Malcs

For those who have read or heard the various reviews calling "Masked and Anonymous" a "mess" all I can say is if you enjoy the work of Bob Dylan you'll enjoy it, and if you don't enjoy his work, you probably won't enjoy it. It's that simple really.

It's a surreal social critique of the current state of things, as well as an attempt to illustrate to the audience not only what the world looks like to Bob Dylan, but also what Bob Dylan looks like to the world, much like his music. So if you are familiar with and enjoy that about his music, you'll enjoy the film.

And also, much like his music has always done, if you're up on your historical references and cultural detritus you'll find yourself giggling a lot. The puns and inside jokes are scattered everywhere, as are his songs, not necessarily performed by him.

Just let it soak over you like a long Dylan album and you'll know what I mean.

All the reviews are basically saying "It's not like how other movies are made these days. What is this crap?" In many ways it's similar to Renaldo & Clara, but it's much more mainstream than that ever was.

There's even a few seconds of the Seattle WTO riots in 99 in the film.

I think the best way to approach the film is as if you were watching a Duchamp. I could see it on a double bill with Orpheus. There's many allusions and references to other films like a pocketwatch with a broken face.

It's not a Hollywood film even though it's got a lot of Hollywood people in it. It's more like a very expensive foreign indie film. They all do great jobs, especially John Goodman, his character not being too far a stretch from his role in Barton Fink. But the characters are caricatures, archetypes, just like in Desolation Row it imagines what the future might be like, or maybe it just looks a little too clearly at what is happening right now.

From a straight acting perspective method would be wasted on these sketchy characters, because like in a noir film, you know them enough to know who they are and what they do, but their lives are all so repressed, their dreams are all of trying to comprehend the world they live in, where there is constant revolution, either dire poverty or obscene wealth and a lot of violence lies between the two, both physically and emotionally. Even the president of the television network has bodyguards with assault rifles. Other reviews all try saying that it takes place in some Central American country, but the irony is it was all filmed on the streets on the other side of LA.

Time is played with, sometimes to make someone get something right, and the parade of faces peopling the movie are the mythological icons of not just this age but stretching back past the 20th century. Ghandi, Pope John Paul II, Abraham Lincoln, Koo Koo The Bird Girl, they're all here. The characters all have names like Jack Fate, Uncle Sweetheart, Tom Friend, Bobby Cupid, Valentine, Prospero, Nestor, Bacchus. There's as many overriding themes as there are submotifs, but it's chockfull of details, too, and the details are fast and furious. You learn just to let one drop if you don't get it because another one will be coming up soon.

Many threads are pulled together and the plot is thought through as much as anything, but Dylan has always been more about questions than about answers, so traditional expectations of identifying with a simple plot and easily sympathetic characters won't leave you very nourished, as much as if you just accepted that, like life, anyone could say anything at any time which just might not be what you expected to hear.

So you can't see the framework that the plot is on very easily because the themes and questions asked are far more interesting and ultimately more overwhelming and therefore concentrated on more than the plot. The themes are big, the questions are huge, after all, this is Dylan. Mortality, desire, loyalty, purity, confession, nurturing, freedom, imprisonment, corruption, manipulation, poverty, madness.

The camerawork is impressive because a lot of the scenes have to do with who is more powerful than the other character, and overhead shots and shots up stairs really underline a lot of the relationships of the characters to their world, their friends and their enemies.

And of course, like a Dylan song, you could watch it over and over and find new things every time, even though you'll get most of it in one viewing. Some things you immediately realize what he just got away with. Who else could put Ed Harris in blackface and have him in a scene where he's looking down on Dylan from the top of a stairwell. Then the next time Dylan looks up he's changed to a young Rastafarian janitor.

When Dylan's character gets out of jail the first song you hear as he struts along with his suit and his guitar is an Italian rap remix of Like A Rolling Stone.

The center of the film is when a small black girl sings an amazing a capella version of The Times They Are A'Changin' to Dylan and his band while they're resting on the bandstand. It sends Dylan's character inward until he finally says "It's all just ordinary things" in one of the films very effective voiceovers. If you think of the film as a new album by Dylan, the voiceovers would be the liner notes he wrote himself. Another one closes the film, and when you hear what his last words are you realize that Dylan has basically just taken the same things he always addresses in his music, as well as the way he presents such things in his music, and has simply tried to do the exact same thing in a film. If you approach the film as a set of songs it will be easier to follow. The scenes are what are important, as well as who is who to the other person. The plot is controlled by the unpredictable events of the dictatorship in power and the dying king and who is the rightful heir.

There was a brilliant article in the magazine Brill's Content a few months after "Eyes Wide Shut" was released which explained what happened to the marketing of the film before it was released. What it boils down to is the fact that Kubrick only let one person see the film before it was released and that person worked for Time magazine and he saw it 72 hours before the film was scheduled to be released in July. But since film magazines and other avenues of the mainstream media have production cycles that have deadlines months in advance, before you knew it rumour was being compounded on top of rumour until it completely snowballed out of control. Obviously no member of the press actually went to the trouble to actually read the novel that Kubrick based the film on, they were more interested in repeating whatever rumour sounded like it would sell magazines. At one point I remember hearing that the film was about two psychoanalysts who are married to each other and each of them starts to have an affair with their respective patients and then they decide to swing with them. Whoa. Says a lot more about the person who thought up the rumour than it does about the film itself. Of course, Kubrick played it to the hilt by just refusing to comment and letting the rumours get out of control until you have lapdog rags plastering their cover with things like "The sexiest film ever?" Can you say "Pavlov"?

The public really was conned into thinking that this film was going to have THE most erotically charged orgy ever filmed by what is considered one of the, if not THE, greatest director of all time. So you wonder why everyone said it bombed? Because they were swindled into thinking that it was supposed to be like the rumours and when it was finally released it was revealed to be just like any other Kubrick film: I.E. a sensitive and very analytical piece that is essentially an art house film that will be discussed for decades. No wonder Kubrick kept his mouth shut: he got his last film, an art house film with, as such, a very limited audience, into the minds of everyone passing a news stand and got them into the theatre thanks to their blind faith in the lies and rumours that the mainstream media publish before they realized that it was, sure, a movie about sex, but not an erotic movie at all. Kubrick made a film which analyzes the difference between sex and love (something the United States doesn't realize there's a difference between) and shows both sex and love in ways that are not erotic at all. Those who were disappointed by this film were those expecting a movie with sex in it to be erotic, which basically reveals just how shallow this culture is. It's actually the warmest film Kubrick ever made. If you can think about sex without getting aroused, you'll love this film. If you can't think about sex without getting aroused, perhaps you're better off with Russ Meyers films.

This could be the film that is needed to refer to right now as whites and blacks in this culture finally begin to circle each other, trying to decide how best to get down and dirty with that damn bugaboo of race and it's shadow players of class, justice and power.

John Travolta plays Louis Pinnock, a factory worker for See's Candies with a history of exemplary company loyalty working his way towards a promotion. He's been with the company many years, dutifully doing his job, looking forward to the day, any day now, that he'll finally get his much-deserved promotion to foreman. He has a wife, a little boy, a small house in the part of the city that doesn't have any sidewalks, and some sort of problem with pride because his wife (Kelly Lynch) wants to work, but Louis gives her the evil eye every time she brings it up. One day after work, just at quitting time, Louis's boss asks Louis and his coworker if one of them could take a small package across town to drop off to Thaddeus Thomas (Harry Belafonte) the owner of the company who has an estate. Louis steps forward and grabs the package immediately, even though he'll be delivering it on his own time and happily takes his beat-up old white truck across town to deliver the package. When he gets to the estate of Mr. Thomas he ends up approaching it from the back way without realizing it, walks up to the house, looks up and inadvertently sees Mr. Thomas's wife nude through an upstairs window. Mr. Thomas, who is watching him through the window as he stands right next to his unclothed wife, says to Louis' boss on the phone "Send another delivery boy next time. Not another peeping tom." These few words set off a chain reaction that ricochets for the rest of the movie, serpentining it's way through the issue of color by presenting a mirror image for society to see: Louis and his family (in fact ALL whites in this picture) live in a black world. When Louis's little boy flips the channels on the remote control, EVERY television station has nothing but black faces. Black game shows. Black soap operas. Black news broadcasts with violators referred to as "Caucasian". Black commercials. The family of Mr. Thomas all sit around, fat and happy, at their gigantic dinner table talking about how inferior the white race is. Scary? Wait until you see the look of incredulous horror of Thaddeus' face when he sees one white man gun down another.

What screenwriter and first time director Desmond Nakano (Last Exit To Brooklyn, American Me) has created is a horror movie for white folk, and this SHOULD scare the white folk who have never thought twice about their hegemony in society, and the responsibility it brings. Since he has directly inverted the equation, the question of skin color is shown to be completely moot as the real underlying issues of class and power are revealed to be the causes they really are, not the effects. This is a film about a situation that gets out of hand due to a simple misunderstanding that is dealt with so offhandedly that the ensuing consequences were never even contemplated by the perpetrator and they come back not only to haunt him, but to place him on the threshold of death's door. I don't want to reveal any more of the plot for a reason: The script is so good that when law-abiding Louis finds himself in the worst of all desperate situations, scene follows scene so haphazardly as a reflection of his thought processes because he has completely freaked out. He has no idea what he is going to do next, and the tension of the film is wound so tightly because the film is through Louis's eyes, and there is nothing more dangerous than a criminal who has not thought out his own motivation. John Travolta's performance is exceptional because he doesn't have any of his standard suave moves or cool facade to lean back on, ala Pulp Fiction or Get Shorty. He's a blue-collar worker who has become accustomed to his lower rung in society, yet has accepted his responsibilities with pride and diligence. He has been a considerate, patient, law-abiding citizen his whole life and has worked hard for his position and his family, no matter how slightly above the poverty line he may be swimming, and when he realizes that all he's worked so hard for means nothing to the heartless authority figures that begin to circle around him like vultures who insist on remaining oblivious to his circumstance he begins to behave like a cornered rat.

When the film is over and the cards have fallen where they have, what is left is a tragedy that, like all tragedies, could have been so easily avoided if only two minutes of someone's time could have been negotiated. Take someone you know to this film. Take that person who you know as an acquaintance whom you've never wanted to have as a friend just because they don't understand it's not about the color of someone's skin, it's about character. Talk to them extensively about the issues in this film on your way home. Make sure they get it.