csdcsdcsd2003

Although I'm a Baby Boomer and went to folk music performances often in the early 60s, I was never a Dylan fan as were my closest genius friends but even without trying I got to know his early music which was unavoidably everywhere and revisited here as a creative journey. I found him and that era too depressing and I badly needed UPLIFT. The 60s were a disaster for me personally but I got through, thanks to the music - just not his music. More on that in a moment. Still, I was favorably impressed with A Complete Unknown, especially the early scenes which brought tears to my eyes - if you can make it in NY you can make it anywhere and he certainly did! Good for him! My one (ok, 2) gripe(s) with the film: too much Joan Baez; eek, that high folksy voice. And way too many 1959 Plymouths! We had one, turquoise, so I always recognize them but they weren't everywhere all at once, especially not as cabs. Late in the film, a folk music promoter insults The Beatles which might have been an opinion held by many then and now but I don't agree - and the one song not by Dylan that is heard from start to finish in this movie made me jump out of my theater seat (in a good way): The Kinks (All Day and All of the Night)! Yes! I was and still am into British Invasion. Sorry, Bob Dylan. As Walter Kronkite would say, "and that's how it is." Or was. "A Complete Unknown" is worth seeing - maybe I'll watch it again. And now for "You Really Got Me"!

Everyone loves this film except me. My husband, on a recent Film Noir kick, kept begging me to watch "Out of the Past" on DVD with him. Despite my dislike of Robert Mitchum, I finally relented and then thoroughly regretted wasting an evening watching the relentlessly drab tale of Bailey, a gas station owner/operator who doesn't spend even a minute running the business in a sleepy little California town, preferring to bend the ear of his current girl friend about his past in the most humdrum monotone that drones on and on and on. Oddly, his date simply says "I understand." Before his non-life at the gas station, we are to believe that he was a private eye from New York! And he wears the most rumpled raincoat to prove it. In the non-rain, Mitchum, a handsome Elvis type, wears this old wrinkled coat for much of the film, often tied in a knot with a twisted stringy belt resembling a ruined bathrobe - giving the impression that he is a bum who sleeps in dirty men's rooms when he isn't pursuing the stunning yet shameless gun moll Jane Greer who disappears and reappears every few minutes - she's on the run from Kirk Douglas whom she shot and robbed so we're told, then she's floating into a bar, she's in Mexico or back with gangster Kirk Douglas, and then in the arms of Bailey of the Olden Moldy Raincoat - yawn. Who cares about their past, present or conclusion? Everyone but me.