Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Charming and brutal

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

.Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Bob Dylan has figured out one important fact: Sing simplistic songs and shut up. People will think you are a genius. Possibly even a God.This movie is a dreadful star vehicle for countless pretentious Hollywood people to tag themselves to the Bob Dylan legend (which is born out of thin air). It seems to me all the professional actors in this are a bunch of desperate direction-less people. Most of them by the way appear to be drunk or high on something else. Sad indeed.Bob is a genius in one single regard - no one has a better grasp on selling himself by NOT doing things.One of the many, many annoying things in this movie is the tendency to trivialize anything that is not "Bob Dylan music" and to turn the entire World into a prop or stooge for the sheer majesty and brilliance that is "Bob Dylan". Why, I would suggest to trademark "Bob Dylan" like some lemonade ... but I think it's already happened. In fact Bob is given a chance to comment on Zappa and Hendrix. They are similar enigmas, so why not take them on in the WWF (Who Writes the best .ucking music).One of the many low points is a black girl singing "Times they are a-changing"... I'm pretty sure this movie was sponsored by some U.N./Unicef/Hollywood conglomerate of detached people living in P.C.-Land.Just watch the scene where Bob and his band are on stage and he sings one trivial line over and over and a carefully selected crop of people from all around the World including by sheer coincidence Gandhi and The Pope stand in awe watching this holy miracle unfold. In one other telling scene in this botch the aforementioned Gandhi and The Pope are sitting side by side but wait ... Who is sitting in between? Why, it's Penelope Cruz! I think that is all you need to know about this piece of horse manure.Of course the movie ends exactly the way it should with Bob rambling about how things don't have to have a meaning etc. etc. etc.

Bob Dylan is certainly one of the great songwriters of the second half of the 20th century, or at least the most pleasurably enigmatic. His songs are poetic, but he doesn't consider himself one (or does, depending on what IMDb quote you read that contradicts another), and like Jean-Luc Godard his output from the 1960s is consistently groundbreaking and with a lot that holds up for the right fan. But this goes without saying one thing: he can't write a screenplay for s***. Sorry to curse, but it's apprporiate. The rules that might apply, if any, to screen writing can't be carried over into film-making. This is probably not a new thing to Dylan- he apparently wrote (and directed) a film in the 70s that almost didn't even get released in most sections till it was cut to just the songs- but he doesn't know how to keep from having his characters go on and on and on about this or that, making platitudes for something that is meant to make him (playing a character named Jack Fate, ho-ho) look all mystical and wise or just confused at not responding to anyone. If it is even written- sometimes it looks like the actors might be making it up as they go along- it is one of the worst screenplays of the decade.It goes without saying that it isn't all Dylan's fault. In fact, him and co-writer/director Larry Charles (usually of the much more spot-on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld and Borat terrain) do have the occasional scene or line that does work, in its own Dylan-esquire way (which is to say, I can't explain why it works except that a line is read truthfully or doesn't sound completel s****y). Plot: not much, except that Fate is let out of prison early in order to do a benefit concert as the bottom-of-the-barrel pick of John Goodman's indebted promoter and Jessica Lange's shallow TV producer, and is hounded by the press (or rather *a* press member, as a weird amalgam of Dylan's frayed connection with the press via Dude Jeff Bridges), while getting ready for a disaster in the making. This sounds substantial, but it isn't by that much. The compensation is that there are, of course, a lot of Bob Dylan fans out in Hollywood, so there's a lot of guest stars. Val Kilmer mumbles a lot, till making a great point about death and animals, while handling a snake. Giovanni Ribisi plays a quixotic Mexican rebel. Christian Slater's in for a couple of scenes. Don't forget about Like Wilson. And then there's Cheech Marin, and...oh, forget it.Strange thing is, I didn't necessarily outright hate the movie. It's more complicated a reaction than that. Dylan seems to be making his flaws here as unique as he would accomplishments; seeing a scene like the one where he and Charles muck up a perfectly moving scene with a little black girl singing "Times They Are a Changin'" by the whim of a brutal mother making her little girl memorize all Jack Fate songs like a robot by suddenly putting over it a flashback of Fate getting roughed up years before with a mumbling voice-over, couldn't happen in any other movie. And, to be sure, when Dylan and his band plays, sans the incomprehensible Dylan singing, it's still pretty good. But the problem is less outright hatred of the material but disdain for the self-indulgence. You can tell the actors and the people behind the picture think there's grand statements being made behind what looks like a mysterious Dylan-esquire fable about greed and socio-political status in the media and music and culture. But behind it is really pandering to the ideas without questioning them. Maybe there is more than I saw in the material, yet is there enough time during the day to give another viewing to look deeper, unlike Dylan at his best with his songs? I'm not sure.

Bob Dylan is not always very well inspired these days. To invest his song and music in a fictitious Latin American situation with a dying general dictator, a civil war without any ideology, some dumb sharks trying to exploit some artists to organize a free concert in support of … of what? It tries to show how Latin America is rotten, how our times have changed so much that we have lost all ethical ideology, how show business is meaningless, how even a revolutionary guerrilla warfare has no real ideological objective and yet the film sets some religious objectives to this revolution. And it all ends in a fiasco. Bob Dylan is no great actor and that is not new. His music are interesting but this film is betraying them 100%.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine & University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne

I think this move is greatly underrated, it is a sad reflection of the fact that when a movie goes beyond the boundaries of most people's morale and intellectual comfort zone, it ends up paying the price. If you don't believe me, think of what happened to British director Michael Powell, after making 'Peeping Tom', a movie which by contemporary standard can only be described as tame and which is now acknowledged by many as one of cinema all time classics, a promising career was cut short and Powell was all but run out of the movie business for some thirty years. The comparison may seem extreme, but to me confirms the fact that we leave our morale, intellectual and even political hangups get in the way with regard of how we perceive and judge movies. Think of how much cinematographic fodder is unleashed on movie-goers every week, this movie is packed full of original ideas, feeling, atmosphere, plus the star-studded cast most of the time delivers excellent performances! OK the movie is technically far from perfect, but who cares! The mere fact of being able to watch His Bobbyness for a couple oh hours would be more than enough for me, but the movie has a lot more to offer, a wonderfully surreal atmosphere, spirited performances by the likes of Penelope Cruz, Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, the latter clearly having the time of his life! But what I most enjoyed is the portrait of a futuristic dystopian US, transformed into some sort of banana-republic dictatorship, whose borders have now extended to include most NAFTA countries! I understand that the project was mainly the brainchild of a Mr. Dylan and it is quite true that the dialogue could have used a little bit of expert editing at times, but who cares! This is happening cinema! Enjoy!