I'm Not There, 11/11.

"I'm Not There crystallizes a particular viewpoint that's dominated Dylan talk for more than a decade," writes Los Angeles Times music critic Ann Powers. "It's the Trickster take, in which the singer-songwriter's gift for theft and chameleonic behavior is played up so strongly that he no longer seems like an individual at all, but a harmonica-slinging humanoid archive of American mythology."

Updated through 11/16.

Todd Haynes "realizes that die-hard Dylan fans in particular may have trouble watching the film; the commentary tracks in their heads won't match the events as they unspool on screen - Allen Ginsberg and Dylan really met in 1963, not 1966, that kind of thing," adds Lisa Rosen. "And it's a joke sometimes," Haynes pointed out, "like [Dylan] as a little black boy called Woody Guthrie and everyone is so swept away by his personality and his performance and they don't even mention his color, as everyone was persuaded to never question Dylan's middle-class Jewish background when he was performing his grass-roots persona."

And here's a bit from further up in that piece:

Said Haynes, "Even if you look at Life magazine layouts throughout the decade, there's an ad in 1966 that literally looks like a Godard poster, but it's for lipstick." His reference material included The Conquest of Cool, Thomas Frank's book on the advertising campaigns of the period. "That intelligence, that sophistication was actually on Life magazine pages way before it was the way Dylan was being photographed on the covers of his new cutting-edge record," he said. "It's not that counterculture changed the society - that's really the thesis of that book - it's that the society was changing and it was hitting every single sector, and sometimes it was hitting the commercial sectors before it was hitting the artistic sectors."

And there's another interview with Haynes in today's papers, a long one in the Observer, Sean O'Hagan's. Two sidebars follow: Geoff Dyer on "I'm Not There," the song, and a very short Dylan-at-the-movies list.

Earlier: The NYFF podcast with Glenn Kenny, reviews from NYFF and Toronto, Venice and Telluride and Larry Gross in Film Comment.

Update: "There weren't many pretty voices at I'm Not There, a tribute to Bob Dylan at the Beacon Theater on Wednesday night tied in with the coming Todd Haynes film," writes Jon Pareles in the New York Times. "Mr Dylan wasn't there, but echoes of his voice were. Singers rasped, cackled and near-yodeled, and the songs thrived on the treatment. They were written to provoke, not to soothe."

Update, 11/13: "It is almost impossible to believe that such amateurism came from a director of his stature," blogs DK Holm for the Vancouver Voice. "It's all very modern and post-modern and structuralist and all that. But as Andrew Sarris wrote a long time ago, a great director has to first be at least a good director, and the incompetence evinced in this film is beyond belief."

Update, 11/14: Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series is on view at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz through February 3. Kate Connolly tells the story behind the exhibition in the Guardian. The gallery's director, Ingrid Mössinger, "moved by hearing his 1965 song 'Subterranean Homesick Blues,'" simply got in touch and asked if he had anything she might show:

He replied within days. "I couldn't believe it when I got a positive answer - I think he was just waiting to be asked, and quite simply until then, no one had," she said. Mössinger's ambitions remained modest - to display his snapshot-style drawings and sketches compiled while on tour in Europe, America and Asia between 1989 and 1992 in a small exhibition in the gallery that she has managed for 11 years. "But like a true artist, he wanted to make new works," she says.

In a burst of creativity over eight months he created 320 works in watercolour and gouache, digitally enlarging them on deckle-edged paper. In a similar approach to his songs, Dylan produced three or four versions of a single motif by altering both the medium and the colours. "I was fascinated to learn of Ingrid's interest in my work, and it gave me the impetus to realise the vision I had for these drawings many years ago," the 66-year-old writes in the exhibition notes. "If not for this interest, I don't know if I even would have revisited them."

Mössinger chose 140 of the paintings plus a further 30 for the accompanying catalogue, for what is the first exhibition of the singer-songwriter's works.

Update, 11/16: "I'm Not There, a vignette oriented tale of the folk singing troubadour told in distinct personality 'acts,' is wildly over the top and often too enraptured by its own chutzpah," writes Bill Gibron for PopMatters. "It shouts when it should whisper and defies when it should redefine. But when it's wrapped up in a visual grace this astounding, and populated with performances that actually boggle the mind, we can forgive the loftier, sometimes loony ambitions."

Posted by dwhudson at November 11, 2007 5:57 AM