The Butcher
You love ’em, he hates ’em! The Butcher carves up your favourite films, and this week, he applies his sharpened cleaver to one of the wankiest music movies ever made…Todd Haynes’ ridiculous Bob Dylan redux job I’m Not There!
With that musical cinematic nightmare This Is Spinal Tap back in cinemas, The Butcher got thinking about the usual stuff…namely things I hate…and there are a lot of them. Music movies are usually championed by “cool people”, and your not-so-friendly neighbourhood Butcher will be the first one to admit it: I’m not a cool guy. I don’t own a Bon Iver CD (I just said the word, “CD”, another indication of my inherent lack of cool), I don’t have an iPad, my wardrobe is free of scarves, expensive trainers, and ironic T-shirts, and when I walk past one of the few arthouse cinemas still in existence, I usually feel the vomit starting to rise in the back of my throat.
Sure, I hate most of the movies that they play, but I also hate the people who go there…come to think of it, I hate the people that work there too, as well as the colour of the theatre seats, the type of food that they sell, the shape of the rubbish bins…and just about everything else. The patrons, however, are the worst. You know the types: hip, well dressed, over educated, outspoken types who like to decamp to the nearest café after checking out the latest film by Pedro Almodovar, Ari Aster or Wes fucking Anderson to bang on about the film’s “themes and stylistic influences.” These arthouse types love movies directed by tossers like Bong Joon-Ho and Sean Baker, or just about anyone from France or Germany. They also like films that are, well, shit.
The best example of this is 2007’s I’m Not There, a cinematic bum note kinda sorta based on the life of “singer” Bob Dylan. Oh, but it’s not a biopic! That would be way too uncool for wanker director Todd Haynes. This is a post-modern intellectual exercise where the various “facets” of Dylan’s life and career are played – uniformly badly – by a host of different actors, including, most absurdly, Richard Gere as some kind of western outlaw…or something.
In short, it doesn’t make sense, though the film’s many fans crowed that this was “part of the charm.” Also lavished with praise (and an Oscar nomination!) was Cate Blanchett’s ridiculous turn as the mid-sixties era Dylan, which is more akin to a Saturday Night Live comedy skit than a movie performance. Like the film in its entirety, Blanchett was silly, pretentious, incomprehensible and self-satisfied. Oh, but very cool…
Want to read more from The Butcher? Check out his exploding of Interstellar, his take-down of Marvel Studios, and his carve-up of that other cinematic shit-show Citizen Kane.
