Scorsese's 'Rolling Thunder' Documentary Confirmed for 2019

Discussion in 'Music Corner' started by CWillman, Jan 10, 2019.

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  1. Bender Rodriguez

    Bender Rodriguez RIP Exene, best dog ever. 2005-2016

    Bob Dylan is actually two ten-year-old boys stacked in a trenchcoat.
     
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  2. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident

    I think Scorsese should re-cut the Netflix special.
    Remove all the fakery, replace it with authenticity from 1975.
    More concert footage, more backstage business, more the relevant sidetrips
    like the walk up two flights to Gordon Lightfoot's room where he's jamming
    with Joni Mitchell, like the discussion Baez has with Dylan at 11o minutes in,
    like the visit to Kerouac's grave, like talking to Hurricane Carter through steel
    bars in the prison, like Dylan's interaction with Senator / President Jimmy
    Carter, and the Dylan songs that were captured on camera but cut to make
    room for stupid fake knuckleheaded interviews.

    We don't need to see Allen Ginsberg meditating out loud on the beach or
    reciting Kaddish to bingo players. Neither bit has any business being in the
    film. Nor do we need to see Larry Sloman slumming in the diner. He's as
    boring as all the fake interviews. Turn the camera back on the RTR where
    it belongs and abandon the obnoxious sophistry.
     
  3. footlooseman

    footlooseman Forum Resident

    Location:
    Joyzee
    completely agree. creative licence not needed for a historical document when we have the raw materials its not like its from the ninth century. does he really think this is a movie that masses are going to watch?
     
  4. Mbd77

    Mbd77 Collect ‘Em All!

    Location:
    London
    I’d imagine there’s a bit of crossover - fans of Bob Dylan and fans of Van Dorf.
     
  5. CWillman

    CWillman Senior Member Thread Starter

    Location:
    L.A., CA
  6. That's actually a conversation between Renaldo and The Woman in White, two fictional characters.
     
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  7. Ricky Lampoon

    Ricky Lampoon Forum Resident

    Location:
    Switzerland
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  8. Dhreview16

    Dhreview16 Forum Resident

    Location:
    London UK
    Terrific stuff. Time just flies by. Classic Scorsese. Hurricane by Bob and Coyote by Joni stand out.
     
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  9. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident

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  10. Willowman

    Willowman Senior Member

    Location:
    London, UK
    Didn’t you already post this in the other Rolling Thunder thread?
     
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  11. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident

    This is a question you're asking me?

    It was, but it isn't really. It's Baez and Dylan saying what's true in
    their lives during their role playing. So it's both. As a film editor
    myself it looks as if there was more to the scene than has been used
    in either film. Scorsese really tightens it up. Which is good.
     
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  12. All the off-stage footage was intended for a fictional film from day one AFAWK. Nearly every second of it. Try to make something truthful out of it!
     
  13. jimbo3688

    jimbo3688 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Phoenix, Arizona
    I'm sorry to hear that some fans feel used or disrespected by Dylan. As a fan for over 30 years, I have a different point of view. I feel that Dylan has been very generous, in many ways. For instance he has given over 3,000 concerts during the NET years in cities all over the world. He plays places that many acts don't get to such as Mankato, MN. He did Theme Time Radio Hour, which was very entertaining, and introduced me to a lot of musical artists that I now follow. His Bootleg Series has been generally well presented over 14 volumes, and includes many previously unknown delights. He sold his archives to the people in Tulsa, which will enable scholarly research such as Douglas Brinkley's book. He authorized and participated in the two Scorsese movies, and licensed his music for I'm Not There. As someone who is interested in Dylan and his art, all of this benefits me. And there's a lot more as well. This doesn't mean that I like or agree with everything Dylan has done, or that I've never been disappointed. But I am grateful.
     
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  14. adam_777

    adam_777 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Duncan BC, Canada
    Absolutely and couldn`t agree more. For a man who evidently does not look back, he has regular archival releases incredible in scope and depth aimed simply at the absolute most hardcore fans. Fans of other artists dream of this kind of disappointment. I understand people not enjoying the artistic decisions made, but when you start saying the guy is basically shilling his fans, its just hard to comprehend.
     
  15. ACAB

    ACAB Forum Resident

    Location:
    Herndon, VA
    Recut a film that was released a week ago? Yeah right.

    If this wasn't what Bob wanted, it wouldn't have come out. If you can't see that Bob Dylan is as funny as he is serious, I'd question your supposed fandom. Any real fan would have worked out years ago that he owes you nothing.

    Maybe you'd like to yell 'Judas' at him?
     
  16. rednax

    rednax Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
  17. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    I finally started watching the Netflix Scorsese movie last night. I wasn't sure what my reaction was going to be to the mockumentary and fantastical elements, but I'm finding myself enjoying it enormously.

    Some of those elements are just flat hilarious and seem just to be goofs on the found footage (like the bit when "van Dorp" is talking about the way he held a cigarette and the shot of Dylan holding a cigarette; I almost did a spit take on that one). Some of it has this weird quality of contextualizing the time and place, like all the bits about KISS.

    It's interesting because in some ways the fictional bits serve the function of a traditional voiceover or use of talking heads in a period documentary -- contextualizing and framing the historical material. But instead of using them to tell you facts, for the most part Scorsese uses them to spin yarns and tall tales, but they're yarns and tall tales that serve the same function as facts would have, and in a way that's much more entertaining that a documentary about Dylan's marriage and Renaldo and Clara and a coked up running around tour of used-to-be-big-deals and hangers on from the Village would have been.

    It's a movie of it's time -- the era of "fake news" and social media video manipulation and the era when people don't even share an agreement about basic observable facts or how to treat them -- but it also does capture the wild, rootless, do-your-own-thing-man spirit of the middle '70s.

    But of course, it being "A Bob Dylan Story," it obscures as much as it reveals. Naturally, that's always been the Dylan way. He's never been a confessional writer, and as he says in the film, life isn't about discovering yourself, or discovering anything, its about inventing yourself, which it seems to be is at the center of the way he has lived his life, and the "truest" think I've come across in the film yet (not that I feel that way, but clearly Dylan does). This movie is another part of that. The difference now is that 60 years later and in the internet era, we all are in on the gag in some ways.

    On thing that strikes me, having listened to some of the box set and watched some of the documentary now, is how much better it is seeing the live performances is vs. listening to them on album. On recordings they're loud, fast, the "singing" comes off often as flatly intoned shout. But in it's scatter-brained, drug addled, old-hippie way, the RTR was a theatrical show and a theatrical revue (and they were trying, the the most drug addled and half-assed way imaginable, to make a theatrical movie out of it too). There were all these new songs co-written with a dramatist, they had the greats American playwright of his generation tagging along to write dialog and concoct scenes, and there's a showmanship to the performances that is kind of unique in the Dylan canon -- including, yes, the makeup, about which the shaggy dog stories about KISS sound more true in the end than all the stories about reverse whiteface. And there's a gripping, theatrical quality to the performances -- the visual plus musical plus the fantastical -- that's missing from the experience of listening to the music alone. I'm not usually a fan of musical performances on film and video, and probably would bet bored by a straight filmed concert of the tour, but in the framed context of this shaggy dog story movie, about this rag tag nutty tour, these intense dramatic performances are gripping in a way that they're not on CD.

    I also think one of the other seemingly "truest" parts of the movie comes right at the begin where Dylan brushes the whole thing off saying basically, it's 40 years ago, I don't remember any of that stuff, who gives a s***?
     
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  18. bobcat

    bobcat Forum Resident

    Location:
    London, UK
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  19. chervokas

    chervokas Senior Member

    For me, that would make this a boring, rote tour documentary that I would struggle through once, more maybe start but never finish watching, like I do with most tour movies, and which certainly most of us wouldn't be obsessively talking about for days, and which wouldn't have anything to say about the current time, just about the past. A big yawn, and also only a story about it's not, not a story too about our time.

    I do think that using Sharon Stone and a prominent fictional character like Jack Tanner, for me, takes away a little of the make of illusion in the movie but I have to remember that it's a movie that opens with a found-object, movie-making magic trick, and yet one that was cut -- whether intentionally or not -- so that the audience can kind of see the trick, like an abstract impressionist painting where seeing the act of painting is part of the message. That's the essence of the new movie in a single opening visual metaphor: a movie magic trick made out of or inspired by found objects where we're all a little in on the trick because the seams of the magic making show. (It's also the way Dylan writes songs -- a found melody from "No More Auction Block" borrowed here, a line from some old hobo railroad song or from some Bogart movie there, a story in which all kinds of different things exists at the same time -- the CSA controls rivers in the center of the country, Leo DiCaprio is on the history Titanic, and Einstein is disguised as Robin Hood.)

    What you get to see in this movie WAS the RTR in large measure -- a road-trip spillover of a mid '70s Greenwich Village lost weekend party of NYC literati, old folkies from a scene that kind of skipped down 10 years before, and younger burnout musicians, taken out of the stoned, dark nooks and crannies of Sullivan and Bleecker and put on a brightly light stage in small New England towns where no one knew what the hell to make of it after which the participants maybe kind of sobered up and wondered, "What they hell was that and why did we do it?"
     
    Last edited: Jun 15, 2019
  20. quicksrt

    quicksrt Senior Member

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    There will be the bonus DVD or BR disc which is very heavy on "music only" for the most part. It's too historic to not have us enjoy more of the music on film. MS knows that.
     
  21. dormouse

    dormouse Forum Resident

    Yes, I guess that should have set the tone. I don't believe that, but he probably doesn't necessarily feel he could give a comprehensive historically accurate account that would satisfy the archivist-fan, so why bother, let's have some fun.

    I think ultimately though it now falls between two stools and now even those who were there are unsure what was real and what was fiction. It is sort of unique in mixing reality and fiction in such a seamless fashion. It is usually almost always one or the other in totality and if fiction intrudes it is just the way someone remembers the facts rather than them being complete fabrication. We all remember things differently (the individual Beatles recalling their meeting with Elvis in the Anthology for example - they all recalled it differently but the core meeting did happen, it was just the incidental facts that were misremembered) but the core of tale is based up reality. I don't think that we come away from this film with any real impression of what the Rolling Thunder Revue was about and why. Even the reason for the whiteface is obscured. It may well have been a whim and the reason forgotten but the Kiss thing is bizarre.

    Listening to the Boston evening show from the CD set as I write and it is another triumph (by mistake I have skipped the afternoon show, which was not my intention, but I'm not going to change now!). It is interesting how some tracks are static while others are swapped out. It does improve the listenabilty of the set where we do get some surprises. So far though the performances have been excellent throughout. A worthy addition to the alternative Dylan discography. We are rarely disappointed with these live and bootleg releases.

    So thanks Bob. You are forgiven for the playful film record. If you could give us some extended concert footage for a dvd release though it would be appreciated!

    Right on queue, as the intro to Isis on the Boston show, Dylan has just informed: "Here is a true story. As a matter of fact they are all true." Yeah, Bob, yeah!
     
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  22. The Bard

    The Bard Highway 61 Revisited. That is all.

    Location:
    Singapore
    "In Renaldo and Clara, the mask is more important than the face."

    RTR I was all about performance art, time, masks, truth and identity as Bob conjured with the teaching of Norman Raeben.
    You could argue that by producing a movie that slips so easily between truth and falsehood, Bob is actually being very true to that period of his life. #Meta
     
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  23. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident

    Don't be childish. No I would not like to yell Judas at anyone. Grow up.
     
  24. The MEZ

    The MEZ Forum Resident

    Location:
    CT
    Accept the version Dylan wanted released
     
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  25. Richard--W

    Richard--W Forum Resident

    I accept the concert footage, which is amazing. I accept walking up two flights
    to join Joni Mitchell jamming with Gordon Lightfoot, the visit to Kerouac's
    grave, the discourse with Joan Baez, talking with Hurricane Carter through
    steel bars, the interview with Hurricane, the interaction with Senator /
    President Jimmy Carter, the political analogies to 1975 (I remember it well),
    all that backstage RTR business. Any statement that needs to be made is in
    fact made with the 1975 footage. It speaks for itself, in addition to being
    entertaining. But the older I get the more impatient I become with people
    playing silly games. The fake tour producer, the fake director, the fake stories
    like Sharon Stone tells have no value and are an insult to my intelligence.
    Watching Ginsberg sing Kaddish to Bingo players and Larry "Ratso" Sloman
    slumming in a diner are distractions from the main thing. All that talk about
    expectations etc. was just fallacious in 1975 and it's fallacious now. I didn't
    like it then, either. It weighed down Renaldo & Clara and it weighs down
    Conjuring the Rolling Thunder Revue. That's why Renaldo & Clara
    sank like a stone at the box-office. 50% of this Netflix special is absolutely
    wonderful. The other 50% lacks integrity and is absolute garbage.

    I'm fine with this footage and voice-over. It's part of the self-deluded
    sophistry of the time. I appreciate Scorsese's tight editing of the vintage
    footage. But it doesn't need to be amplified or justified by imposters and
    fake stories forty years after the fact. The time Scorsese wastes on that
    would be better spent showing concert footage he left out.
     
    Last edited: Jun 15, 2019
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