The Last Waltz

Year 12, Day 207 - 7/25/20 - Movie #3,614

BEFORE: Finally it's here, no more dicking around, no more adding documentaries I found on Amazon or Hulu that I wasn't planning on watching - it's time to watch what some people say is the greatest concert film ever made, no pressure.  I've sort of been following Martin Scorsese as my guide on this year's documentary chain, if Scorsese's involved then I think the subject matter might have some merit, and he directed this one way back in 1976.  Well, it was filmed in 1976, but released as a feature in 1978.  Things just took longer back in those days, that was before the age of digital cinema, it might even have been before digital editing, so that means a team of editors had to live in a little booth for a year or so, just sorting, cataloguing and finally splicing together actual pieces of tangible film to create this.  Old school.

The members of The Band carry over - Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson.  I'm listing them in alphabetical order, but if you listen really close, you can probably hear them arguing over whose name should have come first.

THE PLOT: A film presentation of the final concert of The Band.

AFTER: Well, knowing what I know about The Band now, I think this one really holds up.  I remember people watching this movie back when I had a part-time job at the NYU Library's media center, and in those days nothing was digital, if someone wanted to watch this movie at their station, someone like me had to put a VHS tape in a machine and then send the feed to their monitor.  This was way back in 1987 or 1988, and I managed to still never get around to watching the film for another 32 years.  But I do eventually get to everything, or at least I try.

Now, obviously this was NOT a track-for-track representation of the night in question, which was Thanksgiving 1976.  The final concert of The Band started at 9 pm and their last encore was reportedly at 2:15 am, so this concert was over 5 hours long!  Even if you allow for breaks between the songs, to change performers or set-ups or make mike adjustments or switch instruments, that's still a ton of material.  The film is just under two hours long, and there are interview segments with members of The Band in between the songs, so that means some hard choices needed to be made - there was just no way to get all the music from the live show in to the film.

But that's OK.  If you want to see all four and a half hours of the concert, it's available on YouTube now, in three parts.  Maybe you'll agree with Scorsese's choices about which songs to cut, and maybe you won't, but that's what a director has to do, condense the time of an event so it fits into a running time that theater owners will be willing to show.  Look, the 1970 concert film "Woodstock" is three hours long, but the festival went on for three DAYS?  Should the film be three days long, too?  I don't know, should a theater provide cots for people to sleep on?  Of course not.  Three days of peace and love had to be cut down to a manageable, watchable running time, and the same holds true here.  I think somebody made a whole second film with the songs that didn't make the "Woodstock" cut, and you can watch that one, too, if you're really into it or you want to see what you missed in the first film.

You can't really second-guess a director like Scorsese, but people are going to go ahead and complain anyway, I suppose.  The Band performed a version of their most famous song, "The Weight", but either it wasn't up to snuff or perhaps there was a technical error of some kind, because it was replaced with a version clearly recorded in a studio and NOT on stage at the Winterland Theater in front of a live crowd.  But, on the other hand, it has the Staple Singers singing a couple verses, and gospel singers almost always make a rock song better.  I much prefer the version of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" that was recorded live for the "Rattle and Hum" album over the one that was released on "The Joshua Tree", just because of the gospel choir (the New Voices of Freedom) that took the song to a whole different place.  So I can perhaps see why Scorsese chose to edit in the studio version of "The Weight", it's really good.

Another common complaint is that the songs in the film are out of order - in fact the movie opens with The Band's final encore, "Don't Do It", before snapping back a few hours to the opening of the show.  I guess the idea here was to end the concert film with the biggest, highest moment, which is the all-star version of Bob Dylan's "I Shall Be Released".  And in 1976, everybody knew that song, so  everyone who'd been on the bill the whole evening, PLUS Ringo Starr, PLUS Ronnie Wood, was back on stage for the big finale.  That just HAD to be the big, final moment of the movie, but then just before the credits, there's an instrumental performed by the Band, also recorded in a studio instead of on the stage, which happens to be a waltz, duh.  Still, I wonder if the footage of "Don't Do It" as an encore could have worked here as well, since it does end with The Band walking off the stage for the final time - or would we all rather just remember them playing, rather than leaving?

(Look, the triple album released doesn't have the performances in the order they were performed, either.  Time and space have to be considered differently when one is making a movie or an album.  Sometimes the only way to experience the concert in the intended order is to actually go to the damn concert.  Rock music fans are even worse than "Star Wars" fans, I think - they're always going to complain about what gets released, and HOW it gets released.  There are professional people who edit movies or produce albums, and you'd like to think these people know what they're doing.  If songs have to be moved around due to time constraints or to make a better listening order for an album release, these decisions are probably not made lightly.  If you want to go spend five hours on YouTube watching the raw feed from the "Last Waltz" concert, you're free to do that now.)

I could spend a lot of time picking apart every track here, but since I only own The Band's Greatest Hits album, I wasn't familiar with some of their songs, like "It Makes No Difference" or even "Evangeline" - and this was after watching two other documentaries about The Band!.  I knew "Stage Fright", "Ophelia", "The Shape I'm In", and of course "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" and "Up on Cripple Creek".  You couldn't really sing some of these songs these days, because you can't be seen promoting "Dixie" any more, that's out of favor because racism, and you also can't say "cripple" any more, either.  I'm surprised that the footage in "The Last Waltz" hasn't already been changed to sound like "Up on Differently-Abled Creek", if I'm being honest.  "Up on Handi-Capable Creek"?  And the only Band song that was apparently part of the set list that didn't make the film that I really miss would be "Life is a Carnival".  I'd vote for putting that one in over, say, "It Makes No Difference".  Plus, I think I only know "Chest Fever" from Paul Shaffer's band playing that instrumental during commercial breaks on Letterman's old show.

Some of the performances from the guest performers fit in very well, but others are questionable, to say the least.  Neil Diamond's here performing one song, "Dry Your Eyes", a song he apparently co-wrote with Robbie Robertson, so I guess that justifies it.  But Van Morrison performs "Caravan", and of all the lame Van Morrison songs (and there are many) I think that's one of the lamest.  It's got like four lines before it just deteriorates into "La la la LA la" over and over, so it's one of those "I'll write this part later" songs to me, where an artist just never got around to finding more lyrics where the "La las" ended up.  And Joni Mitchell brought the proceedings to a screeching halt by singing "Coyote", which I think was the song she wrote and performed during that Rolling Thunder Revue tour.  I'm not a Joni Mitchell fan, not even "Big Yellow Taxi" - I just don't see the appeal.

(The Joni Mitchell song unintentionally highlights a key difference between men and women - the typical male-written rock song about a tour hook-up is something like "I met this chiquita in Omaha, we had a rockin' good time, but when the tour moves on, babe, you know I've gotta leave." It's plain, simple and honest. But the typical female rock song on the same subject is more like "The Coyote's at the door, he pinned me to the dance floor.  I chased him into the desert but he faded away."  It's way too enigmatic, and also needy.  Joni Mitchell was like the Taylor Swift of her time, it turns out, making fans do the work to figure out who she slept with.  HINT: It was Sam Shepard.  Here's a thought, Joni Mitchell, maybe don't have affairs with married playwrights who have commitment issues if you want to be happy.  But hey, you're an adult and you can have an affair with whoever you choose, but then maybe don't gripe about it in a song after it blows up in your face. Nobody cares, and I don't have time to figure out which married person you screwed around with.)

At another point in the proceedings, one Irish guy reads the introduction to Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" in the original medieval dialect, and that left me scratching my head, too.  Another local San Francisco poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti read a parody version of the Lord's Prayer, and I don't see what either thing has to do with the American folk-rock music of The Band.  I guess something had to happen on stage while the band took a break, got some water, or more likely, smoked some weed.

But hey, Ronnie Hawkins, The Band's old boss, shows up early in the proceedings to perform "Who Do You Love?", which should remind everyone that it's NOT just a George Thurogood song, it's been around much longer than that. Always good to see Dr. John, and Eric Clapton too.  Watch for the moment when Clapton's guitar strap breaks during the solo on "Further on Up the Road", and he yells for Robbie to take over, which Robbie does with only a moment's hesitation.  I doubt Clapton would have been so generous in sharing the solo if he didn't have to fix his strap, right?  And don't hog the solo, you know Clapton's going to want it back sooner rather than later...

Finally, The Band's OTHER old boss shows up, Bob Dylan in a horrible old-lady hat comes on stage to lead "Forever Young", and from the brief conversation they have on stage, it's clear that his old backing band both respects and fears him.  Dylan's in charge of the rest of the show, and The Band falls right back into their old marching order with "Baby, Let Me Follow You Down".  (Someone in the crowd really should have yelled "Judas!" here, just for old times sake.  How funny would that have been?)

Bob Dylan then looked like Adam Sandler playing Bob Dylan - I'm sure I'm not the first person to bring this up. They sort of sound alike when they sing, too.  Did Sandler ever impersonate Dylan when he was on SNL?  He must have, just like David Cross must have played Allen Ginsberg before.  Can there ever be a biopic made where Sandler plays Dylan, and, I don't know, Bill Hader plays Robbie Robertson?  Paul Rudd as Rick Danko, if he brings back his haircut from "Wet Hot American Summer"? Just free associating here.

In the end, this two-hour film represents a watershed moment, some say it's when the music of the 1960's really started to give up, considering that the next year disco took over, and then pop music kind of sucked until MTV kicked off the new wave in 1982.  I say this may be the greatest group of musicians assembled on stage, at least after Woodstock and before Live Aid.  (And then after Live Aid, there was really nothing comparable until that scene in "Blues Brothers 2000", you know the one.  Or is that just me?)

I think I finally (maybe) understand the mentality behind "The Last Waltz" - yesterday I pointed out the discrepancy in Robbie Robertson trying to save the band by hosting a farewell concert.  That didn't make sense at the time, but now it kind of does, when you consider that The Beatles went through the same thought process - in 1966 they decided to stop touring, to become a studio-only band.  Nothing makes a rock band more money than touring, but nothing is tougher on a set of musicians than constant touring.  And as I saw many times in my rockumentary chain in 2018, the process of releasing an album, then touring to promote it, then paying everyone involved, then financing the NEXT album, becomes a sort of never-ending hamster-wheel, where the band members are the hamsters.  So perhaps Robertson was trying to save The Band by planning the final live show, but keeping The Band together to make more studio albums, but also allowing them to have personal lives (ideally drug-free, but whatever).  And it's at this point that The Band apparently just forgot to come back together.

(Only they DID, which a lot of people forget - a few years after their "Final Concert", the other four got together to play some gigs without Robbie.  I think he was just royally pissed that they didn't need him as much as he thought they would.)

(EDIT: Today was the anniversary of the infamous appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where Bob Dylan "went electric" and fans allegedly tried to boo him off the stage.  Yep, that was 55 years ago today, so appropriate at least that Dylan was in today's film with the band who backed him on his first half-electric tour.)

Also starring Eric Clapton, Neil Diamond, Bob Dylan, Ronnie Hawkins, Dr. John, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Ringo Starr, Muddy Waters, Martin Scorsese, Bill Graham (all carrying over from "Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band"), Emmylou Harris (last seen in "Elvis Presley: The Searcher"), Paul Butterfield, Bob Margolin, Pinetop Perkins, Carl Radle, Mavis Staples (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Cleotha Staples, Roebuck "Pops" Staples, Yvonne Staples, Ronnie Wood (last seen in "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band & the Basement Tapes"), Michael McClure, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

RATING: 8 out of 10 turkey dinners

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and the Band

Year 12, Day 206 - 7/24/20 - Movie #3,613

BEFORE: Once again, I feel I have to delay "The Last Waltz" one more day, because I've stumbled on to ANOTHER documentary about The Band, this one's on Hulu (and I think on Amazon Prime for like 99 cents) and I think this will help fill in some of that big gap between the recording of the "Basement Tapes" in 1967 and "The Last Waltz" concert in 1976.  The last doc ended with clips from "The Last Waltz", so I would have been justified in going straight there, but there were some hints and allegations in the last film about trouble and strife in The Band, so I want to get to the bottom of that before I proceed.

But as I stated yesterday, I'm afraid of running out of slots at the end of the year.  I had 10 or so slots, but I've added two unexpected documentaries this week, so now I think I'm leaving myself only 8 steps at the end of 2020 to get to a Christmas movie somehow.  I can probably do it, but maybe I should save 10 slots just to be on the safe side - or else by adding in two films this week I'm saying that I'll have to skip on seeing "The New Mutants", even if it gets released in theaters in time.  Excising that little section of the horror chain could get me back three slots - and the worst thing would be if I run out of slots before I run out of year.  Either way, I'll have to do another count once the Summer Concert Documentary series is over.

My muse this week is really Martin Scorsese, who directed "No Direction Home" and also "The Last Waltz" back in the day, and he's listed as executive Producer on this one.  I'm following your interest in rock music, Marty, so don't let me down.  If you're good I'll also consider adding "Shine a Light", that Rolling Stones concert film you directed.

Robbie Robertson carries over from "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band and the Basement Tapes", but a lot of other people do, too.

THE PLOT: A confessional, cautionary and occasionally humorous tale of Robbie Robertson's young life and the creation of one of the most enduring groups in the history of popular music: The Band.

AFTER: Well, they do say that history is written by the winners - or the band members who live the longest, I guess.  Richard Manuel died in 1986 while on tour with a revived partial line-up of The Band, and Rick Danko passed away in 1999, while Levon Helm stuck around until 2012.  That just leaves Garth Hudson, aka "the shy one", so really just Robbie Robertson is the one crafting the tale these days, and I've seen some opinions and reviews of this film that lead me to believe there's a fair amount of revisionist history here.

But first I had to sit through another re-telling of the band's history, forming in Toronto as the Hawks, backing up Ronnie Hawkins who'd moved up from Arkansas with Levon Helm in tow.  After about a half-hour this film got to the Basement Tapes, where I was yesterday, and then thankfully proceeded forward from there. The renting of the Big Pink house in Saugerties, Levon Helm coming back from his time working on an oil rig, and the release of The Band's first album, "Music from Big Pink".  First they outgrew Ronnie Hawkins, then they outgrew Bob Dylan, even though they eventually went back out on tour with Dylan in 1974, which I now know was David Geffen's idea.  Geffen had always wanted to sign Bob Dylan, and he got there by going through Robertson.

The problem with listening to Robbie Robertson, I think, is that his voice comes off as very condescending, a bit like a certain President's does.  As a storyteller, well, he makes a great guitarist, and the condescension can easily be mistaken for insincerity.  The blandness of his storytelling doesn't help either, because a typical Robertson story will go something like, "We were looking to play more gigs, and one day Bob Dylan told us he was looking for a backing band, so we discussed it and said YES!"  Wow, fascinating stuff, Robbie.  Now tell us the one about that time that the band was really thirsty, and then drank a bunch of water, and that took care of it.  Such a gripping narrative.

Others have taken umbrage with the fact that this film is very apologetic to Robertson, and supports his side of some very complicated issues, and downplays any information that disagrees with his story, or shines a bad light on him in any way.  Clearly after 10 years of working together there was some kind of divide between Robertson and Helm, but Robertson here keeps stressing how much he loved him and considered him his brother - OK, so then what was all the fighting about?  Brothers can fight, too, that's part of some relationships, so let's get into it.  To hear Robertson tell it, the divide between him and the rest of the band arose because he was married with kids, and they weren't.  He didn't mess with heroin, and they did.  He kept sharp with songwriting and practicing, while the others were driving drunk and getting into car wrecks.  It feels like a set of absolutes, and I've learned that things are rarely so black and white.  Robertson never partied, never partook, never indulged in excess?  I find that a little hard to believe.  Possible, I suppose, but doubtful for any rocker during the late 1960's and early 1970's.

Then there's the issue of songwriting credit (and therefore royalties) which was touched upon briefly in "Down in the Flood".  There are apparently two schools of thought when it came to the form of collaborative songwriting that The Band engaged in.  One school says that whoever first brings a song idea to the group, that person should get songwriting credit, even if a collaborative process changes or tweaks the song from there.  The other school says that if the new song gets workshopped by the group, if the drummer says, "Oh, what if I add this rhythm here" and the organist is allowed to have a freeform solo, then all the band members should share songwriting credit.  Robertson was a believer in the first system, while Helm believed in the second, and felt he was getting screwed out of royalties.  However, the other argument is that there's a difference between composing a song and arranging a song, so if the writer brings a song to the group with, say, a set of chords or rough sheet music, that's songwriting and the rest is arranging or producing.  I'll admit this is something of a very gray area, but also, if these men are truly Robertson's "brothers", why wasn't he willing to share credit and royalties with them?  Even a small percentage, like 10% each, and he could still retain 60% of the credit and royalties for himself.

This is the sort of thing that can, over time, tear a band apart.  Meanwhile the partying lifestyle the other band members enjoyed in wild, freewheeling upstate New York wasn't helping, and Levon Helm not admitting to having a drug problem was apparently another bone of contention.  Things got so frustrating for Robertson, he claims that the only way he could see to right the ship and get the band back to where it needed to be was to suggest the idea of the "Last Waltz" concert.  But this doesn't really make much sense in retrospect - how can he suggest that the way to save the band, to keep it moving forward, was to schedule their farewell concert?  That's a bit like trying to improve the performance of your car by removing the engine.  Did Robertson not really understand the implications of a farewell concert?  I mean, going out on top, at the peak of a band's popularity, it's a hell of a baller move, but it doesn't really come with a good prognosis for future success.

Robertson now claims at the end of "Once Were Brothers" that the intention of "The Last Waltz" was to have a big, blowout party concert, take some time off to regroup, and then get The Band back together again, though what happened was everyone just kind of forgot to get back together.  Right, it just slipped the mind of five guys all at the same time.  If you care about the band and you know that some members have problems with addiction, taking time off could really be the worst idea, because then you've altered their routines, and you've removed their incentive to get clean and stay clean, because the addiction is hurting their performance in the band.  Send them to rehab, sure, but don't break up the band, because then they'll all have so much more time on their hands to get high.  I can't really take Robertson at his word, because he either was very misguided about what was best for The Band, or he's lying about it.

The party line, even among fans and critics, is that "The Last Waltz" is the last performance of The Band, but that's not completely true.  It's just the last time that all five members performed together.  By 1983 the other four members were playing together without Robbie Robertson.  Then even after Richard Manuel died, the other three kept touring, with other musicians filling in for Manuel and Robertson.  So I'm eager to watch "The Last Waltz", sure, but it was NOT the end of The Band, they played at Woodstock '94 and released a couple more albums.  What's weird is that in "Once Were Brothers", Robertson only mentions Levon Helm's death directly, omitting the prior deaths of the other two band members.

Look, 16 years is a great run for a band - that's eight before they hit big, and another 8 after.  Even the Beatles lasted only 8 years after they hit the charts.  It's very rare for a band to last longer than this, the only real exceptions are the Rolling Stones and The Who - a few others who still play the State Fair and nostalgia circuits.  Technically the Eagles are still playing, but only two or three original members are still alive, and they've rustled up Glenn Frey's son and the Beach Boys have roped in second cousins and children and grandchildren to back them up.  Chicago's still going, but they've had a fair amount of turnover, too.  That's really about it, most other bands don't make it past a decade before they either fall out of style or become victims of their own success.  Queen, Styx, REO Speedwagon are all still touring, but with fewer and fewer original members.  So maybe it's better to get off the crazy merry-go-round when you can, but the best advice is to slow the ride down and let it come to a complete stop first.

(EDIT: Today's the anniversary of The Byrds being at number one on the UK singles chart with their cover of Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" in 1965.  While this doesn't directly relate to today's film, it feels sort of tangentially related.)

Also starring Bob Dylan, Ronnie Hawkins, Eric Clapton, John Simon (all also carrying over from "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band and the Basement Tapes"), Martin Scorsese (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), John Hammond (ditto), Bruce Springsteen (last seen in "Quincy"), Peter Gabriel, Rick Dano, David Geffen, Van Morrison, Jann Wenner, Taj Mahal, Jimmy Vivino, John Scheele, Bill Scheele, Dominique Robertson, George Semkiw, Jon Taplin, Larry Campbell, Grant Smith, Elliott Landy,

with archive footage of Rick Danko, Levon Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Neil Diamond, Albert Grossman, George Harrison, Joni Mitchell, Ringo Starr, Neil Young (all carrying over from "Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band and the Basement Tapes"), Chuck Berry (last seen in "Quincy"), Fats Domino, Bill Graham (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Dr. John, Marilyn Monroe (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Muddy Waters (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Howlin' Wolf (ditto), Sonny Boy Williamson.

RATING: 5 out of 10 publicity photos

Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band & the Basement Tapes

Year 12, Day 205 - 7/23/20 - Movie #3,612

BEFORE: So this was going to be the slot for "The Last Waltz", because that's a very prominent concert that I've heard much about over the years, and I've never watched it.  This was probably the biggest glaring omission from my dive into rockumentaries in 2018, and once I saw the cast of the Dylan documentaries, I recognized the names of the members of The Band, and I saw my opportunity to squeeze in "The Last Waltz" not only as connective tissue, but a strong concert that I should definitely move out of the "never watched" column.  And a few months back I noticed it was available on Amazon Prime, so great, that's a done deal, right?

But I signed on to my wife's Amazon Prime account last night to find FOUR listings for "The Last Waltz", two older ones that were now unavailable, and a newer version, perhaps re-mastered or some kind of special anniversary gold edition, for rental at the ungodly price of $14.99.  Of course, if I'd tried two months ago I could have seen "The Last Waltz" for free, and I'm certainly not paying $14.99 to see it when it's available on iTunes for $3.99.

So I was about to sign off from Amazon on the downstairs TV and pack up my gear to go upstairs to iTunes on my computer, when I saw the listing for this doc, right next to "The Last Waltz" in the recommendations.  Wait, the "basement tapes" were a thing, right?  And they were recorded after Dylan's motorcycle accident, but before "The Last Waltz", somewhere in the years between 1966 and the 1974 tour, right?  So that means this film is a documentation of the chronological connective tissue - "No Direction Home" ended with Dylan's accident, and "The Last Waltz" was recorded in November 1976, so this is kind of like the missing piece in the Bob Dylan puzzle - maybe.

I don't have any extra slots, I've already got an eye on December and how I need to get from "Hellboy" to a Christmas movie in under 12 movies, so I can't just drop in another unplanned film without having an effect on my 2020 endgame - but I can't pass up this opportunity, either.  Maybe "The Last Waltz" can wait one more day.  Maybe "Black Widow" won't get released in November, and I'll have to move "Hellboy" to early October and I'll gain one more slot that way.  Maybe "The New Mutants" won't get released in August and I won't have to watch the connective tissue to include that one, and if I just watch "The Addams Family" instead, I'll gain three more slots.  I can't possibly tell if watching this today is going to screw up my December plans, in August maybe I'll get more insight if theaters fail to open up.  Who can say?

But in the meantime, why not follow the story of Bob Dylan and turn this into a little documentary trilogy, with Bob & Company carrying over from "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"?

THE PLOT: The story of Bob Dylan and The Band, the legendary amateur recordings they made together in Woodstock, their re-invention of American music and their continued relationship during the late 1960's and 1970's.

AFTER: I always thought that The Band was perhaps the least creatively band name in history - like, how did that come about, right?  Or else maybe it was the most pretentious, like "We are THE Band", the most notable band among all the bands.  Finding out that The Band came together as a backing band for Dylan, much like The Eagles formed out of Linda Ronstadt's backing band, sort of explained a few things.  The marquee would naturally read BOB DYLAN in big letters, with whatever band name was backing him in much smaller type, so a very bland, nothing-like name such as "The Band" was perfect, nobody was coming to the show to see the backing musicians anyway, so the less it distracted from BOB DYLAN, the better, and in that sense, "The Band" was perfect.

But it could also have been part of many an "Abbott & Costello"-like comedy routine in the 1970's.  Like:

"Hey, I heard you got concert tickets, who's playing?"
"The Band"
"I know, it's a band, but which band? What's their name?"
"The Band"
"Well, OK, that's weird, but who else is on the bill?"
"Guess Who."
"I don't want to guess, just tell me the name of the 2nd band!"
"GUESS. WHO."
"Will you just tell me the name of the band already!  Never mind, is there a third group playing?"
"Yes."
"Well, are you going to tell me the name of the third group?"
"YES!"
"Then TELL ME ALREADY!"

But by now we all know the story, right?  Well, parts of it I knew.  It turns out that the members of The Band were formerly The Hawks, and the Jayhawks before that - Ronnie Hawkins was a country rocker from Arkansas who moved up to Toronto for greener pastures, and instead of importing musicians for a backing band from the U.S., which involved a lot of paperwork, he tried recruiting local Canadian musicians and teaching them his songs.  This was probably also cheaper, and since the Canadian musicians were having a tough time getting hired to play in Canadian bars, it worked out well for everyone.  Ronnie Hawkins called his band The Hawks, Levon Helm did come up from Arkansas, but the new recruits for the Hawks were Ontario natives.  The group gelled together, maybe a little too well, because Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson and Richard Manuel left to start their own band. (This seems to have happened quite often to Hawkins, a later incarnation of the Hawks took off to form Janis Joplin's Full Tilt Boogie Band.)

Around this time, shortly after Dylan "went electric", he was looking for a back-up band for his 1965 tour, and someone recommended Levon and the Hawks.  The team of "Bob Dylan and the Band" performed those half-electric concerts in Manchester, UK and other places, resulting in many boos and someone screaming "Judas" at Dylan (this concert was recorded and mistakenly released as "The Royal Albert Hall Concert", when in fact it was recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall).  Then, as we know, Dylan came home, had his motorcycle accident and didn't tour again until 1974.  But is that what really happened?  Apparently there's a theory out there that there WAS no motorcycle crash, that Dylan entered drug rehab instead, and when that was done, went right into making the "Basement Tapes" with The Band in his house up in Woodstock, NY.  That's right, Dylan lived in Woodstock a few years before the big concert in Woodstock, and when the big concert happened there in 1968, he was not in the line-up.  Instead he was probably just yelling at all these hippie kids to get off of his lawn.

I have to admit, some things about the motorcycle crash just don't add up - if Dylan had a drug habit and then broke a few vertebrae in his neck, as the story goes, then pain medication for the back injury would have been problematic.  Doctors don't tend to prescribe painkillers to addicts, or if they do, then those addicts have a much tougher time after back or neck surgery when they have to get weaned off the medication, and some people end up getting addicted to those painkillers, worse than if they were addicted to recreational drugs. And then a couple years later, Dylan appeared to be clean and adopted his new "Christian" image?  Not knowing or being able to confirm anything, somehow the drug rehab story seems more likely to me - also, a convenient "accident" would allow Dylan to get away from the fans who had been booing him on the last tour, and also to then focus on making more music without worrying about what the fans thought about his live performances.

Anyway, for whichever reason, accident or rehab, Dylan stopped touring in July 1966, just a few weeks before the next tour was scheduled to start in New Haven, CT.  (Hmm, Dylan was also being rushed into the next tour by his manager, Albert Grossman, and the motorcycle accident happened very close to Grossman's house.  New theory - the fake accident was Dylan's way to send a message to his manager that he didn't want to go on the next tour.).  But Dylan had The Band (minus Levon Helm, who had left to go work on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico) in a NYC hotel, plus he paid drummer Mickey Jones in L.A. for a year to keep him available for touring, so in early 1967, Dylan called The Band and told them to move up to Woodstock so they could record something. (If you're keeping track, that's 7 months for Dylan to recover from a back injury.  I'm no expert on back and neck injuries, either, but this seems like a very speedy recovery.  I think I'm on to something here, Wikipedia is telling me that no ambulance ever was called to the scene, and Dylan never went to the hospital for his injury - so there you go.)

Anyway, this was the kick-off of a very complicated relationship, where Dylan played with The Band to work out songs and be involved in a sort of free-form, collaborative process, and then every few months, Dylan would fly to Nashville and record a professional album with a different group of session musicians - these albums were "John Wesley Harding" and "Nashville Skyline", which included the songs "All Along the Watchtower", "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight", "Lay Lady Lay" and "Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You", among others.

Meanwhile, what came to be called "The Basement Tapes" produced a wild mix of American folk songs, covers, and a few things that later became hits for Dylan, like "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" or hits for other recording artists, like "Quinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn)".  Some songs like "This Wheel's on Fire" ended up being recorded on The Band's first album, "Songs from Big Pink".  (The members of The Band had rented a big pink house in nearby Saugerties in order to live close to Dylan during this time.). The Basement Tapes also led to what is frequently called the first real prolific bootleg album, "The Great White Wonder", and then some songs from the sessions were released in a big double-album by Columbia Records in June 1975.  But consider that these sessions went on for a MONTHS, with maybe 10 or 15 songs being played each day, so the commercial output is probably only a very small sampling of what was recorded.

Look, I think even by this point Bob Dylan had amassed the kind of career where he was free to do whatever he wanted, especially if he was the one footing the bill and signing the checks.  If he wanted to keep The Band on retainer in one city while he flew to Nashville to record an album for commercial release, that was his prerogative.  If he just needed these guys handy to noodle out some ideas on a daily basis, then put the best of those songs on his next album, or not, that was certainly his right.  But considering how The Band was also putting their own first album together at the same time, perhaps this was something of an uneasy alliance.  Or maybe this represents a coming together of performers with similar interests, sort of a marriage of convenience, where all the parties involved got something out of the relationship.  Also, by this point Dylan was married and had two kids, with a third one on the way, and maybe he just needed to be home for a while to enjoy this.

Whatever happened, however it happened, on some level it seemed like it needed to happen.  The Band got their first album out of the deal, and then went off and toured on their own, though they re-joined with Bob Dylan in 1968 for a concert tribute to Woody Guthrie, and again in summer 1969 for the Isle of Wight Festival.  Then of course they toured again with Dylan in 1974, as was mentioned in the "Rolling Thunder Revue" film, and that means I've come full circle, this is where I came in two days ago.  Consider the important of the Basement Tapes thusly - when the Beatles came back together to record their "Get Back" sessions, their goal was to record in the honest, live, no-frills, no-overdub down-home style of, you guessed it, Dylan's Basement Tapes.

If I'm judging this one as a FILM, it's maybe a little heavy on the "talking heads" format, because the people interviewed here are mostly rock critics and rock biographers, not the rockers themselves - though they did score an interview with one member of the band, Garth Hudson, but he's very old and largely incoherent.  I would have liked for this one to lean a little more toward the playing of music, because it is my Big Summer Concert Series, after all, but for shedding light on one little important corner of music history, it's not that bad.

Also starring Garth Hudson (also carrying over from "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Mickey Jones (ditto), Derek Barker, Robert Christgau, Anthony DeCurtis, Sid Griffin, Ronnie Hawkins (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Barney Hoskyns, Charlie McCoy, John Simon, and the voice of Thomas Arnold,

with archive footage of Levon Helm (last seen in "Coal Miner's Daughter"), Rick Danko (also carrying over from "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), Richard Manuel (ditto), Robbie Robertson (ditto), Johnny Cash (ditto), David Crosby (ditto), Roger McGuinn (ditto), Eric Clapton (last seen in "Concert for George"), Neil Diamond, Albert Grossman, George Harrison (last seen in "Filmworker"), Jimi Hendrix (last seen in "Super Duper Alice Cooper"), Paul Kantner, John Lennon (last seen in "Filmworker"), Paul McCartney (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Joni Mitchell (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Yoko Ono (last seen in "Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine"), Earl Scruggs, Grace Slick, Ringo Starr (last seen in "Quiet Riot: Well Now You're Here, There's No Way Back"), Ronnie Wood, Neil Young (last seen in "Quincy").

RATING: 5 out of 10 angry British fans

No Direction Home: Bob Dylan

Year 12, Day 204 - 7/22/20 - Movie #3,611

BEFORE: Well, I COULD have dropped in the movie "Howl" in between the two Bob Dylan documentaries, because that film does use footage of Allen Ginsberg, I think.  But no, screw Allen Ginsberg, I'm not a fan.  Why should I go out of my way to include that film here if I'm not a fan of the beat poets, especially Ginsberg?  I've already re-scheduled the film "Howl", but shoehorning it in here would interrupt the flow of the Summer Concerts Series, which only just got underway.  Just like Bob Dylan, I'm cutting Ginsberg out of the show, as best as I can.  And screw Jack Kerouac while I'm at it, the movie version of "On the Road" sucked and I'm betting the original book does, too.  Screw all the beat poets, William S. Burroughs and Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey too.  What have any of them produced lately?  (I know, they're all dead, but that's a rather poor excuse for shirking off work.)

Bob Dylan carries over from "Rolling Thunder Revue", as do a few members of his entourage.

THE PLOT: A chronicle of Bob Dylan's strange evolution between 1961 and 1966, from folk singer to protest singer to "voice of a generation" to rock star.

AFTER: Before I start in with my thoughts today, another point of order: Is this a movie?  "No Direction Home" is essentially two episodes from the PBS series "American Masters" that have been cut together for streaming on Netflix.  Does that make it a movie?  Well, it's being packaged and promoted like a movie, and given Netflix's predilection to turn everything into a series, it's kind of amazing that they didn't split this into two or eleventeen parts and call it a series.  Instead it's a solid 3 hours and 28 minutes long, that's movie-length and then some.  So how come on the IMDB page for the American Masters series, the length of "No Direction Home" (Season 19, Episode 7) is given as 6 full hours?  Did I just watch a cut-down version on Netflix, or is this an error on the IMDB?  Or were they making time allowances for pledge breaks - it aired on PBS, after all.

It's worth noting that I was under the mistaken impression that this would be the DEFINITIVE documentary about Dylan, picking up where "Don't Look Back" left off, and bringing us up to the present day.  But even with a running time of three and a half hours, it only covers the formative years of his career, from 1961 to 1966, and it stops just before the motorcycle accident.  In one way this is kind of great for me, because yesterday's film picked up 8 or 9 years after the accident caused Dylan to stop touring, even though I've now watched two films about His Bobness in the wrong order, I can still piece something together here in my mind.  "No Direction Home" comes first, then the accident, then he toured with The Band in 1974, then after that came "Rolling Thunder Revue", and then a few months after that tour came....well, that's tomorrow's film.

Still, there's going to be a huge gap in my Bob Dylan knowledge now, everything from 1976 to present day is going to be a big mystery, unless Scorsese does another follow-up documentary.  Still, maybe that's OK because Bob Dylan probably doesn't remember all those years, either.  I think he's full of crap, I think he remembers everything perfectly, he's just re-invented himself so many times that it probably feels like all those memories happened to somebody else.  Geez, the only person who adopted more personas and rebuilt his image time and time again was probably David Bowie - and part of me is still waiting to see what the next stage of Bowie's career is going to look like.  (I know, he's dead, too, but that's still no excuse. I will continue to expect his next fabulous stage.)

Dylan, on the other hand, turned 79 this year.  And my only fear about watching these documentaries about someone so far along in their career is the slight chance that he might die this week - hey, you never know - and then I'm going to look like a ghoul for watching a documentary about him, when I'm aware that weird coincidences have been known to happen, where real-life sometimes coincides with my planned movies.  But, I went through this two years ago when I watched movies about the Rolling Stones, and they came out of that just fine - so I'm not a jinx after all. Man, if Dylan and Jagger and McCartney ever kick it, then the 60's will truly be over.  I mean, I know they've been over for 50 years now, but their spirit somehow survives as long as there are a few icons left.  You just don't meet too many people these days who claim to have been at the original Woodstock concert - and anyone who was there and is still alive probably doesn't remember it, I bet, for one of a few reasons.  (Years ago, the oldest actor who played a Munchkin in "The Wizard of Oz" passed away, and now I think we'll have to start wondering which Woodstock performer will ultimately live the longest - Joan Baez is as good a bet as any, but perhaps it will be John Sebastian or Carlos Santana.  #WoodstockDeadPool)

But we all know what you came here for, if you've watched "No Direction Home" - you want to see that fateful moment where Bob Dylan "plugged in" and "went electric" and disappointed all of his fans - just like if you watch "Gimme Shelter", you're going to keep an eye out for when that Hell's Angels bodyguard killed that guy during the Altamont concert.  You know, I'm really starting to worry about you.  Don't worry, "No Direction Home" has you covered, you sick person.  It opens with a 1966 concert in England shortly after the infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival, this is the concert where someone in the crowd shouted "Judas!" after they realized the concert would be half acoustic and half electric.  You have to admit, this took balls, coming from a British chap.  I thought they were so genteel over there, as the Beatles often talked about how their first few concerts for the gentry were very quiet, because the upper crust Brits didn't know when to clap, and they certainly didn't scream like the teenage girls.

But here's the thing, limeys, you paid to see Bob Dylan and you got to see Bob freakin' Dylan.  So shut the hell up and enjoy the show that Dylan wants to do.  (Yes, I realize I'm giving advice to British teens from 1966, and they're all probably in their 70's by now, if they're lucky.). Who the hell complains about HALF of a concert that they don't like?  If I went to see a band and they played all their hits, then did something new and perhaps even experimental, I'd champion that, especially if they were a big star or my favorite band!  Look, one time I went to see a double-bill of Jethro Tull and Suzanne Vega, and I may not be a big Suzanne Vega fan, but it was Jethro freakin' Tull!  I'll endure half a concert of folk music to get to see a rock legend.  (Only problem was, there were two VERY different groups of people in that crowd.  I remember one Tull fan yelling out "Show us your tits!" while Ms. Vega was performing.  And no, that was not me who yelled.)

It's called progress, you Cockney bastards, so get on board and get ready to rock.  After showing clips from the 1966 concert in the U.K., the film snaps back to Dylan's early days growing up in Minnesota, and eventually works its way back up to that infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival.  And I learned a lot about this incident - for example, Dylan only played 15 minutes of an electric set.  There were boos from the crowd, sure, and Pete Seeger thought the performance was so terrible he was pleading with the crew to turn off the band's microphones, or cut the power entirely.  What I did not know was that after the electric set, Dylan was persuaded to grab an acoustic guitar and get back out on stage to perform more songs, in the style that the crowd obviously wanted to hear. But while the popular belief is that the crowd was booing Dylan's use of an electric guitar, an alternative theory is that the crowd was really booing the poor sound (possibly distortion caused by the louder electric instruments) and the announcement that Dylan would be playing a shortened set.  So there may be more to the story of this incident than we've been led to believe.  If I paid big bucks for a concert ticket, I know I'd be inclined to TRY to enjoy the concert no matter what, so I could feel like I got my money's worth.  That performance would have to be TERRIBLE for me to raise a fuss, and I just don't think that Dylan's 1965 performance was that bad.  Was the audience filled with folk music purists who were immediately hyper-aware that they were witnessing a sea change to an entire genre of music?  That does seem kind of unlikely.

However, it's more likely that by the time of the 1966 European tour, word had spread that Dylan had changed his style - so I think by the time of that "Judas!" accusation, his fans had come to learn about the change-over from acoustic to electric, they'd had time to think about it, and clearly some people were not happy about it.  So this story seems more believable than the confusion surrounding the Newport incident.

(Look, I'll be honest, my one experience seeing Dylan play live was SO horrible, that performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" at the David Letterman "Late Night" 10th Anniversary show - actually, everything about it was GREAT, except for Dylan phoning it in.  He was both OFF and AWFUL, he'd wait until the band played an entire line of the song, and then he'd quickly blurt out all the words from that line, after the fact.  I don't think he was trying to sing the song in a different style, unless that style was "BAD".  Now I'm wishing that I had shouted out "JUDAS!" during that performance, I think I would have been more justified than the British audience was in 1966 when he played a half-electric show, because at least in that performance, you could understand what Bob was singing, and I couldn't.  What I saw sounded exactly like an instrumental version of "Like a Rolling Stone", but with a drunk homeless man suddenly remembering the lyrics at the last minute, but still not being able to sing them in time.  But if I had screamed "JUDAS", I probably would have been thrown out of that Letterman show - and I wonder what Dylan's reaction would have been.)

For further reference, "No Direction Home" prefaces the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with footage of Dylan's performance at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival, which was obviously a more folk-driven performance for him (try to ignore the fact that he looks about 15 years old instead of 22, for some reason.  I think he looked thin, maybe he wasn't eating very well, that first record may not have been selling very well, or perhaps the royalties took a while to kick in.). Dylan also casually mentions that he's come a long way in his career in a very short time - he wouldn't have even been able to play at the 1961 Folk Festival, yet here he was, headlining it just two short years later.  And two years after THAT he went electric and all hell supposedly broke loose.  And so we see a very neat progression of the stages of any music star's career - first there's "Who's Bob Dylan", then comes "Wow, it's Bob Dylan!", followed two years later by "Wow, Bob Dylan sure has changed!" and then finally "Who's Bob Dylan" again - only that last stage NEVER HAPPENED.  Instead he toured like crazy after 1975 and everyone in the free world now knows who Bob Dylan is.

At the start of the film, there's so much in the way of musical context set-up that I wonder if there may not be TOO MUCH context.  Homage is paid to nearly every folk singer of note, from Leadbelly to Odetta to the obscure John Jacob Niles - surely Dylan wasn't influenced by EVERY SINGLE one of these people, was he?  Then again, maybe he was, because he stole - sorry, borrowed - a couple hundred of that collector's records just so he could listen to them and learn all those tunes.  Eventually I think the hammer's going to fall when people realize how many of Dylan's songs were essentially re-workings of obscure folk and blues songs - "Maggie's Farm" is essentially just a re-tread of another artist's "Peggy's Farm".  Sure, every act copies - sorry, pays tribute - to other acts that have gone before, but stealing songs, even when they're tweaked a little is still considered a no-no. Currently Led Zeppelin is still on the cultural black list because they didn't properly credit Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and others. They even stole "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" from a Joan Baez song!  I think eventually Dylan's "borrowing" in his early work will be exposed as well.

I suspect this has something to do with why Dylan felt very uncomfortable after being labeled as the "Voice of a Generation", because he didn't feel he was addressing current political topics with his songs that had elements "borrowed" from older folk and blues songs.  The torch of social commentary had been passed from Woody Guthrie to Pete Seeger, or alternatively to the beat poets, but when no replacement for Seeger seemed obvious, people turned to Bob Dylan and started connecting his lyrics to their own calls for social reform.  Remember that the 1960's were a time of great upheaval, racial injustice and dissatisfaction with corrupt politicians.  (Umm, kind of like now.)  And when Dylan felt that his work was being pushed into the social commentary arena, he then tried to get out of that line of work, and become a true rock star instead.

I also didn't know that Bob Dylan was AT the famous March on Washington in 1963, he was right there for MLK's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.  Heck, I didn't even know there were singers performing there, but after Mahalia Jackson and Marian Anderson, most of the rest of the performers were white, which seems a bit odd.  Joan Baez sang "We Shall Overcome" (umm, who's "We", Joan?) and then Dylan sang "When the Ship Comes In", and "Only a Pawn in Their Game", and only one of those is directly about racism.  Then Peter, Paul and Mary performed Dylan's song "Blowin' in the Wind", I guess because they had released a record of it at the time, and it was successful on the charts?  Bob Dylan later said that he felt uncomfortable as a white man, serving as a public image for the civil rights movement.  Also, Dylan's since publicly stated that songs he wrote after reading about events in the 1850's or 1860's were misinterpreted by people in the 1960's who thought his songs were commenting on current events.  He wasn't singing about civil rights, he was singing about the Civil War, and it was all a big misunderstanding - albeit a positive one.

Perhaps similarly, Dylan's said he wrote "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, even though technically he wrote the song a month before (Bob never lets truth get in the way of a good story, apparently.).  Although there's no direct connection, the song is about a period of hardship and suffering that's approaching - so when JFK got assassinated, some people felt this added a new layer of meaning to the song - there were a few years of suffering as the country recovered, and once again, Dylan looked like a prophet - though an accidental one.

But now that the era of protests is back, with calls for racial justice and racial equality, Black Lives Matter and all that, where is this new generation's Bob Dylan?  Why hasn't the entertainment media reflected the new era of protests?  Even though Dylan claimed that his songs weren't about civil rights, at another point in time he said, "All of my songs are protest songs."  But perhaps he was just being cheeky with a reporter, it sure seems like he didn't like answering dumb questions from the press.

After the infamous U.K. concert where Dylan was called "Judas", he's seen talking to his musicians and staff (?) where he expresses a desire to cut the tour short, not go to Italy, and return home to the U.S.  He was apparently somewhat afraid of dying in a small private plane crash in Europe if he continued on the tour - and the ironic thing here is that shortly after arriving back in the U.S., he had that motorcycle accident near Woodstock and stopped touring for 8 years.  I guess we'll never know what might have happened if he'd stuck it out in Europe for another week - maybe he would have died in a plane crash.  Maybe the reality in which he broke his neck on a motorcycle and lived like a very productive recluse for a time is the best of all possible timelines.

But since this documentary wraps up just before that crash, and we all know that eventually Dylan toured again and had many hundreds of concerts still left in him, somehow a documentary that's three and a half hours long also managed to feel somewhat incomplete.  How is that possible?  And is Scorcese ever going to make a follow-up that explores the 2nd (and 3rd, and 4th) halves of Dylan's career?  Or is he just going to stop with the Rolling Thunder tour?  I saw one fake obituary online where someone claimed that Bob Dylan "died" in 1965, I believe they meant metaphorically.  Fans of acoustic guitars still have an axe to grind, I guess - but then why were there rumors about Paul McCartney dying in a car crash and being replaced by a look-alike, but no similar rumors about Bob Dylan?

Also, from now until the end of my days, I'm going to think about Al Kooper every time I hear "Like a Rolling Stone" on the radio - Al had been outshined on the guitar during the recording sessions, so he relocated to the control booth, but took the opportunity to get back in when the organist was called away.  Al jumped on the keyboard to the dismay of the recording's producer, but he didn't really know all the chord changes - so you can hear that the organ often comes in about a half-second after everyone else, that was Al after confirming the new chord.  Dylan noticed it and apparently liked it, he asked the engineer to turn the organ UP instead of down, and Al thought he was about to get fired from the session, but that wasn't the case.

It's worth noting that Bob Dylan may not have EGOT status, he's only halfway there since he has no Emmys or Tonys.  But he has several Grammys, and also an Oscar for the song "Things Have Changed" from the movie "Wonder Boys" in 2001.  So if you add in his special Pulitzer Prize and the recent Nobel prize for literature, he does have PONG. (Pulitzer, Oscar, Nobel, Grammys)  How many other people can say they've achieved that?

Also starring Joan Baez (carrying over from "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Allen Ginsberg (ditto), Bob Neuwirth (ditto), Liam Clancy, John Cohen, Lamar Fike, Tony Glover,  John Hammond, Carolyn Hester, Bob Johnston, Mickey Jones (last seen in "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas"), Al Kooper, Bruce Langhorne, Harold Leventhal, Greil Marcus, Mitch Miller, Artie Mogull, Maria Muldaur, Paul Nelson, D.A. Pennebaker, Christopher Ricks, Dave Van Ronk, Manny Roth, Suze Rotolo, Pete Seeger, Roy Silver, Mark Spoelstra, Mavis Staples (last seen in "Graffiti Bridge"), Sean Wilentz, Peter Yarrow (last seen in "While We're Young"), Izzy Young, the voice of Martin Scorsese (last seen in "Trespassing Bergman")

with archive footage of Steve Allen (last seen in "Robin Williams: Come Inside My Mind"), James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte (last seen in "Selma"), Mike Bloomfield, Sonny Bono (last seen in "The Wrecking Crew!"), Marlon Brando (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), Johnny Cash, Cher (last seen in "Mermaids"), David Crosby (also last seen in "The Wrecking Crew!"), Rick Danko (last seen in "The Kids Are Alright"), Ossie Davis (last seen in "Sam Whiskey"), James Dean (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Woody Guthrie, Billie Holiday, Garth Hudson, Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "The Irishman"), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Martin Luther King Jr. (last seen in "BlacKkKlansman"), Peter La Farge (carrying over from "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), Roger McGuinn (ditto), Richard Manuel, Johnny Mathis, John Jacob Niles, Odetta, Lee Harvey Oswald, Patti Page, Webb Pierce, Johnnie Ray (last seen in "Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World"), Robbie Robertson (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Mario Savio, Paul Stookey, Mary Travers, Bobby Vee, Gene Vincent, Muddy Waters (last seen in "Keith Richards: Under the Influence"), Hank Williams, Howlin' Wolf and the voice of Studs Terkel (last seen in "Life Itself").

RATING: 7 out of 10 Greenwich Village clubs

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story

Year 12, Day 203 - 7/21/20 - Movie #3,610

BEFORE: It's finally here, the big Summer Music Concert (and Documentary) series.  It's delayed, sure, and right now in the real world there are no rock concerts taking place, except for virtual ones, so maybe what I'm doing in some small way can help fill that gap.  For me, of course, you're on your own - but it's a great time if you want to play along at home, or watch some great rock concerts that you've seen in the past, or hey, just put on your favorite live album and think about all the money you're saving by NOT buying overpriced tickets, $40 t-shirts and $12 beers.  And you won't have a cleaning bill after somebody in the stands throws up on you after drinking too many $12 beers.

You may recall I did a MASSIVE dive into rock music documentaries two years ago - over 50 films, and yes, they were all linked together, of course, because it turns out that once you get into documentaries about the Beatles or the Stones the filmmakers all end up interviewing many of the same people, plus you can't do a rock doc without archive footage of McCartney or Jagger popping up somewhere in it.  So that little magic trick of mine was really much easier than I made it look - but that's all magic tricks, right?

But in that deep documentary dive, I kind of neglected Bob Dylan - partially because I'd already seen "Don't Look Back" and "I'm Not There", and also because the Dylan films I'm about to watch now just weren't available to me yet.  I meant no disrespect, I was just working with the material I had, starting with the Beatles and then I radiated out via the linking to Clapton, Hendrix, Chicago (yes, that progression makes sense...), Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, Elvis Presley, and The Doors (umm, that progression made sense at the time...).  Whew, and that was just part 1 of 4!  Part 2 covered everyone from Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse and Lady Gaga to Glen Campbell, George Michael, Whitney Houston and Joe Cocker. Let's call that the "In Memoriam" section, except for Lady Gaga, of course.

Part 3 kicked off with a comprehensive documentary about the Eagles, then covered Clive Davis, Bruce Springsteen, Talking Heads, Michael Jackson, James Brown, the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa, the Who, and circled back to George Harrison for his tribute concert.  And Part 4 started with David Bowie and then veered into heavier stuff like Alice Cooper, Twisted Sister, Quiet Riot, Black Sabbath, Metallica, and it all wrapped up with Rush's farewell concert.  What a whirlwind it was - but see what I mean, where the hell was Bob Dylan?  And as you may imagine, since then I've watched a couple docs here and there, like "Quincy", when they fit into the chain, but still, they've been building up ever since, and I've tried to keep track of who's in them, so I could link together as many as I could - I think I've got an even dozen linked together, the only trick was linking in and out of this chain.

To start us off, Sharon Stone links in from "Sphere", and I'm not exactly sure what role she has here, maybe she's just glimpsed in the audience at a Bob Dylan concert, who knows.  But I'm about to find out.  One other thing you need to know about this Summer Music Concert series, it's going to end in disaster and ruin.  Fair warning.

THE PLOT: In an alchemic mix of fact and fantasy, Martin Scorsese looks back at Bob Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a country ripe for reinvention.

AFTER: Before I get any further, some behind-the-scenes business to take care of - I have to go into a different mode once I hit the documentary section of the year, because the IMDB doesn't do a great job of keeping track of who appears in docs, especially when it comes to archive footage.  Someone like a U.S. President or a newscaster, who might pop up in a documentary through the use of licensed video footage, won't show up in IMDB's search engine, for that web-site's purposes, a news clip of Richard Nixon doesn't always count as an "appearance".  But for some reason, a credit as a songwriter or a vocal performer on a soundtrack DOES count to the IMDB, but for my purposes, if that person didn't appear on camera, it doesn't count as an "appearance" (umm, except for animation voice-work and other recorded voice work, those credits count to me).  "Appearance" implies that the person was SEEN and recorded for this movie, or was SEEN (or heard) in archive footage.  So for a prominent musician like Bob Dylan, interview footage counts, old concert or news footage counts, but playing a Dylan song in the background of a scene doesn't.  Got it?  I now have to keep a separate document with a running total, because I can't trust the IMDB's search engines for this, if I want an accurate count of how many times each actor or singer "appeared", according to my rules.

Well, we might as well start with the Sharon Stone thing - she appears here in an interview where she claims to have gone to see Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Tour in 1975, with her mother.  (Jesus, who goes to a rock concert with their mother, how embarrassing.  Did her mother get busy with a roadie to get them backstage?)  In an act of defiance, she wore a KISS t-shirt to a Dylan concert, which just seems like bad form.  Everyone knows you either wear a t-shirt of the act you're seeing that night, or no band shirt at all.  Would you go to a Beyoncé concert and wear a Nicki Minaj shirt?  But allegedly this led to a conversation between Dylan and a 17-year old Sharon Stone, where they discussed KISS and Japanese kabuki and other things - because yes, Sharon Stone got backstage, and later claimed to have met Dylan again later and became some kind of backstage muse and/or wardrobe assistant (more on this in a bit...)

Now is where I have to admit to being a lacking dilettante when it comes to Bob Dylan's music.  I only know what appears on his "Greatest Hits" compilations, but at least I own all three of them.  I know true fans know all the deep cuts, and even have the entire "official bootleg" series, but I'm just not that guy.  There's no question to me that this man changed pop culture and the music scene, several times in fact, but there are HUGE gaps in my Bob Dylan knowledge.  I know early Dylan (thanks to Greatest Hits 1) and I paid attention to the "Traveling Wilburys" phase because I was a fan of George Harrison and Tom Petty.  And I saw Bob Dylan perform live once, at a Dave Letterman anniversary show, of all places - it was an all-star performance of "Like a Rolling Stone" at Radio City Music Hall, put together by Paul Shaffer of course, and it was, well, completely incoherent.  My first impression of Bob Dylan live was not good, because he was always a line of the song behind the band, I don't know if he was drunk or stoned or just goddamn sick of that song, but I was not impressed.  But they had two seatings of the show, so the song was recorded twice, and the one that aired was clearly not the one that I saw live.  (This was January 1992, and you can now watch that performance on YouTube - I had an uncle who had ALWAYS wanted to see Dylan live, and I made that bucket list item happen for him.). Watch it and you'll see what I mean - it's like the band is playing one song, and Dylan was singing another, yet it is the SAME SONG.

So here's what I know about Bob Dylan - you just can't tell him what to do, how to be, because he's just going to go ahead and do it the way he wants to do it.  This was confirmed for me later on when I watched that four-hour documentary about Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (I was home sick one day, this was back before starting the blog in 2009) and Petty talked about being the backing band for Dylan on a joint tour.  They had to be ready on any given night to play any song from the set-list the way Dylan wanted to do it.  If he said, "OK, guys, let's do "Just Like a Woman" in the style of a fast waltz...", they had to be ready for that.  Or here comes "Knockin' On Heaven's Door" with a bossa-nova beat, shit, let's try it, that might work.  This is what an artist does, or should do - he should be allowed to constantly re-invent himself and his work, on a whim, and never get bored with what he's doing.  If he's bored, something's wrong, and then why do it?  He'd rather try something new, or something old in a new way, and have that sound awful, rather than just get stuck singing the same songs the same way until the end of time.  Maybe this is why so many rock legends die at age 27, because they're staring down a life of singing their hits the same way for the next 40 years, and becoming a lounge act or a joke, so they blow their brains out, or do themselves in with drugs and alcohol, just to avoid a future of tedium.

And that's a bit of what "Rolling Thunder Revue" is about - Dylan, of course, had re-invented himself before, most notoriously by "going electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.  After several acoustic albums that were received well, and being labelled "the spokesman of a generation", Dylan decided to change his sound and sing with an electric guitar, and this was not received well.  I think I'll learn more about this in tomorrow's film, but for changing his sound, Dylan was called "Judas" and booed by fans, but when you look at the big picture, this was just one small part of a constant process of re-invention in his career.  He even says at the start of today's film that an artist has to be in a constant state of motion, he gets up each day and not only creates art or music, but creates himself.  You know he wasn't born "Bob Dylan", right?  He was Robert Zimmerman from Minneapolis, and he moved to New York, changed his name, his look, his sound, everything.  He built himself from the ground up, so who the heck are the fans to tell him what to do, how to sound, what to say, how to act?   Just buy the records, or don't, and shut the hell up.

Anyway, after the bad experiences on the 1965-66 tour, and a subsequent motorcycle accident, Dylan didn't tour for a while - but he still put out albums, alternately entertaining and confusing his fans.  It wasn't until 1974 that he put a live touring band together again (they became known as "The Band", more on them in a couple days) and after that tour ended, he once again decided to do something different, which came to be called "Rolling Thunder Revue".  This would be an assembly of different performers from the Greenwich Village folk scene, touring the nation in 1975, playing smaller venues in smaller towns, gradually leading up to the Bicentennial celebration.  And it started in Plymouth, Mass, symbolically I guess, then circled around the Northeast and Canada in the fall of 1975, culminating in a big concert in Madison Square Garden, NYC, where Dylan made a very public plea for leniency at a benefit concert for Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, falsely imprisoned for murder in 1966.

(The second half of the tour was in Spring 1976, and covered the southern and southwestern U.S., but we're only concerned today with the first half of the tour...)

The music here, for me at least, is beyond reproach.  The hits I knew from the "early" Dylan catalog ("A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall", "When I Paint My Masterpiece", "She Belongs to Me") were, by this point, probably on their third or fourth re-invention, and since he had assembled a rock band, were played hard in a fast tempo - otherwise Dylan himself would probably have been in danger of falling asleep on stage.  And I think the point of this exercise was to play folk songs in a rock style, thereby ideally combining the best of the two worlds - having something to say, and saying it in a modern style that people might want to hear, not just as flat, boring folk tunes.  (My wife loves to make this joke about early Bob Dylan - he sang, played guitar and harmonica at the same time.  But put a pair of cymbals between his knees, and he'd be regarded as ridiculous.)

But eventually, near the end of the film, I started to realize that not all of what I was being told could possibly be true, which seems to be an odd direction for a documentary to take.  The appearance of Michael Murphy as "Congressman Tanner" is what tipped the scales for me.  Hey, isn't that a fictional character from Robert Altman's acclaimed cable series "Tanner '88"?  Why, yes it is.  How could this be?  This man does not exist, yet he claims to have attended a Bob Dylan concert near Niagara Falls, or gotten tickets from Jimmy Carter or something.  Next you're probably going to tell me that Dylan didn't drive his own tour Winnebago (yeah, unlikely) and Sharon Stone never worked behind the scenes in the wardrobe department when she was 18 (umm, she didn't.). So what, in fact is going on here?

Once you notice this, the whole storyline begins to unravel.  That guy who claims to have been hired to follow Dylan around as the director of an eventual failed concert film?  Yeah, he's an actor.  I tend to believe the stories of the concert promoter and the band members, but then some other scenes start to appear staged as well, like the "private" conversation between Dylan and ex-girlfriend Joan Baez, during which they hash out the fact that they've both gotten married since they last sang together, and it's a bit like a double-betrayal, so everything's equal and OK.  Come on, now...

My suspicions include the following: at the start of the film, when asked about the Rolling Thunder Tour, Dylan claims to not remember a thing.  This is very possible, when you consider how well funded this tour was, the fact that it was 1975, and they probably had connections to get the BEST drugs.  The other factor to consider is that rockers had learned by this time to control their own narrative, like how the Beatles had those fake press conference answers in "A Hard Day's Night".  They're hilarious, sure, but were they improvised?  Probably not.

Also, consider that some of the directions that the Rolling Thunder Revue fired in turned out to be complete duds.  Writer Sam Shepard was hired to follow the tour to produce...well, something of note, apparently, only he never really felt connected to the music or inspired enough to create anything tangible.  Beat poet Allen Ginsberg was also part of the revue, but frankly, I'm not a fan - I know, I know, some people swear by the poem "Howl" and "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked", but I just don't give a rat's ass.  I don't know what it means, I don't WANT to know what it means. His work is overrated, and by 1975 what had he produced lately?  He was out on tour with Dylan because he was aware that rockers were the new poets, and he desperately wanted to BE Bob Dylan, or be LIKE Bob Dylan.  I think Dylan realized that Ginsberg's time had passed, because by the end of the tour's first half, Ginsberg's role had been reduced to that of baggage handler, roadie for the band and its entourage.  Assuming that this documentary is to believed on that point, anyway, but I can't think of a better use for Ginsberg's skills.

(I walked away from "Rolling Thunder Revue" convinced that somehow, someday, the part of Allen Ginsberg really needs to be played by actor David Cross.  Then I did a little research and remembered that this already happened, in the film "I'm Not There".  I must have remembered that on a sub-conscious level, because I watched that film.  Since then, I've worked my way through the whole series of "Arrested Development", so I essentially circled back to that other Dylan film without realizing it. I'm glad that the universe somehow accommodated my casting whim, before I even had it.)

So, without a consistent narrative for what happened on the Rolling Thunder tour when the band WASN'T playing, Dylan and director Martin Scorsese apparently felt the need to substitute their own reality.  And after some debate, I've decided to be OK about it - because this is what an artist does, and another re-invention, even a re-invention of historical events, is on some level just par for the course.  All performers are liars, to some degree.  Writers and poets are liars, musicians are liars, filmmakers are liars, and magicians are liars.  I'd say magicians are the biggest liars of all, except for Penn and Teller, who are least honest about the fact that they're going to lie to you, I've always admired that about them.  Like them, Bob Dylan has a career that's long and successful enough that I'm not going to tell him what he can and can't do.  If he wants to present a false narrative about a tour that happened 45 years ago, I think he's earned that right to some degree.  Plus, as I learned from personal experience, Dylan's going to do what he wants to do, however he wants to do it, and he doesn't give a fuck about that.

I'd say this could be a commentary on reality TV or the widespread use of social media, where everything that's supposedly "real" is just part of what some celebrity WANTS everyone to know about them, and everything that's sad or unpopular just never gets mentioned at all, but Bob Dylan's way too cool for that.  This man was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature on the basis of his songwriting, which just simply DOES NOT happen for anyone else, and then he couldn't be bothered to comment on the occasion, or show up for the public ceremony to accept the prize.  He's going to do exactly what he wants to do, exactly how he wants to do it.  Just shut up and stay out of his way.

Still, I think on one small level I might have preferred this as a concert film, with the main focus on the performances, in order, without interruption.  Maybe a couple breaks to show us footage from the tour, or anecdotes from Dylan or Joan Baez in 2019 to tell us what he remembers about the show, even if that isn't much. That would go down easier for me than faked interview footage shot by Martin Scorsese that's essentially a lame magic trick.  (And filmmaking's nothing but a big magic trick and/or a pile of lies, too, but at least I can usually figure out how the tricks are done.). I'm going to check YouTube now to see if there's a complete performance from the Rolling Thunder tour available, just to listen to it, without the film's connective tissue.

Plus, why the need to include EVERY SINGLE Bob Dylan tour and show since 1975 in the closing credits?  I mean, really, before we even see the cast list we're shown a breakdown of every tour he's done, but to what end?  We get it, the man's performed thousands of concerts - why do I need to know that he played at Soldier Field in Chicago in March of 1991?  It adds nothing to the story, and just buries me under information I don't need.  Can't we just keep the focus on the tour from 1975-76?

(EDIT: Yesterday, July 20, was the 55th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's single "Like a Rolling Stone, in 1965.  I was checking famous birthdays, but I probably should have kept a closer eye on web-sites that feature "This Day in Rock History", I'll try to do a better job of that during the rest of the documentary chain.)

Also starring Bob Dylan (last seen in "Steve Jobs: Man in the Machine"), Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith (last seen in "Love, Gilda"), Martin von Haselberg, Scarlet Rivera, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn (last seen in "The Wrecking Crew!"), Larry "Ratso" Sloman, James Gianopulos, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, Sam Shepard (last seen in "Darling Companion"), David Mansfield (last seen in "Heaven's Gate"), Ronnie Hawkins (ditto), T-Bone Burnett (ditto), Anne Waldman, Ronee Blakley (last seen in "Nashville'), Joni Mitchell, Chief Rolling Thunder, Chief Mad Bear, Peter La Farge, Michael Murphy (last seen in "The Year of Living Dangerously"), Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, Roberta Flack, Bob Neuwirth, Luther Rix, Mick Ronson (last seen in "Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World"), J. Steven Soles, Rob Stoner, Howie Wyeth, Jacques Levy, Denise Mercedes, Eric Andersen, Barry Imhoff, Louie Kemp, Claudia Levy, Peter Orlovsky, Gordon Lightfoot, George Moran, Walter Yetnikoff,

with archive footage of Jimmy Carter (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Gerald Ford (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, Bill Graham (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Rev. Billy Graham (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America"), Bette Midler (last seen in "The Stepford Wives"), Richard Nixon (last seen in "Bombshell"), Gene Simmons (last seen in "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage"), Paul Stanley (last seen in "The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years").

RATING: 7 out of 10 pointless rambling Patti Smith stories

Sphere

Year 12, Day 202 - 7/20/20 - Movie #3,609

BEFORE: OK, I know I'm running a day or two late, I was supposed to start the big Summer Music Concert series already, but I'm just going to squeeze one more in here, because this one's been on my DVR since last August, and I need to free up some space.  I've got new movies coming in all this month...  This film has a cast of only 12, but really only four or five that are usable links.  Sure, I could reschedule it and put it with another Samuel Jackson film like the most recent "Shaft" film, but then what would I do for an outro?  Better to burn it off here, I think, between two other films with Sharon Stone, and I'll start the Summer Music Concert series tomorrow, I promise.

Sharon Stone carries over from "The Laundromat".

THE PLOT: A spaceship is discovered under coral growth at the bottom of the ocean.

AFTER: I know this is the year for Weird Movies, but WTF?  This is a really weird one, not from a storytelling format sense (well, kinda, maybe) or a flashback/time-twisty sense (well, kinda, maybe) but from more of a just-plain-terrible story idea standpoint.  Narrative films have really been letting me down in the last few days, like "Hot Rod" sucked and then "The Laundromat" was a mess, and now this.  Maybe it's a great time to switch over to concerts and documentaries for a couple weeks.

To really pick this story apart today, I'm going to have to talk about it in detail, so here's a rare (for me) SPOILER ALERT - if you want to preserve the delicate narrative details of "Sphere", and like me you haven't found the time since 1998 to get around to watching it, please stop reading here, or go watch "Sphere" if you can and then meet me back here, OK?  Good.

The first 30 minutes of the film is just build-up, getting the team together, a team that needs to be assembled because the U.S. Navy has found what appears to be an alien spacecraft on the ocean floor, so they follow some government recommendation for putting together a team for this exact situation, namely a psychologist (to initiate contact with alien life), an astrophysicist (to determine where the aliens came from), a mathematician (because, umm, I don't know, apparently math is universal or something) and a marine biologist (just in case the contact would be made underwater - so, umm, how did the government pamphlet know this would happen?)  I smell some NITPICK POINTS coming into play here.

For the sake of expediency and convenience, the psychologist picked for the response team is also the same psychologist who wrote the report for the government on who to put on the team.  Wait, he recommended HIMSELF for the position?  I guess that's a form of job security, or maybe he just always wanted to be the one to talk to the aliens, if they ever landed.  And then to save time, he recommended a bunch of his friends and colleagues for the team, just in case they ever put the team together or made a movie about it, there wouldn't be that awkward "getting to know you" phase.  But the marine biologist he recommended for the team, in the very very unlikely event that first contact would happen underwater, was a woman he had an affair with, someone who also had a nervous breakdown or a suicide attempt or something.  Sure, that sounds like a perfect candidate for someone to recommend for a high-pressure inter-galactic situation, why not?  I guess he kind of owed her, after breaking up with her?  Still, it's a NITPICK POINT, because this is someone he would probably want to AVOID in the future, not be on a response team with.  Also, this is somehow set in an alternate universe where somebody who looks like Dustin Hoffman can score with someone who looks like mid-1990's Sharon Stone?  That seems impossible.

But I digress again.  The response team is supposed to just live in a nearby underwater habitat while the alien vessel is investigated by the military - so they go through a rigorous process of getting their bodies accustomed to living in the pressure of the deep ocean, just on the extremely unlikely chance that something is alive down there, and they'll need to enter the vessel.  (Umm, guess what...)  The team determines from the coral build-up that the vessel has been on the ocean floor for nearly 300 years, which could be possible - alien civilizations may not be on the same timetable as humans, and could have developed spaceflight before we did.  But when they finally find the aliens' bodies, they look suspiciously human - and one's wearing a DisneyWorld t-shirt and holding a can of beer, so the only logical conclusion is that an alien civilization developed exactly like we did, only earlier!

Just kidding - the "simple" answer to this conundrum involves some form of time travel, the ship logs are in English, and the date of the last entry ends in the year "43", so the spaceship must be from 2043, or 2143, or maybe 1643, they're just not sure. (seriously?) There's also a giant, golden glowing sphere (ah yes, the title of the film...) in the spaceship's hold, so the only logical conclusion to draw here is that an American spacecraft went out into space to get this thing, flew into or too close to a black hole, and somehow went back in time hundreds of years, to arrive back on earth during colonial times, at which point they crashed into the ocean.  Yes, the pilot was good enough to fly through a black hole and then find the earth again (though it would have been in a different position in the universe, thanks to the time travel) but not good enough to allow the ship to survive re-entry.  (Again, REALLY?  This is a story point we're going to plant our flag on?)

Well, great news, there are no aliens, and we accidentally solved the riddles of black holes, and the mystery of time travel, so the team is no longer needed, everyone can go home and not worry about the big mysterious, golden, shimmering sphere that's perfectly harmless in every way.  Thanks for your service, and the CIA will be eliminating you soon enough, so get your affairs in order, AND movie over.  BUT WAIT, there's a coincidence typhoon coming to the area the spacecraft is under, so the useless team has to stay underwater for a couple more days - what could POSSIBLY go wrong during that time?  Well, a lot, as things turn out.  The team members get attacked by giant squids and impossibly aggressive jellyfish (which, umm, isn't even a thing, I think)

At this point, the mathematician uses time travel logic to determine that the entire response team is doomed - because if they survive, there will be a historical record of the spaceship being found, and then in the future, the crew of the spaceship would then know in advance about the black hole that they're scheduled to encounter, and they would take the appropriate safeguards to avoid it, and therefore the spaceship WON'T get thrown back in time.  This is a nice, neat little time paradox that appears to support one solitary conclusion - however, other answers are possible.  Perhaps the U.S. Navy could be counted on to keep the discovery secret.  Perhaps the crew of the spaceship in the future never studies U.S. history, or doesn't figure out that their spaceship was THAT spaceship that got found in the ocean several hundred years before.  Or maybe they knew about the black hole so they changed their course, only to fly right into it anyway.  Or maybe some future expert on time travel saw the paradox coming, so they removed certain details about the found spacecraft from the historical records.

But it seems that the curious mathematician couldn't resist the urge to check out the shiny thing, and somehow he got inside of it, or appeared to, even though there wasn't any kind of door.  This is where things got very uncertain, it was difficult for me (and the characters, too) to determine what was happening after this point in the film.  So far I've read four or five different interpretations, and there's no clear consensus - that's a big problem for a film, if the audience doesn't even know what's going on, I think.  The big shiny sphere is some kind of reality engine?  Is that right?  What effect it had on the humans was also unclear, they sort of imply that because the math guy was reading "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" that somehow his unconscious mind created the giant squid?  While he slept, his dreams manifested as reality?  That's a big buy-in, don't you think?

What's worse is that we're told that the mathematician was the ONLY one who entered the sphere, and then they pull a switcheroo late in the film that then tells us two other people also entered the sphere, and they've been manifesting the same dreams-become-reality powers.  And then this after-the-fact fact is used to explain the other weird events that took place before - their fears and dreams were manifested in reality, and for this reason somehow the habitat then needs to be destroyed.  Sure, right, I follow that logic, of course.  But reality is fractured by this point, and these three people can't tell their dreams apart from reality - they're on the sub, but they THINK they're on the station, or is it the other way around?   How the hell can they even tell what they're doing, and if they can make their dreams happen, why don't they just IMAGINE themselves to safety?  And how come nobody's dream of being in high-school in their underwear manifests itself into reality? (and please, can we make sure that happens to Sharon Stone's character, not Dustin Hoffman's.  Thanks.)

I don't know, some things just can't be explained - like, for example, how did this confusing piece of nonsense get made into a film?  I'm assuming that the source material, a novel by Michael Crichton, is much more coherent.  What a shame that $80 million was spent making this movie (and that's in 1998 dollars) and it only brought in $37 million.  They could have done so many better things in the late 1990's with $80 million, like cured a disease or something. Wouldn't the world have been better off?  Instead somebody just couldn't decide if they wanted to rip off "Alien" or "The Abyss" so they tried to do both, and failed miserably.   And the characters decide that they're better off forgetting about the whole encounter - if only I could do the same.

Also starring Dustin Hoffman (last seen in "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"), Samuel L. Jackson (last heard in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Liev Schreiber (last seen in "Defiance"), Peter Coyote (last heard in "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"), Queen Latifah (last seen in "Girls Trip"), Marga Gomez, Bernard Hocke (last seen in "The Big Short"), James Pickens Jr. (last seen in "Red Dragon"), Michael Keys Hall, Ralph Tabakin and a cameo from Huey Lewis (last seen in "Back in Time").

RATING: 4 out of 10 leaky pipes

The Laundromat

Year 12, Day 201 - 7/19/20 - Movie #3,608

BEFORE: Well, we were SUPPOSED to have our bathroom construction finished yesterday, only our builder had some kind of conflict and couldn't come on Saturday, so he swears he's going to finish up the details - the fan, the painting, the light switches - tomorrow.  Three weeks is an incredibly fast turn-around time for tearing out a bathroom and replacing everything, the walls, the tile, the fixtures so we should be satisfied no matter what, but still, we were hoping to use the new upstairs bathroom this weekend, and then we had to wait two more days.  We've got all our bathroom accessories and toiletries spread out over the upstairs office and the dining room, but everything should go back to normal if they can finish tomorrow and we can put everything back into the new bathroom.

Concerning the pandemic, I've heard it said that the whole thing could be over in three or four weeks, too, if only EVERYONE in the states with the most case would comply with wearing face masks and social distancing rules, and clearly they're just not.  Look, I know it's summer and this is the time for going to the beach, or amusement parks, or just hanging out in a bar, and you can still do all that, just four weeks from now.  Now is not the time to be selfish and think only of yourself and how much you want to have fun, it's the time to be considerate to your fellow Americans and continue to stay home if your state's statistics are not doing well.  Look at me, I'm still housebound, and New York City's numbers are doing fine (because after remodeling the bathroom, who can afford to go out?  Plus, with travel restrictions still in place, there's no place safe to go, except maybe Atlantic City.)  Maybe once the construction is over we can hit a few more restaurants on Long Island, maybe get some BBQ or some soup dumplings.  But also, it's too HOT to go anywhere.  If you live in Florida or Texas, isn't it even hotter than NYC?  I would relish the chance to stay home and not go outside during a super-hot Florida summer?  Why not just look at this as an opportunity, to stay home and beat the heat?

OK, you can still go out if you want, but wear a damn mask?  Why is this so hard, it's not a civil rights issue, it's a safety issue - YOUR OWN safety, and if you're too dumb to realize that, then do it for the safety of your friends and family, people who could catch the virus FROM YOU.  Do you want to live in a world where your inactions spread the virus and caused the death of a beloved family member?  I just don't understand the thinking here.

Chris Parnell carries over from "Hot Rod".

THE PLOT: A widow investigates an insurance fraud, chasing leads to a pair of Panama City law partners exploiting the world's financial system.

AFTER: Well, Chris Parnell was only in this film for a few minutes, it was just a cameo, which of course I had no way of knowing - but cameos count, too, for my purposes any appearance is an appearance, even if it's not credited or listed in the IMDB (this cameo is both, it turns out, but I've relied on plenty that are not).  Parnell and Will Forte play two "Gringos" in a Latin American country who stumble upon a bar's backroom while looking for the bathroom, and they see something they shouldn't, apparently.  But I'm not even sure how this scene tied in with the rest of the film, which is rather disjointed throughout.  I can't even say it's "all over the place", even though it is, but that statement sort of implies that a plot is firing in too many directions at once, or jumping around without making a point, and I think even saying that would be giving this film too much credit.  This one does jump around, but in an incoherent way, or perhaps it's in a way that was well-intentioned to bring about some understanding about the financial mess that our country and the world is in, only it could never quite get its act together to fully explain anything concrete about what's wrong, or what needs to be done about it.

Honestly, I was expecting a more tangible crime-based film, something like "The Kitchen", where people run rackets and rough people up and collect protection money - or based on the title, maybe a money-laundering scheme connected to drug dealers or extortioners.  But the crimes here are much less obvious, basically centering around companies that set up offshore shell companies for any number of illegal activities, only the company that's the main focus here claims to not be aware of any criminal activity related to their companies, and apparently setting up offshore accounts and shell companies remains legal in certain companies, and tonight we're only concerned with the EFFECTS that these practices have on the average person, from time to time.  Umm, I think?

The main point seems to be that everybody, financially speaking, is screwed - with some notable exceptions, those being for the people who are in power and MAKE the rules which are screwing everybody else.  Stylistically, this film wanted so badly to be like "The Big Short", where a few people in power figured out what was going on and how to game the system, and certain points were made by talking to the audience and having anecdotes and diagrams to explain the technical bits.  That's all here, too, but it doesn't really help - and there's a fair amount of "The Darwin Awards" mixed in, which was a film about the unusual and stupid ways some people die, which worked fine as a joke web-site but couldn't possibly function as a narrative film, only that didn't keep somebody from trying.  So plenty of people here die (some literally and some just financially) because they were stupid in some way, or didn't take the proper steps to protect themselves or their money, only how were they to know what would be coming in their future?

I'm probably making a mess out of trying to explain this film, but that's only because I couldn't fully understand it.  Well, I have said many times that this is the year of weird movies, I think this one certainly qualifies.  I couldn't quite figure out how all the different segments were related to each other, or if they were even related at all - so picture "The Big Short" mixed with "The Darwin Awards" mixed with "Movie 43" and you may get some idea, even though that sounds like the worst "elevator pitch" of all time.

Apart from the segment I mentioned above that didn't seem to connect AT ALL to the rest of the film, there was another segment with a college girl finding out just before her graduation party that her rich African father is having an affair with her roommate - and to keep her quiet and not tell her mother, her father offers her ownership of one of her companies as a graduation present, and on paper, that company is worth millions.  But through some miscommunications her mother finds out about the affair anyway, and so when the college girl goes to cash in her bearer shares of the company, she finds out that it's a shell company, and not worth nearly as much as she was told.  Or the father somehow took the money away or devalued the company, it's not very clear what happened, only that he tried to buy his daughter's silence, and screwed her over in the process.

The link between the stories is very flimsy, in my opinion - the same Panama-based corporation that set up all the offshore shell companies is run by two men, one German and one Panamanian, who serve as narrators of the film, giving us economic lessons on things like credit, but never really admitting how shady their business practices are, we have to sort of figure that out from seeing all the bad effects that happen to other people.  Ellen Martin gets the worst of it, as she appears in several segments, one where she doesn't get as big a settlement as she was promised after a tragic accident that happens to a family member, and another where she doesn't get the retirement condo that she wants in Las Vegas because someone else made a better offer and paid in cash.  I sort of see how the first story connects to the "shell companies are evil" message, but I'm not sure I see the connection in the second one, which is rather frustrating.

The tide does turn after an anonymous hacker releases all the secrets from the corporation to the world, and this is based on a real incident, the Panama Papers scandal, which revealed the inner workings of a company called Mossack Fonseca in April 2016.  Financial information for over 214,000 offshore companies was leaked to the press, and since many of these shell companies were used for fraud, tax evasion and avoiding international treaties and laws, many high ranking political officials around the world, plus celebrities and business moguls suddenly found themselves in hot water. Basically upper crust folks around the world were using these tricks to keep more of their money, and thanks to a hacker, everybody now knows about it - there was a FIFA scandal that resulted, too, if I recall correctly.

The good news is that some countries have taken steps since then to recover back taxes owed, plus the resulting fines.  This I suppose was also good news for tax attorneys, who suddenly had a wealth of celebrity clients to defend, or had to come up with other ways to instruct their clients to save on taxes, and one way is to set up charitable foundations to offset taxes, instead of hiding their money in offshore accounts.  But still, the movie seems to not present a clear message at the end about what needs to be done - Meryl Streep, the actress who played Ellen Martin, removes her wig and make-up and talks directly to the audience about the need for campaign finance reform.  What, WHAT?  I thought the problem was shell companies and international banking, not finance reform, doesn't this feel a bit like changing horses in mid-stream?

I suppose that if we had campaign finance reform, that would change the fact that lobbyists, such as the banking industry, can contribute massive sums of money to Presidential and Senate candidates, which therefore controls the way that those officials govern and legislate once they're elected.  We would theoretically need an impartial President and legislature going forward in order to change the laws on taxes and banking, but this seems like a bit of a stretch, plus what are the chances of this happening?  In order to change the world, a candidate has to get elected, but it's unlikely that anyone's going to win an election without getting enough money to do so, and that apparently makes that candidate beholden to those industries that contributed to his or her campaign.

My thoughts on campaign finance reform are the same as my thoughts on election reforms, and for that matter, the vagaries of the electoral college.  An election goes poorly or there are signs of malfeasance or shenanigans (cough) 2000... (cough) 2016... and then everybody starts screaming "Something's got to be done, we need to change the system!  We need to improve the voting system!  We need to get off paper ballots!" and now it's "We need mail-in paper ballots!" but nothing ever gets done.  And then right after the election, people say, "Well, we've got four years to fix things before the next election..." and they do NOTHING for three years, and then when the next election is on the horizon, the shouting starts again, but all of a sudden it's too close to the election, we can't possibly fix the system with only 12 months to go, we've got primaries coming up, after all.  It's kind of like the old joke about the leaking roof - whenever it rains, you realize the need to fix the roof, but then when the rain stops, there doesn't seem to be a need to fix the roof, so the roof never gets fixed.

If everyone agrees we need some kind of election reform, or campaign finance reform, then why don't we start tomorrow and work on that around the clock, until it gets fixed?  Just wondering.  It couldn't possibly be that nobody's really serious about making the system better, could it?   Why are we still hearing about gerrymandering, voter suppression, votes being lost in some districts, voting machines not working, and now poll-workers who are afraid to work because of the pandemic?  Just FIX IT already.

As for "The Laundromat", I'm not sure that can be fixed, either.  It's darn near incoherent and I felt like it circled around some valuable points but never really landed on potential solutions.  Why point out these problems without a clear road to recovery, just to make us all feel helpless and terrible?  Plus, what happened to the guy who fainted in the airport after flying in from Nevis?  You can't just have a character drop like that and not follow up, that was very sloppy.

Also starring Meryl Streep (last seen in "Little Women"), Gary Oldman (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), Antonio Banderas (last seen in "The 33"), Sharon Stone (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), David Schwimmer (last seen in "Six Days Seven Nights"), Matthias Schoenaerts (last seen in "Our Souls at Night"), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "Game Night"), Will Forte (last seen in "Good Boys"), James Cromwell (last seen in "Marshall"), Melissa Rauch (last seen in "Are You Here"), Larry Wilmore (last seen in "I Love You, Man"), Robert Patrick (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Rosalind Chao (last seen in "Just Like Heaven"), Jesse Wang, Nikki Amuka-Bird (last seen in "The Omen"), Nonso Anozie (last seen in "Atonement"), Jessica Allain (last seen in "Eddie the Eagle"), Amy Pemberton, Cristela Alonzo (last heard in "The Angry Birds Movie"), Jay Paulson, Charles Halford (last seen in "Darling Companion"), Shoshana Bush, Norbert Weisser, Marsha Stephanie Blake, Veronica Osorio (last seen in "Hail, Caesar!"), Jane Morris (last seen in "Frankie and Johnny"), Jeff Michalski (ditto), Juliet Donenfeld, Brock Brenner, Myron Parker Wright, Miriam A. Hyman, Brenda Zamora, Frank Gallegos, Miracle Washington, Kunjue Li, Ming Lo, with archive footage of Lester Holt (last seen in "Bombshell"), Barack Obama (last seen in "The Report").

RATING: 4 out of 10 IRS special agents