REVIEWED: Bob Dylan Gets the Hollywood Treatment in A Complete Unknown

“I’m just thankful and grateful to be seeing the real you at last,” sings Dylan on 1985’s Empire Burlesque, and that’s cute because there’s not enough gratitude in the world. And you know what? I’m grateful to be born within the same lifespan of Bob Dylan. What are the chances? Sure, the baby boomers may get bragging rights about rubbing shoulders with the restless troubadour at the Roundhouse in ’65, but us Gen X and Y children got to listen to Dylan as babies and children – Tambourine Man was our lullaby, Subterranean Homesick Blues was our fever dream, our paranoid anthem, a frantic dispatch from a world teetering on the edge of chaos. Plus, Allen Ginsberg is in the music video. While much of Dylan’s palette was colored largely by the American folk revival there were enough splashes of Kerouac’s Mexico City Blues and Ginsberg’s Howl to add a disordered streak of melancholy to the canvas.

Much of the criticism for A Complete Unknown from traditional media outlets comes from those who want to know “more about the man” and less about the myth. Personally, I couldn’t give a fiddler’s elbow about understanding the real man. I’ve been exploring the murky depths of Dylan’s soul since Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues and can frankly take no more. Truth be told, I didn’t want to see the real man. Why? Because I’d already seen him perform at Brixton Academy. Never get too close to your heroes. Trust me. I wanted a film that transformed the audience to a post-beat Greenwich Village café, a picture that brought to life the record sleeve of Bringing It All Back Home. I needed to see a writer in a messy room smoking cigarettes and scribbling in the middle of the night, because, ladies and gentlemen, that is the life of a songwriter. I wanted Johnny Cash to be a caricature of himself, I wanted Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman to be fat and kinda, like, gross, man. Filmmakers can be authentic to the legend without being authentic to the time and real characters – sell us the dream because the fantasy is what we’re buying. Directed by James Mangold, based on a book by Elijah Wald, the movie takes place over an eventful four years, culminating with him shocking the 1965 Newport Folk Festival by going electric.

And then come the cries of Judas. Now, as every schoolboy knows, the real cries of Judas occurred in England, a year later, but this fact takes nothing away from the film. Bob, the artist as a young man, played brilliantly by Timothée Chalamet, soon finds his Chelsea boots on the ground in New York’s bustling folk scene, after meeting Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton, at the hospital bedside of Bob’s hero Woody Guthrie. Success in the music business only happens fast in Hollywood adaptations. I was expecting that “failed first gig” moment that has become a trope of rock biopics over the years, but here it didn’t happen (although in real life, it most certainly did – the one time I saw Dylan perform). Romance is a bore, man. It’s a drag when you’re writing at the highest level of your life, and the kids are coming at you in droves. Worn underwear sent through the mail. Lipstick and limousines. Bob and I both know all this, but the filmmakers here had to shoehorn in a tragic love triangle between Dylan, Sylvie, and Joan to keep the romantics appeased. Personally, I’d love to know more about Dylan’s preference on tunings than his weakness for women, but that’s just because I’m a psychopath with a heart made out of a rolling stone.

The whole movie screeches to a halt at the aforementioned folk festival and electric rock and roll is born or reborn, or reinvented or whatever. Dylan goes electric, the world goes technicolor. The future is now – the future is Hollywood. Corporate, baby. But who really cares? Propaganda, all is phony.

REVIEWED: Luca Guadagnino's Adaptation of William Burroughs' early novella Queer.

 William Burroughs – A man who shot his wife, battled drug addiction throughout his life, cut off his little finger on a Van Gogh kick, and found himself in trouble with the law in pretty much every country he ever lived in, and, as Luca Guadagnino’s recent film reveals, was definitely Queer.

Before shooting began, expectations were high. James Bond legend Daniel Craig plays the author during his troubled time as a Mexican expat seeking companionship and direction. During this period of his life Burroughs became perhaps the first American outside of funded research college programs to venture into the jungle in search of Ayahuasca. Nowadays college kids do it on their gap year.

Burroughs bounces from alcohol to heroin addiction with all the free will of a Rizla paper in a cyclone, while being drawn, moth-like, to Allerton, a young American expat student, played by Drew Starkey, who frequents the local Ship Ahoy bar.

Burroughs has always been an interesting character to dramatize. Movies such as Beat, Kill Your Darlings, and the adaptation of Naked Lunch have, perhaps lazily, chosen to base their characters on the cold, dry, nasal-spoken persona Burroughs offered to the media. Remember, Burroughs was no slouch when it came to the media. His uncle, Poison Ivy Lee, was a PR man who handled Hitler’s American publicity campaign – “We don’t report the news, we write it,” Ivy would yell to his nephew while scoping a bird and pulling the trigger on their weekly duck-hunting expeditions. A seven-year-old Burroughs knew from an early age that the world was run by deep, inherent corruption. Old whiskey-drinking cigar-smoking card players made rich through striking oil and getting cured or inheriting it from long lines of dynastic wealth.

Guadagnino decides to go deeper than the gun-wielding anarchist of popular mythology, deeper than the inner causmanault on voyages of drug-addled self-discovery. This new film brings Burroughs to an entirely new generation, precisely because of the sensitive portrayal of his personal life, and at a time when they need him most.

Can we really celebrate a society that tolerated a man who shot his wife, bribed the judge, and sailed to Morocco to live among thieves, drug addicts, artists, and magicians? Of course we can. And here he sits on the bookshelf, next to Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Bulgakov’s The Master and the Margarita. Deep beneath the turmoil and the chaos of the man and the writing, there was something profoundly honest and human in the writer. Burroughs believed in the Johnstone approach to life – mind one’s own business and help out others when needed.

Like drug addiction begins for many youths, my own introduction to Burroughs started as a dare. Warned by close friends not to touch Naked Lunch as a kid, I was naturally curious but wisely began by dipping into the less murky, literal pools first. Junky is straightforward, hard-boiled prose typical of the pulp press that originally published it—think Dashiell Hammett or Chandler, with simple declarative sentences: "Junkies wore hats—if they had hats."

Next up, the beautifully bizarre world of Cities of the Red Night—his masterpiece. A dreamscape world of pirates, gumshoe detectives, aliens, and foreign lands. Convinced this shady literary character was a genius, the interviews, letters, and folklore did little to throw me off the trajectory of his career. There was, of course, the problematic cut-up period, where many of us lost the thread, but his work during that time on tape recordings and film makes up for the lack of narrative form.

By the time I read Queer, I was familiar with the landscape. The film is close to the novella, lifting some of the best lines for the screenplay – “Get off of your ass, or what’s left of it after five years in the navy” springs to mind, or the part about the boyfriend cleaning out the place rather than cleaning up.

The film looks beautiful. Thai cinematographer Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, best known for his work with Apichatpong Weerasethakul, frames scenes both expansive and restrictive, evoking the spirit of the book. The interior shots of the bar and the apartments are both authentic and realistic. The soundtrack, composed by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, adds to the film – Nirvana’s Come as You Are plays as locals crowd around a symbolic street cockfight. Lee notices Allerton, the hunt is on.

Could we have done without the erotic love scenes? Possibly yes. Nobody really wants to see their literary hero blow a dude in a shabby apartment room, but if Luca Guadagnino felt it essential, then blown he must be. The two lead roles play cat and mouse (Allerton isn’t gay but accepts Lee as a friend) before flying to South America. Here Burroughs suffers the unpleasant flu-like symptoms of opiate withdrawal before hacking through the jungle and encountering a symbolic anaconda at the entrance to the hut of an old botanist doctor. The crazed herbalist is played brilliantly by Lesley Manville swinging her handgun, again, symbolic-like, mid conversation.

Here, in the jungle, the film switches source material from Queer (the book itself ends with the idea to find the telepathic drug) to The Yage Letters, a book of correspondence from Burroughs’s time in the Amazonian bush. Luca and Sayombhu attempt the impossible at this point by representing, in images and sound, the effects of a hallucinogenic trip. A long sequence of body close-ups in studio environment ensues among jungle exteriors before the audience is dumped back in Mexico City, where the death of Burroughs’s wife, never used as a plot in the earlier part of the film, is referred to as a central motive.

Sure, the ending is confused, but even more so if the life story and the books have not been digested. Craig makes no attempt to mimic the voice or movements of Burroughs as caught in archive footage – instead, he relies completely on the text and the screenplay for his direction. Whatever the method and approach, the result is a picture that brings the Burroughs legend to many more people of a young and liberal disposition.

This can’t be a bad thing.

Bngkok City of Angels - Feature Length Documentary Released.

 

Bangkok is the most visited city in the world and also the most misunderstood. This documentary film tracks the development of the Thai capital city from a small trading post in the late 18th Century to the sprawling metropolis of today. Written by Matt Carrell and directed by James Newman this film uses a blend of archive and contemporary footage alongside interviews with some of Bangkok's most colourful expats and local residents such as novelist Christopher G. Moore, journalist Tom Vater, publisher and historian Narisa Chakrabongse, Youtuber Bangkok Pat McKay, the only man to escape from the Bangkok Hilton, David McMillian. Running for over 40 minutes this is a feature-length documentary that covers the history of the city from the cholera outbreak in 1820 to the Covid Epidemic of 2020. Well researched and covering a lot of ground this film is a must for anybody interested in the city that never sleeps.   

The film is now avaible to rent or buy on Amazon Prime.