Masked and Anonymous

There was a time when music mattered, and the people that made that music mattered too. Bob Dylan was one of those people. Dylan has floated in and out of the public eye over the years, but has made somewhat of a return with the release of his 2001 album Love and Theft. He has tried to increase his current comeback, and extend his hand into another form of art, by written and staring in a new film.

Masked and Anonymous is good no matter what your opinion of Bob Dylan may be. For Dylan fans this is a tour de force of film making. Written like a Dylan epic tune, think Desolation Row, Masked stays just out of reach of the explainable. Coupled with great cameos, Val Kilmer is far and away the best of many, Masked delivers. John Goodman and Jeff Bridges hold supply the majority of the nessecary acting with Luke Wilson helping out on occasion. However this is the Wilson of Old School, and a far cry from the Wilson of the Royla Tennebaums. None of that really matters, however, because this film was made for Bob Dylan, and he is the single most important character on screen.

In Jack Fate Dylan has created a chracter that personifies his style. Fate, an aging rock star returning home for a benefit concert, symbolizes what h as become of Dylan's career as a musician. Masked isn't really the story of Bob Dylan's life, no more then any of his songs are, it can be, however, his response to what his life has been like. The story itself lacks a little and the characters are never fully defined, but like the supporting acting none of that matters. The important part of Masked and Anonymous, and the only reason it was ever made, is Bob Dylan. Taken that way, Masked and Anonymous is a truly excellent, and original, piece of film.

you cant get much bigger of a Bob Dylan fan than me, but i tried my best to not let that interfere with my evaluation of the movie. If you like Dylan, and at least think you understand him, you'll like the movie. Today, there are 4 cookie cutter classes of movies...your drama, bathroom humor slapstick comedy, your romantic comedy, and everything else. I cant say that this is the best movie ever, but i can say that it was a nice escape from these categories, as about 20% of the year's movies are.

Abstract is what keeps my faith in the modern day films alive. Have a nice day.

This movie will mean little to you if you aren't my age (late fifties). That's because you actually had to be there when Bob Dylan was the most powerful man in the west, exchanging leadership with the merged Lennon and McCartney. Together they led us like no one had or has since in terms of immediacy.

I'm talking about the period between his protest singing and his collapse into fundamentalism. From "Tambourine Man," to "Twist of Fate," with the John Wesley Harding period being his most profound. His method was simple, to let himself go and trust what he saw on the edges of his vision. It wasn't that he engineered himself to be at the front of us. Instead he advertised a small bit of conceptual thinking for the pop mind and we grew into it, in his direction almost as if by accident.

The point is that he was important, but never knew why. His insights and art were far more intelligent than he was. And when he fell into the fundamentalist stupor it probably seemed like a reinvention following all the others.

This business of not knowing is crucial to whether you should actually listen to him when he tries to say something.

So go and watch "Renaldo and Clara" which he co-wrote with one of our two greatest living playwrights. It has a grand shape, multiple people playing the same character; multiple characters played by the same person. Scintillating realities, shifting fundamentals. That's the Sam Shepard part. The Dylan part is so juvenile, so obtuse, so plain artless it carries its own message.

And that's what we have here too. Except this time, the grand shape is by a cartoon writer instead of a master playwright. So we start with vapid notions of profundity. This writer believes that Dylan is still the man most thought he was 25 years ago. Even that was wrong: he simply saw rather than understood even then.

Well, so we have this vast stroke of fate, Jake Fate (Twist of Fate, see?), this notion of the son of a broken God (John Wesley Harding, get it? nudge, nudge) and along the way scads of characters drawn to illustrate the various ways mankind has broken itself.

The good news is that many of these are played by first rate actors. Sam Shephard's wife has the role of "presenter." But they are drawn so cartoonishly they miss any target they could have hit. They are not cinematic. This guy has no cinematic skills. They are not Dylanesque. Dylan has a very specific and consistent imagination that is more "Hitchhiker's Guide" than "Seinfeld" and "The Tick."

We could have gotten an ensemble piece where talented actors synthesized their impressions of Dylan. Now that would have been cool, but they are kept separate.

So what we end up with is a lost soul who once was king, playing a lost soul who once was king, tries to recover — thinks he succeeds, fails miserably in front of our eyes and doesn't know it.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

A puzzling, very dark, far-fetched and totally abstract political satire that is revealed through the film's dialogue and the contents in the 7 songs of Dylan's Jack Fate. Fate (supposedly to be a pun?), a faded (looks kind of jaded in his looks,too!) cult-singer gets out of prison to play at a benefit concert for the victims of wars. Fate performs with a band, called Twist of Fate. The film offers an ‘Armageddon' view of an artist's loss of creative freedom to a consumer-consumed corrupted and politically-correct society. Will Fate forgo his freedom of artistic expressions to satisfy the commercial ideals of the corporate world. The themes of government corruption, female deceit, and the need for a messiah are also constantly evoked. It's Fate's concept of a world of madness and perfidy, and the corruption of society. There doesn't seem to be any plot in this film, but it sure feels like it does have loads of messages to pass on! The location (with ‘science-fiction' landscapes of a crumbling society) may be "Somewhere in America" - a notice, at the beginning, seems to suggest so. There are unexplainable groups, rioting or carrying out terrorist acts or even military operations. There are canvas images of a dictator-like "President" (a reminder of Saddam Hussein?) scattered in between scenes. Is the location totalitarian? The film does imply that the location has nothing positive to offer – bringing to mind the Orwellian Dystopia! The viewer does get to see this location turn into a police state.

The relationship between all characters, except for that between Fate and Luke Wilson's Bobby Cupid, seem cold and ugly. Art vs. commerce is metaphorically represented by the roles of John Goodman and Jessica Lange. There are several references to contemporary news. Giovanni Ribisi plays a confused man eager to join the insurgents, and discovers their funding is by the government they are hoping to topple. Perhaps, a John Walker Lindh? Jeff Bridges plays an aggressive journalist. "I'm on your side," he tells Jack. Jack responds with: "That depends on your point of view." Take heed of the wisdom of Ed Harris' blackfaced ‘Al Jolson' minstrel-show character – to avoid Fate's fate! The film's finale occurs as a result of a ‘Pretender' presiding over the location. That strikes me as the most powerful ending I've seen this year!

It's a complex film that cries for opinionated answers – even harder to analyze than Jean-Luc Godard's ‘60s movie or Fellini's La Dolce Vita – or even Mulholland Drive! One would see it as a brilliant attempt, or hate it without any ‘buts'!

I actually hated the movie at the end of it, but given time, discussion and re-thinking, I've found this film excitingly interesting and clever!

Sure, Masked and Anonymous (or M&A, as I fondly like to call it) is convoluted and pretentious. Sure, it has ridiculously banal dialogue that makes Forrest Gump sound like an intellectual. Sure, there are preposterously-named characters (Jack Fate, Tom Friend, Uncle Sweetheart, et al) and let's face it, no one actually has a coherent conversation throughout the entire proceeding. But it's not predictable - that counts for something in my book, anyway, and it has Bob Dylan (looking more and more like Salvador Dali in every scene - all he needed was the mustache wax), and Jeff Bridges always rocks. Here's the bottom line for me, though: any film that has a bearded, bare-armed and derangedly disheveled Val Kilmer deliver the title phrase (while fondling a bunny rabbit) can't be all bad.