A shadowy kingdom of truth and consequences as the Dylan fantasies thunder out?

Smashed and Eponymous, how the greatness of Bob’s film surrounded Leigh and Andrea in good sounds

Last night I had a fascinating and funny chat with LA film editor Bob Mori about the cinematic strangenesses of Bob Dylan … not the most successful part of his career as far as I’m concerned.

I think Mr Dylan has been involved in two filmic faux pas in these modern times.

First, Martin Scorcese’s Rolling Thunder Review.

And then the more recent Shadow Kingdom.

I felt a bit cheated by both films, although I loved them in a sort of dysfunctional way. It was as if my best friend had lied to me.

Bob Mori, the man who created the brilliant independent video to Dylan’s Murder Most Foul, went half way with me as far as Shadow Kingdom is concerned. We both agreed that there was something shadowy about the publicity to this film, a major event for any Royal Bob-ness fan…

Or should that be shady?

There is no doubt it was promoted as a ‘live’ show, which is simply wasn’t. Both Bob and I – and millions of others, I dare say – expected it to be just that, LIVE.

And in a way, it was. But it was a staged, posed, directed, edited recording of what could have been some live performances of a number of Bob’s beautiful and best songs.

Far from being Bob winging it on a live stage, it was him embracing new technology when most people of his age are embracing a cup of Horlicks!

As far as Mr Mori and I are concerned though, it was ‘mis-sold’ to the public and we have both been a part of the world of advertising, so our thoughts are based on some knowledge of how smoke and mirrors can be used in the shadowy kingdom of selling dreams…

But we had totally different views on Rolling Thunder, so steeped in fact and fantasy that basically I found it a bit dishonest and misleading… in simple terms I just didn’t get the joke of Sharon Stone revealing her metaphorical ‘all’ about her youthful dalliance with Dylan, the appearance of a pretend politician, a bitter and bad tempered film-maker complaining how he had been treated…

Well, he wasn’t was he! He just wasn’t there!

I know his Royal Bob-ness has always used slight-of-mental-hand and noble literary spells to mislead, obscure, frustrate, entertain and charm us all. But we understand all this as fans.

But Scorsese? A mock-mentary? An in-joke? A series of lies?

Another bit of Bob’s failure on the big screen?

Mr Mori disagreed and put his argument this way: “In my opinion. It is a marvel, along the lines of Spinal Tap with real history attached. Not pure but truly perfect.”

Not pure but truly perfect … I respect the convoluted perfect articulacy of that statement.

So, what do you think? Let me and Bob know, join us in this great debate.

Meanwhile, here’s a story about how I got hold of the totally wrong end of the stick while watching the fabulous Masked and Anonymous – and how finally I got turned on to it!

Leigh G Banks takes an unusual and hilarious journey around surround-sound, an old telly and the gold of silence in what could be one of Dylan’s most accomplished works of art…

It has to be said that Bob’s life as one of the true artistic geniuses of our times has not generally been complimented by his Big Screen acting career.

There have been many brilliant films about HIM – Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, ABC’s Eat the Document and Scorcese’s No Direction Home for instance – but films involving him as a dramatic actor … well.

The sad thing is he is actually a brilliant actor! Any of his stage performances prove that – the hobo, the wild amphetamine fop, the white-faced ‘gypsy king’, the incendiary leather-clad biker, the stumbling eccentric rock n roller and, latterly, the riverboat captain, the growling, posing story-teller and purveyor of ancient poetry.

And his acting is subtle and multi-layered, containing multitudes of heroes and villains – with echoes in every nuanced movement of Hank Williams, Elvis, Little Richard, Guthrie, Ovid, Robert Burns and Arthur Rimbaud.

But film directors have seemed singularly unable to capture this genius on celluloid.

Dylan’s Alias in Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid was far more mesmerising than the rest of this bad-tempered over blown film, Hearts of Fire was an embarrassment for Return of the Jedi director Richard Marquand – Dylan was quirky and brilliant though.

Renaldo and Clara was stunning as far as the musical performances were concerned but Dylan let himself down by trying to make a poetic documentary fantasy love story travelogue that played for almost half a day!

And so to Masked and Anonymous, the 2003 dystopian film which bamboozled, entranced and embarrassed me and the Glorious Andrea…

Just before M&A came out we’d bought ourselves a surround-sound system for our telly which just served to amplify the fact we were headed at 90mph into middle-age.

It had all seemed so simple at first – 30 minutes to open the box, five hours to connect all the tweeters, monkey men and woofers. Another two hours to read the instructions and do it all again.

Simple!

Then we plugged it in and switched it on!

Amazing! Our ancient bulbous round-screen telly cascaded across the room like the flashing, spinning, clowning of Blackpool Lights – the surround-sound speakers burst into life with whoops and bells and whistling and cheering, puffing and blowing. Our telly looked shocked and abused but the system we’d attached it to had even taken over its screen and a big emoji of a grinning banana of a mouth appeared at the heart of its pixel life just below a shimmering, wobbly WELCOME!

Wow, we thought.

I have to admit we were well down our first bottle of red and our old hippy proclivities had already hung a heady smokey fug across the ceiling.

We felt good …

The fug got thicker as Andrea spent the next 40 minutes trying to get the cellophane wrapper off our DVD of M&A and the second bottle of red was opened.

Finally, I stuck our new DVD into the letterbox orifice of our old player. The Volcano hubbled and bubbled away on the coffee table, filling its dirigible of delight with vapour as our new sound system played the Mexicano opening to Bob’s new film with clarity and distinction.

And then Bob strode with purpose down the graffitied steps to take the bus to the future.

And that’s when it happened … stoned and a little bit squiffy I thought I had discovered the secret to Masked and Anonymous. The sound track.

The music was brilliant – everything from Diamond Joe to Down in the Flood! And his new magnificent growling crow of a voice…

But it was the fact that when the characters were conversing, there was no dialogue – there was the sound of tea-cups clinking, buses driving – the sounds of the city and the sounds of dystopia.

But no words! Bob had done it!

He’d made a silent film where the action spoke louder than words, where the music was the only vocality to lead the narrative. Bob had created a film of music and images and allowed the viewer to create their own narrative on the skeleton of pictures so startling and shocking – the murder of bus passengers, the death throws of a dying president, a carnival of showmen, show-women, performers, gypsies, journalists, writers, clowns, provocateurs and madness to match any of his ground-breaking works from the mid-Sixties.

It was magnificent – clink clink (of cups) humming noise of voices in the background, traffic going west … Bob’s crow-like brilliance “Now There’s a man you’ll hear about
Most anywhere you go,
And his holdings are in Texas
And his name is Diamond Joe.”

The sound from our telly was exquisite and the bong boomed … then we returned to mysterious silence of Bob’s creativity ‘Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks, when you’re trying to be so quiet… “

Wow! Wow! Bong! Bong! Vapour! Vapour! Silence! Silence!

***

One hour and 48 minutes in to the film the front door opened and our middle son walked in, listened to the silence on the TV, looked at us, looked back at TV, walked over to it and flicked a switch that brought ALL the speakers to life and low and behold Bob began to speak – and so did the rest of the cast … Masked and Anonymous took on a whole new aspect. It had words …

So, we watched it all again – and it was just as brilliant!

...If I know nothing else, I know at

least one thing is true:

that the sacred is in the ordinary, the common

things in life. They tell you that

everything is nonsense, that the laws

of nature are nonsense, gravity is

nonsense, relationships don’t exist,

jobs don’t exist. Everything is up

for grabs and there’s no cause of

anything. That’s what they’d like you

to believe. I guess you could say I

was pushed downhill, but my fall from

grace didn’t end at the bottom of

those stairs. It went on, and it

seemed to’ go on forever. All of life

is a balancing act, and we make

choices between extremes. Conformity

or freedom. Acceptance or doubt.

And do you know what, in a way, this little story about watching one of Dylan”s baffling trips into cinema, proves just how good his own film-making actually is.

Masked and Anonymous stood up – for us at least – as an almost silent movie, a long string of images and movement without the normal glue of narrative holding them together.

It was disconcerting because the soundtrack appeared to be representing the background noises of life and the only punctuation was the music.

The main thing is though that with all these elements missing, Masked and Anonymous wasn’t boring and kept our attention for more than an hour and fifty minutes.

But when the sound came on and we could react and understand the script, it didn’t make a mockery of what we’d been doing for the last 110 minutes, it actually validated it.

Dylan’s movie is a multi-layered multi-textual multi-dramatic work of art.

And yet once again it bombed at the box office.

Murder vid genius Bob Mori talks to us and reveals his stunning take on I Contain Multitudes

#bobdylan #maskedandanonymous #ranaldoandclara #don’tlookback #eatthedocument