Full disclosure: I'm a Bob Dylan fan. I don't just mean I appreciate his 1960s topical folk songs. I like his recent stuff a great deal. Everything from Time Out of Mind onward anyway. I like his life story and the bizarre turns his career has taken over the years. I've read his memoirs. His songwriting is usually phenomenal and his artistic vision is generally unique and forward-looking. Still, everybody makes mistakes.
"Masked and Anonymous" is set in a dystopian future where a corrupt concert promoter (John Goodman) has decided to put on a benefit concert of sorts to, somehow, heal the nation's psyche. Due to John Goodman's corruption, the only artist that they talk into playing is Jack Fate (Bob Dylan) a late Bob Dylanesque figure whose fortunes are in serious decline as he has to be sprung from jail to play the concert. The main problem with the movie is that the pacing is so slow that the story, told in this paragraph, drags out over the course of a full length movie. There are a couple of performances mixed in. It kind of makes the whole thing seem like a long, strange, conceptual Bob Dylan music video.
Val Kilmer appears only briefly in the film. He's listed as an "animal handler" in the credits, but he actually plays more of an exotic animal bbq concessions stand attendant who delivers a long rambling speech that more or less sums up everything wrong with this movie. Take a look.
November 9, 2009
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