and the "was, but wasn't really" from the "wasn't, but pretty much was" has always been part of the fun of Bob Dylan fandom. Running in circles. Masks upon masks. Seeing the Bob Dylan in the Jack Fate and the Jack Fate in the Jack Frost and the Sergei Petrov in the Robert Zimmerman and so on and so forth. Aware that there's maybe nothing or everything of any of the others in any one of them. Aware that the closer you think you're getting to the truth the more likely it is that you're being played.

Fun, so.

As an example of someone else taking a turn with that particular ball, this falls pretty fucking short, I'd say. It's a long way off an I'm Not There, for example.

Yes it tells you that a bunch of stuff happened that didn't. But so what?

Very little fun to be had here, really.

Largely that's because the moves it pulls are so shallow. Where this stuff goes, it's always more craic when you're not sure one way or the other what's going on. Like when trying to deduce what truth there is, if any, in the various things that Bob has said about Blood In The Tracks over the years, for example. That's something you can lose a long time to, if you're so inclined. There's likely no straight answer, really. Here, for the most part, there is a straight answer. You'll lose no more than a few seconds. A character is either fictional or not, for example, and once you know one way or the other then that's it, it's just wasting your time from then on, that fictional character isn't going to do or tell you anything else of note. They're not even going to amuse you in any meaningful way. What does the Stefan van Dorp character add that comes any way close to justifying the amount of time given over to him? What function does he serve beyond not being real?

I laughed twice in the whole two and a half hours, and tellingly it was something that Bob himself said that made me laugh on both occasions. His "that's all clumsy bullshit... it's about nothing, it's just something that happened forty years ago" right at the outset is the one thing in the film that caught me off guard, and I chuckled another time later on, when he's detailing the curious things that Scarlet Rivera would keep in this trunk of hers. Might be true or not, that, I don't know.

For the most part it's just some folks going on all "Oh, masks, wait, I know, Dylan makes stuff up, lets make stuff up and it'll be just like when Dylan does it!"

If you're going to do this sort of thing right you surely have to do better than just load it up with a load of guff that's easily dismissed with a cursory Google and that has next to nothing to offer to anyone once that game is up. The truly phenomenal concert footage aside, and one or two bits here or there, there's precious little in this that would warrant a second viewing. There's nothing anyone's going to be picking over. The significant falsehoods are nothing more than that and the more ambiguous stuff is of no consequence one way or the other.

Although I said I hoped that it lasted for six hours, I felt it was really outstaying its welcome before even an hour had passed.

I'll skip through it a fair few times more for the performance footage - Dylan's facial expressions alone make it worthwhile - but should it ever become possible to see that stuff in this sort of quality any other way (I dunno how likely that is or it isn't, certainly it's obvious now why nobody involved would have wanted Renaldo And Clara to have become available again at the same time as this was going out into the world), I can't see me ever having reason to look the road this New Scorsese Dylan Film is on.

Netflix should have used some of that Bandersnatch magic to make it so that all of the stuff that becomes tedious as fuck once you know it's just the film half-arsedly doing a Dylan would self-destruct ahead of any repeat viewing, allowing you to enjoy the sixty-odd minutes that can still be enjoyed without having to sit through the hour and a half's worth of garbage that can't.

grassbath

Ah. Well that's a shame.

I might watch it anyway. Fucking hell I love Dylan.

Sin Agog

Quote from: grassbath on June 13, 2019, 10:55:52 PM
Ah. Well that's a shame.

I might watch it anyway. Fucking hell I love Dylan.

I really liked it, for what it's worth.  The mockumentary stuff felt like it may have been a half-arsed Coke idea, and a weird excuse for Scorsese to visit an old friend, but it corralled all this old footage together relatively well.  And those performances, particularly Isis, where Dylan transformed into a bow-legged angry Slim Pickens, were great.  Then again, I like scatty things, and see this as a crackling sister project to Netflix's other bit of archival Lazarusing, The Other Side of the Wind.  I also suspect that the pompous fake European director character may be based on this guy (who made that movie a young Scorsese was trying to edit into a successor to Woodstock: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067414/).  The whole myth of Dylan and the masks stuff basically boils down to him being a bit shy, so I wasn't expecting much on that front;  just watched it for the contact high from seeing people put together a fun little scene.

the science eel


Ballad of Ballard Berkley

I have never in my life seen anyone more utterly, dementedly coked-up than Roger McGuinn in the Rolling Thunder live footage. He makes the beak-hoovering musicians in The Last Waltz look like Thora Hird after downing a slightly too strong cup of Tetley's.

As for the film itself, I agree that Scorsese's playful attempts at fusing fact with fiction fall flat. It's neither as funny nor subversive as it thinks it is. The concert footage is incredible, obviously, and I enjoyed the various glimpses of backstage/between-show Dylan and co, but overall it felt too ordinary, especially when compared to No Direction Home, which is without doubt one of the greatest music documentaries ever made.

It's not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, I enjoyed it for the most part, but I was hoping for something a bit more substantial (as a piece of immersive art, I mean, not in the sense of wanting a straightforward 'heavyweight' documentary).

kalowski

15 minutes in, watching the rehearsal footage I'm reminded why Bob is the Godhead.

kalowski


she said you gonna stay
i said if you want me to, YES

kalowski

Quote from: Monsieur Verdoux on June 15, 2019, 11:31:24 PM
she said you gonna stay
i said if you want me to, YES
The best "Yes" in musical history.

DukeDeMondo

Quote from: Ballad of Ballard Berkley on June 15, 2019, 08:48:31 PM
It's not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination, I enjoyed it for the most part, but I was hoping for something a bit more substantial (as a piece of immersive art, I mean, not in the sense of wanting a straightforward 'heavyweight' documentary).

Yeah, that's what I was getting at too. It just felt really insubstantial. The other thing I meant to say, related to that, was that it seemed like a hell of a lot of the behind the scenes stuff, staged and otherwise, was lifted directly from Renaldo & Clara, alongside a huge amount of the concert footage. So much of it seemed to be pulled from there, or seemed like outtakes from the same, with so many of the same themes ported over with so little variation, that it actually felt like a direct, unacknowledged remake a lot of the time. Maybe it was supposed to replace it, maybe that was the idea, but it seemed like Scorsese actually brought very little of note to this at all. Everything that this does, R&C already did, and did with loads of the same material. Granted this is more straightforwardly enjoyable than R&C, especially if you're watching that eyesore of a version that's on YouTube (I'm not complaining, an eyesore of a version is better than nothing), but still.


Ferris

I'm a Dylan obsessive, so I'm naturally trying to find time to watch this.

I loved No Direction Home to the point of driving out of my way (as a teenager when I had this kind of time) to get a photo in my sunglasses and long coat with my old shit car on the ferry terminal in the same pose as Dylan on the film poster.

It's north of Bristol, if memory serves.

Quote from: kalowski on June 15, 2019, 11:39:01 PM
The best "Yes" in musical history.

Rick Wakeman leaves thread in tears

grassbath

Quote from: Monsieur Verdoux on June 15, 2019, 11:31:24 PM
she said you gonna stay
i said if you want me to, YES

His voice was superb on this tour. Absolutely proved that he could do 'rock' singing as well as anyone, and better than many, with that uncanny knack for elevating a line with a twist in the enunciation.

Ant Farm Keyboard

What, McGuinn was on coke???


kalowski

I enjoyed it a lot, but wanted much more concert footage. That stuff was incredible and Dylan was on fire. I've always loved this period, his reinvention of songs is remarkable. The Live 75 Bootleg Series disc is just brilliant, and now I've got to start making my way through the 14 disc version.
Bloody magic.

poodlefaker

Watched this pissed at the weekend knowing nothing about it and took it all at face value (i'm not a major Dylan fan). There were bits that I thought were odd/surprising (Sharon Stone, Jimmy Carter)...reading about it afterwards I couldn't really see the point. The really good stuff is parts like the old ladies at the mah-jong tournament and Joni Mitchell doing "Coyote".

C_Larence

I really liked it for the most part. The guy playing Stefan Van Dork or whatever his name is was awful though, could they not have found someone who didn't find acting to be visibly painful?

mojo filters

I watched the film as an avid fan of Dylan - both from the perspective of being amazed by previous Rolling Thunder live recordings and footage, plus having preferred the Blood On Tracks and Desire period from my first introduction as a teenager.

I was disappointed, as there was so much great live material and other period footage that set the scene so effectively. I thought Scorsese would work some cinematic magic. Instead it felt like he was deliberately injecting his own stamp, via unnecessary additional material and editorial complications.

However it inspired me to get the full CD set. I haven't got right through it yet, but so far it's fucking amazing!

I lost my previous Rolling Thunder stuff in some house moving hassle. I'd forgotten how absolutely brilliant the live versions of tracks like Hurricane and Isis were...but was quickly reminded.

I'd always loved Desire as a classically trained violinist, as it was my first exposure to rock'n'roll fiddle, along with Zappa's Hot Rats. What's so great is the amazing contributions from Scarlet Rivera to earlier Dylan classics like Just Like A Women.

From what I've heard so far, this is truly Dylan at his peak live. The new arrangements of songs both old and new are all just perfect.

Watching the film is fascinating, as all those musicians strumming away have no right to sound that good. It looks like the making of a musical shambles (sadly something I've experienced when performing with larger ensembles) yet the dynamics are truly the making of the full band reworkings of all those stone cold classics.

Even Dylan playing Tangled Up In Blue alone with his harp, brings a new dynamism to a track I already regarded as perfect. The slow songs like Oh Sister really benefit from this treatment too. The backing band sound so disciplined, though obviously the mixing has helped.

I'd love to learn more about the technical side of things. For example, I'd be surprised to learn they were recording the stage split on anything fancier than 8 track, though I guess two recorders could have been sync'd.

I can't put a name to the mic Dylan (and others) use for their vox. It looks like a modern tom mic with a big shield and an SM7 type XLR out; I assume Neutrik etc didn't make right-angled XLRs back then, but I may well be wrong.

For me, the standout track from the records and film is that amazing staccato version of Isis. As per the comment made above - that is the most impressive and emphatic "YES!"

It truly sounds like the best news that I've ever heard!