“Things fall apart, especially all the neat order of rules and laws.”

July 18, 2023 1:54 AM

Not much about Masked And Anonymous makes literal sense. It follows the rules of songwriting, not cinema, where surreal and nonlinear storytelling is more common, particularly in Bob Dylan songs. But mainly it’s just straight-up bonkers, following a loose narrative thread that functions primarily as a vehicle for a lot of colorful actors to give scenery-chewing performances. It’s the kind of movie where Val Kilmer shows up as a character known only as Animal Wrangler, and rambles in Bob Dylan’s general direction for several minutes about how people are worth no more than a crack in the mud at the bottom of a sun-dried lake. It’s also the kind of movie where Ed Harris dons blackface, Mickey Rourke plays the president, and Luke Wilson clubs a rock journalist to death with an old blues singer’s guitar. A real “just go with it” kind of film. from Inside The Making Of ‘Masked And Anonymous,’ The Strange Dystopian Bob Dylan Musical Comedy Movie [Uproxx]

Masked and Anonymous [IMDB]
Masked and Anonymous [Rotten Tomatoes]

posted by chavenet (18 comments total)

Metafilter: a loose narrative thread that functions primarily as a vehicle for a lot of colorful actors to give scenery-chewing performances.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:37 AM on July 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

I’m a second generation Dylan fan. My dad was a fan from his early teens onwards, and he’d play Dylan songs on guitar and sing as lullabies for me and my sister, so I had one of two options, either be a fan or a hater, and happily I chose the former.

Though my Dylan fandom has ebbed and flowed, the peak was in my late teens into my mid-twenties, from Time Out of Mind through Love and Theft and Modern Times. Of course I listened to a lot of his earlier material, but those three albums were “my albums” because I could listen to them without my dad having listened to them first.

Given all that, I’m surprised that I had absolutely no interest in seeing Masked and Anonymous when it came out. The movie critics I generally trusted hated it, including Ebert, so I didn’t give it a chance. But this article and interview makes me want to give it a watch.
posted by Kattullus at 3:29 AM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

as critically reviled movies go, it's as good as they get. At a time when pretty much no one was asking for it, we got a tour into the mystery (and the masks) of the Dylan mythos, with the man himself guiding the way.

I mean, how bad could any movie be that includes a scene such as ...

WARNING: nothing shown but graphic stuff implied
posted by philip-random at 8:51 AM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I saw a press screening of this. It really bounced off the audience, to the point where the screening became a communal hate watch. At one point one of the assembled critics got up, left the theatre, came back with a hoagie, asked “did I miss anything?”, and everyone responded “no.”

In the interest of not being all Your Favorite Band Sucks, I will say that the screening kept me in air conditioning on one of the hottest days of that year. So there’s that…
posted by pxe2000 at 10:34 AM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

But this article and interview makes me want to give it a watch.

If you do, please report back here as to whether you want back what precious moments left of your life you spent in watching it. I know I did.
posted by y2karl at 3:02 PM on July 18, 2023 [6 favorites]

I've never seen this movie, but I've always had the impression it's kind of the Monkees' Head, but for Bob Dylan. An epic mess that's great and terrible at the same time.
posted by Ursula Hitler at 4:24 PM on July 18, 2023 [4 favorites]

It was one of those, for sure.
posted by y2karl at 4:34 PM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

All this makes me wonder if the secret to enjoying Masked & Anonymous is... maybe not liking Bob Dylan?

I don't hate the guy, or his songs - especially if someone else is doing the singing. But I'm not a boomer and he's never been one of my favorites from that time period. But for some reason I watched the movie, and liked it; I've seen it several times. Pretty good soundtrack (mostly covers).
posted by mersen at 5:09 PM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've always had the impression it's kind of the Monkees' Head, but for Bob Dylan. An epic mess that's great and terrible at the same time.

it definitely has an element of Head weirdness to it, by which I mean it's a sort of informed weirdness. And there's a consistency. Neither are badly made movies. But they are wilfully NOT remotely conventional. So if you're looking for a reason to shrug them off, you've got one.

It's also worth noting that Bob Dylan doesn't exactly knock you off your feat with his performance. It rather has the quality of a guy who's wandered into something that he finds equal parts compelling and bemusing, so his focus wanders. Anyone else, you'd say "that guy's not a very good actor, is he?" But here it's just Bob being masked and anonymous.

I did like it a quite a lot on first viewing. It was new. I was aware of it but didn't realize it had opened in town. It was a rainy day. I smoked a little dope, went to the multiplex and there it was, starting in a few minutes ... like it was meant to be. And it really did take me away. The music, of course, was great but there was more going on than just that. It had a cool sort of apocalyptic mood, dreamlike but on point ... and never remotely predictable.

The title of this post “Things fall apart, especially all the neat order of rules and laws” comes from maybe the last scene in the movie, which I think goes a long way toward being as succinct an explanation as you're ever going to get from Mr. Dylan as to what his songs are really about. The last thing he says is, "I stopped trying to figure everything out a long time ago." And then we're segueing into a strangely restrained live version of the one about how the answer is blowing in the wind.
posted by philip-random at 6:07 PM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hearts of Fire (1987) is also a Bob Dylan movie, co-starring Fiona and a young Rupert Everett's hair.
posted by snuffleupagus at 6:47 PM on July 18, 2023 [2 favorites]

Man, he sure didn't know how to pick 'em, did he.
posted by y2karl at 7:12 PM on July 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

I’m a big Dylan fan, aware of his many missteps and musical fails here and there, but haven’t seen this. If I thought ahead was amazing and have seen it a bunch of times, would I like this?
posted by caviar2d2 at 4:51 AM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

"You were so good with words and at keeping things vague." ~ Joan Baez
posted by DJZouke at 5:19 AM on July 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I love Dylan and I've seen only parts of this. It was interesting. It didn't make any sense from a plot standpoint. But was he even really going for that in the first place? Bob's music has always felt very impressionistic to me. A lot of ideas. You can interpret them however you want. And then you go back to it a year later and interpret it completely differently. He's not a straightforward artist. He's not saying this thing is this. He just puts the idea out there for you. He'd be the first to say he doesn't know what it means or where it comes from. It's just Bob's head that sometimes gets put into music or film or paintings or whatever.
posted by downtohisturtles at 10:33 AM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Masked is worth watching as Dylan attempting something along the lines of True Stories crossed with A Mighty Wind. Maybe it doesn't succeed (very probably) but it's still an entertaining menagerie. Did you like the short story/parable in the John Wesley Harding liner notes and "The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest?" Or "Idiot Wind" and "Changing of the Guard"? If so, you'll probably like this. It's Dylan in his symbols and portents mode. But it on in the background, you'll chuckle.

(Hearts of Fire is a much worse movie, but interesting as a pitch-perfect recording of the production values of its moment; and also Bob Dylan the man's distillation of Bob Dylan the persona to the 'Billy Parker' character, repeated with 'Jack Fate.')
posted by snuffleupagus at 10:50 AM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

Perhaps in spite of the critical pile-on of the time, I saw and liked the film. I think it is fairly funny. I am a moderate Dylan fan but I am more than willing to admit that, like most things with Dylan, this is an acquired taste. The movie is not exactly narrative heavy - it is a collection of bits that may or may not resonate with you. It is more coherent than Renaldo and Clara for instance but it is part of the same cloth - just as idiosyncratic and indulgent. So if you're the kind of person who regrets the time spent with a work that you didn't enjoy or have the patience for then you should likely go and watch something else. Me? I'd happily watch a 4 hour director's cut of this, YMMV.
posted by Ashwagandha at 11:03 AM on July 19, 2023 [3 favorites]

I asked my dad if he’d seen Masked and Anonymous, and he said he didn’t like it much, beyond the music. He has a copy somewhere on DVD, so maybe I can borrow it from him.
posted by Kattullus at 2:18 PM on July 19, 2023 [1 favorite]

A-also, there is a lot going on in the background, from Goodman banging [Cruz? Lange?] in the van to the Pope eating a sandwich.
posted by chavenet at 2:33 PM on July 19, 2023