Chillin’ Like Bob Dylan
This week PBS’s American Masters documentary series ran an excellent two part documentary on Bob Dylan, directed by Martin Scorsese: Bob Dylan: No Direction Home. If your PBS station is like mine they’ll probably re-run it sometime this weekend or next week in the wee hours, so check your local schedule and set your Tivos.
It also seems to be available via Netflix. The Netflix listing is a bit odd, though, because the PBS doc was in two parts at two hours each. Netflix lists the running time as only 120 minutes on one disk with another disc of “bonus material.” However, I suspect the second disc actually contains part two of the series.
The film is not just for die-hard Dylan fans (which I am not) but for anyone interested in how music is created, the Beats, New York in the early 60s, and/or the American folk music tradition in general. It’s constructed around interviews with Robert Zimmerman (aka Bob Dylan) and the people around him during his formative years intercut with live performance video and audio—not just of Bob but also of his influences and contemporaries. Although the film assumes Dylan is an “American Master” he is presented in (at least to this layman) a well-rounded fashion—showing how he fit within the context of the larger social/musical happenings of the day.
If you like American music, you should check it out. If you like American roots/folk music you must check it out.
September 28th, 2005 at 3:24 pm
OK, My Netflix Recommendations page keeps pushing that one on me, on the very first page, and I have been saying to myself, “Bob Dylan? What the….?” We usually get pretty solid recommendations (occasionally thrown off by Alex–who, I SWEAR is a film auteur–who will do something ridiculous like give a 5-star rating to “Army of Darkness”. Anytime I see a recommendation for something like “Big Momma’s House”, I know there’s a ratings adjustment to be made somewhere), so I should have trusted it.
Have you ever noticed films that Netflix said you rated, that you know you didn’t? We looked at our own rating history the other day, which is something like 1300 deep, and when we checked the “hated it” category, we were horrified at some of the things that were in there–movies we’d actually liked!
Oh, and so far, I’ve gotten every “friends” quiz about your movie ratings correct. Woo-hooo.
September 29th, 2005 at 9:03 am
I watched this, and then I watched it again the next night. I became a big fan just watching it, though the biography gives you plenty to think about, not least – what happened to music today?
September 30th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
>> We looked at our own rating history the other day, which is something like 1300 deep…
Whoa! I thought I was doing well at 315!
August 7th, 2006 at 8:02 am
Good job.