Softwing Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Solidrariol Am I Missing Something?

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Charles Herold (cherold) Towards the end of Don't Look Back, a reporter asks a babbling, pretentious, possibly stoned Bob Dylan how much of what he says he actually means. While Dylan blows up at the reporter, the question is central to the movie, which portrays a young, arrogant, brilliant folk singer playing music and arguing with people.At times it all seems like a put on, with Dylan poking and prodding people just to see how they'll react. He let's everyone know that he doesn't really care what anyone thinks, yet at times you can see how concerned he is with his own image. Dylan is contrary, but he has something to say, both in his songs and in moments like a weird argument with some guy about whether Dylan should take an interest in this guy.The movie also has his posse, most notably a young Joan Baez who seems like a lot more fun than her woke-Madonna persona lead me to believe.This is cinema verite, which means it just tosses a bunch of stuff at the viewer and lets them sort it out. Dylan pontificating, Dylan's manager negotiating payment, Dylan on stage, singing almost invariably with less passion than when he's singing offstage. It's an interesting movie, although I'm not sure how interesting one would find it without a preceding interest in Dylan.

Chris_Docker Do you know that feeling when a song captures you completely? One minute there's all these thoughts running around in your head and the next minute someone switches the radio on and it's kinda like it screams, STOP!You can feel it. You let your whole being be absorbed by it. You're on a high. Then you catch your breath . . . Bob Dylan, as depicted in Don't Look Back, is the kind of megastar that can grip you emotionally and intellectually. While their neighbours joined screaming mobs that bayed at the Beatles, Bob Dylan fans listen in rapt silence, taking in every word."How many times must the cannon balls fly - Before they're forever banned? The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind, The answer is blowin' in the wind."He inhabits a hallowed quality. Anti-war protesters, educated and disenchanted youth, all see him as their hero. An emblem of hope. Dylan inspired people. Made them feel they could make a difference. Somehow make it a better world.It was also the Swinging Sixties. Music videos hadn't been invented. In cinema, TV commercials director Richard Lester had kicked off a style of pop musical with the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night (1964). Andy Warhol projected live footage of a band to heighten a live performance (The Velvet Underground and Nico, 1966). Whereas for the opening scene of D.A. Pennebaker's film, Don't Look Back, a deadpan Dylan simply discards one large white card after another. They contain random words from the overlaid soundtrack song, Subterranean Homesick Blues.That scene has been copied and parodied. Like the kiss-on-the-beach-at-the-edge-of-the-waves in From Here To Eternity, far more people know of and recognise the scene than have ever seen the film. Words are deliberately misspelt. Alan Ginsberg haunts the background as if he's wandered in from another film lot. The scene became one of the first 'music videos'. And the film became one of the early examples of fly-on-the-wall cinema.Don't Look Back is one of the important movies of the decade for its development of cinema verité, a documentary style with many offshoots but at that point made possible with the new lightweight cameras and sound recorders. These were less intrusive and meant that events could be recorded in a way less staged, the filmmakers having opportunity to follow subjects down corridors or seemingly eavesdrop on conversations.Don't Look Back follows Bob Dylan through his most iconic phase, dark glasses and leather jacket, on his 1965 UK tour at the height of his fame. (He is about to dispense with a rustic folksy style and upset fans by embracing rock and roll and electric guitars.) It is the Bob Dylan so cryptically emulated by Cate Blanchett in I'm Not There. This is the legend. And the man who became a legend in his own lifetime, constantly reinventing his poetry. He would one day be awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for his "profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power." Not to mention an honorary degree from the prestigious St Andrews University in Scotland.The follow-the-tour format is a little like In Bed With Madonna. But the immediacy of the film foreshadow movies like Control. Stark black and white photography and a personality that dominates the screen without even trying. Joan Baez (who was near the end of an affair with Dylan) is singing in a hotel room. Dylan looks up with rapt attention (and obvious admiration) for the shy young folk singer Donovan. And clips from his sell-out Albert Hall concert. Throughout – and in sharp contrast to almost everyone else captured in all their bygone sixties primness – Dylan still looks cool and self-assured in his own skin even by 21st century standards. Somehow his image hasn't aged.There was something almost mystical about Dylan at the time. Press conferences in the film (that would also be re-staged later in I'm Not There) show journalists nonplussed by the youngsters response. News stories marvel at how thousands of well-behaved youngsters are packing concert halls – in essence to listen to several hours of one man's poetry. His lyrics, ranging from poignant stories to stream-of-consciousness collections, were emotionally resonant with metaphors and phrases that could be appropriated to every person's private suffering, every cry of pain behind anti-establishment (and particularly anti-war) sentiments. Dylan never claimed to be any other than a poet and a guitarist. "I got nothing to say about these things I write – I just write them . . . I don't write them for any reason. There's no message." His almost angry 1960s disclaimer in the film will still be uttered almost 40 years later at great length in his Chronicles biography. No-one wanted to believe he was only interested in writing poetry. But his openness and honesty in facing down critics is disarming.For non-music fans and people not specifically interested in the period, the film has slightly less to offer. Poor definition on many hand-held shots gives a lack of visual elegance. The lack of any voice-over means the viewer has to work out many details themselves. And, while it is a remarkable and very vibrant portrait of an esteemed artists at one of the most famous and influential periods of his career, there are maybe too few songs for fans.Dylan would go on to win Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Awards and receive several Nobel Prize nominations for literature. The film stops long before he had achieved such mainstream critical acclaim. It never features him singing the credits song, Subterranean Homesick Blues, or the song from which the title is taken. Ironically, it looks back to a period he himself had abandoned by the time the film was released.

MisterWhiplash D.A. Pennebaker does something different with this clearly- and probably slightly revolutionary- approach to form of cinema verite approach that has as much to do with directorial choice as it does with lack of any budget, and trying to use the best of an all-access-pass to the behind the scenes with an iconoclast like Bob Dylan. As far as I can tell, and maybe it's something sort of naive, there doesn't seem to be an inherent bias on part of the filmmaker. A director of a documentary usually, and most often effectively, will have some kind of subjectivity, or something to say with the collection of interviews and the subject matter. But we never really see Pennebaker skewering either side or the other. For whatever one might perceive to see in Bob Dylan from this time capsule, a man at 23 who was swarmed by media buzz and an acclaim that was staggering (and, from the start for Dylan, more than a bit of a crock), it can't be said that Pennebaker is being unfair to anyone here, not to Donovan or the press or whoever it was that broke that glass in the street.And least of all to Dylan himself; it's because of a stripped-down, bare-boned approach to film-making with a camera in a room getting down the beats- only once does Pennebaker go to a 'flashback' of sorts- that one can't truly and easily pin down what Dylan's all about. And because of the questions raised about the nature of a young artist in a frenzied environment where the pressure to be one thing, i.e. 'folk hero', 'voice of a generation', et all, it's really not simply one of the best rock documentaries, but one of the more insightful, strangely involving documentaries of the past 50 years. We see the fun moments; Dylan having laughs with his fellow musicians or playing guitar with Joan Baez or others; the quiet moments like writing a song on the typewriter; we see the interviewers perplexed at the thought that they're getting prodded by a subject who can disarm their queries at nearly every turn either, arguably, by a stand-offish quality, or just not knowing how to logically answer a question without sounding untruthful. And then the music, on stage, sort of alone in a way with the audience tuned into every word he says as though he's a golden calf.Many scenes are simply fun, experimental. The opening to the film is like a punk rock music video, as Dylan just stands there, awkward and blank-faced, turning over the cards for Subterranean Homesick Blues, with Ginsberg at the end walking across the alley Dylan was standing on. Seeing Dylan with an acute sense of humor is refreshing, and at times it's almost like he uses it as a defense mechanism, as a means of uncertainty to go through fans and the like (the scene with the science student has been described by some as Dylan being simply bullying, but again there seems to not really be any bias- Pennebaker could make this guy look like the fool, but each side is heard, and whoever comes out the wiser once the conversation ends is anyone's call). It might go without saying, however, that some of the material in the film could use some context: Dylan had to go under the same sort of press attention and questions every time, over and over, which was something that Dylan could never really adjust to like other celebrities or popular musicians. Hence a scene like the heated talk with the TIME news reporter; if one knows nothing of Dylan, it might make him seem hostile, or at least uncomfortable. But even with this one sees the nature of an interview where there isn't balance- TIME hasn't listened to much of Dylan's music, and Dylan already has a bias against the magazine for, according to him, not printing the truth as it could. "Do you care about what you do?" the interviewer asks him, to which Dylan takes umbrage. It's almost like watching a loop, where neither side will give in exactly, and it's too complex to tell which side is really wrong or right. Questions between them lead to the audience bringing up questions: is this 'folk hero' really a jerk? Is there some truth to his ranting? What about the generation gap? It's a perplexing scene that is, in its tense manner, spectacular.But as many will want to see in Don't Look Back is the music, the mood of the man who's life was work. It's interesting to see Dylan, in context, on the precipice of his transition from folk to rock, starting a slight disconnect with the folk scene with a few fellow band-mates on the tour, and yet always at his peak playing the same songs he'd played repeatedly for the past few years (Times They Are A'Changin is the same opening number on every date of the tour). There are many pure moments of spontaneous music (Joan Baez singing Turn Turn Turn, and Dylan with It's Alright Ma, I'm only Bleeding ), and practically all the stage stuff, including Hard Rain's Gonna Fall and Blowin in the Wind, two of the most atypical of his songs. At the same time one sees and hears someone like Bob Dylan at the peak of his powers in the 60s, there's the observant dissection of fame- even through Pennebaker's technical imperfections of a loud camera- and if only a small taste of the 'why' that Dylan couldn't ever really be himself, and if so wedged somewhere in a quasi-persona. Don't Look Back is amazing.

tedg History only matters to the living at least, and among them to those who can consume the packages we devise to understand what happened.Sometimes I really do believe it requires elite skills, a term used by people without the training and discipline. But most of the time, its just about cultural wrappers, and this is such a case. I can imagine a young person, say a 25 year old, watching this and wondering what the big deal was. Why is this pretentious gnome at all interesting?I think you had to be there, which is another way of saying that you had to be culturally tuned to accept the possibility of major change. For whatever reason, we were, from say 65 to 70, a hundred million in the US and countless others elsewhere. And where we invested our hopes was in these artifacts of the popular culture. In films, yes, but more so in the music. It was religious, with the artists serving more as receptacles for what we sent them than as creative geniuses. Well, yes they were that too, but we have many of those today but miss this huge investment.When Dylan made records from about this period on, each of them (until, say he was lost to Jesus) — each of them anticipated where the poetry we were imagining was going. It was open, liquid, sexually ideal. Powerful stuff, because we felt power. Collective because we did most things collectively then, not just purchasing as now. This little film is so imperfect that its embarrassing that it is all we have to cling to. It just happens to be rare.It has three parts. One is some stage performances. These aren't interesting at all, in large part because he had already changed but hadn't told us. This same period is covered by Martin Scorcese's rather precious "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan," which at least tells a story for those who weren't there.It also hangs around in hotel rooms, interviews and backstage and hears Dylan rattle on. Its embarrassing this, because we still have this notion that great art comes from great men and women and that they know what they are doing. He's basically a twit that we chose, and we see it here. The only really interesting element of this is a glimpse of Sally Grossman. You'll know her from the cover of "Bringing It All Back Home." She's an important woman in the transformation of our poet. She's perhaps the key, a mystery, a poetical story we still can fill after all these years, because it still carries things we accept. If not power and change and better futures, honest politicians and ideal government, enlightenment, at least love from a wise woman who transforms a willing soul.A third part of this really is great and is something you really should see. Dylan's first electric song was "Subterranean Homesick Blues," originally inspired by Alice in Wonderland meets a Guthrey "dream" song, but loaded and transformed with the sort of open images that would characterize his best work. He hadn't started performing it in shows yet. Alan Ginsberg decided to make a text — a residue in words — of the song, introducing puns and annotations of the already open lyrics. These were put on large sheets. Then, while the camera and record were rolling, Dylan flipped through them as the lines appeared, Ginsberg in the background.Its wonderful, a film of a poem of a song of a life of an imagined future revisited from that future.Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.