Being a child of the 60s one of the first Prophets of the counter culture to make me sit up and take notice was unquestionably -Frank- -Zappa- Bob Dylan.
Before the counter culture movement was the counter culture movement it was Folk with artists like Pete Seeger (If I Had a Hammer), blacklisted during the McCarthy era, and Woody Gutherie (This Land Is Your Land and "This Machine Kills Fascists") who would become a model for a young Jewish kid, misfit and song writer from Duluth, Minnesota, Robert Allen Zimmerman. He would go on to become famous (or infamous depending on your politics) as Bob Dylan.
Certainly to every day the worm turns, turns, turns. An article in the LA Times caught my attention earlier this week: Judges hand down the law with help from Bob Dylan that got me to thinking (like most everything else does) about the movies.
Someone get the lights, plz (and pass the popcorn)....
No musician's lyrics are more often cited than Dylan's in court opinions and briefs, say legal experts who have chronicled the artist's influence on today's legal community. From U.S. Supreme Court rulings to law school courses, Dylan's words are used to convey messages about the law and courts gone astray.
Certainly "you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows". This is one often cited quotation in expert testimony challenges that are left up to the courts to decide upon in various trials although the lyric was originally intended to undercut the violence of a certain Left Wing extremist group known during the latter part of the 60s as the Weathermen Underground. In fact I had actually known a member of this group as a friend my own age gone astray from the same Quaker community which I had initially began my protests against the Viet Nam War along side of, David Fine.
But I digress....
Certainly brown shoes don't make it, Mr. Smith, but you can keep your feet if you really, absolutely must.
So, what about the impact Dylan has had on our movies? When I watch Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987) I think of Dylan asking us to consider where all the flowers have gone in that final scene where we see America's young men wandering in loose formation across a burnt out battlefield while singing the theme from the Mickey Mouse Club. Much of Dylan's influence has emerged as an understated sub text in the meta communication of our national past-time found at the cinema but on some occasions Dylan's subjects, as well as his themes, have made it to the silver scene albeit sideways often and so in this hastily thrown together homage to Bob Dylan I thought we might take a gander at some of these flicks and cue them up for the coming weekend....
Flags of Our Fathers
Directed by Clint Eastwood, Flags of Our Fathers is a 2006 release based on the book of the same title written by James Bradley and Ron Powers about the Battle of Iwo Jima, and the five Marines and one Navy Corpsman who were involved in raising the American flag there following that bloody and historic battle. One of these soldiers especially represents the hypocrisy and indignity that even loyal patriots too often suffer in the story of Ira Hayes, a Pima Indian shattered by the carnage all around him which he witnessed during that world shaking battle. While "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" was written by folk singer Peter La Farge, Bob Dylan covered the song during his sessions for Self Portrait, released as part of the Dylan album in 1973 and helped propel this ballad into the consciousness of our nation.
It seems hard to believe there is anything left to say about World War II that has not already been stated and restated, chewed, digested and spat out for your consideration.... And yet here, at age 76, is Clint Eastwood saying something new and vital about the war in his new film, and here, too, is this great, gray battleship of a man and a movie icon saying something new and urgent about the uses of war and of the men who fight...
Mr. Bradley's father, John Bradley, nicknamed Doc played by an effectively restrained Ryan Phillippe, was one of six men who helped plant the flag (it was the second planted that day) on the island's highest point on the fifth day of the month-long American offensive. An Associated Press photographer, Joe Rosenthal, immortalized the moment, and American politicians seized the day, sending the three surviving flag raisers Doc, Ira Hayes (Adam Beach, delivering heartbreak by the payload) and Rene Gagnon (Jesse Bradford) on a hugely successful war-bond drive...
Collectively hailed as heroes from sea to shining sea, Rene embraced the spotlight, Doc settled into stoic unhappiness, while Ira, a Pima Indian shattered by Iwo Jima and its dead, sobbed and drank himself into oblivion. The efforts of Doc's adult son (Tom McCarthy) to tell his father's story years later give the film its scaffolding, but it is Mr. Beach's Ira, with his open face and vulnerability, who haunts it. Tears mixing with booze, he floods his scenes with raw emotion that serves as a rebuke to gung-ho fictions like Sands of Iwo Jima, a 1949 bad joke in which John Wayne hands an American flag to the real Ira, Doc and Rene so they can raise Old Glory once more, this time over the sands of Southern California...
Read the full New York Times film review by Manohla Dargis
here.
"Make no mistake: this is also a work of its own politically fraught moment"... and NOW that Bin Laden is no more we must ask ourselves the same questions we typically only ask too late regarding the flags of our fathers still.
Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973)
Original music and lyrics by Bob Dylan in his motion picture screen debut as the mysterious drifter "Alias".
HeH! Not only is his music good (IMHO) but this guy can act as well (so sez I).
The film is mostly a bloody mess of card games, gunfights and camaraderie, so peculiarly edited that it is difficult to follow a story that is a good deal less complex than "Remembrance of Things Past." This universe is so out-of-order that even the gunfights seem mysterious: there is no real relationship between how a man aims his gun and who he hits.
For the complete and appropriately savage New York Times film review go here.
The Huricane (1999)
The Hurricane is the inspirational true story of the professional welter weight boxer Rubin 'The Hurricane' Carter, who was wrongfully convicted of murder in 1966 by the institutionalized racism of New Jersey still entrenched all throughout America even after several tremendous landmark victories in the Civil Rights era. Told in a series of flashbacks, Denzel Washington immerses himself in the role of Hurricane Carter with a charged, intense passion. The story jumps around in time, from Carter's troubled childhood, to his arrest in 1966, to his fruitless appeals, settling in 1983, when a group of three white, non-conformist adults from Canada and a black teenager they had taken under their wing dedicate their lives to freeing him. Jewison's assured direction keeps the stories of each character from getting jumbled or blurring together. Even in flashbacks, the plot moves forward dramatically, to its eventual rousing conclusion. Based on the novels The 16TH Round by Carter and Lazarus And The Hurricane by Chaiton and Swinton.
The film is above all a story of the power of the written word and it is only through that power that the Hurricane eventually after 22 years in solitude and from desperation that justice was finally served. Bob Dylan took up the banner to free the Hurricane from prison not only composing the song that would make Carters' case famous but also taking his guitar and friends into the New Jersey State prisons at a time when the only other prison performances by big name celebrities had been made by Johnny Cash at Fulsome and San Quentin. Carter had been transferred because of the heightened awareness of his case to a New Jersey State Womens Correctional Institute in 1976 where along with Joan Baez, Roberta Flack, Joni Mitchell and Allen Ginsburg they performed to a few dozen mostly disinterested inmates (who actually booed Joni Mitchell). Meanwhile outside hundreds of Dylan fans were actually climbing the fences trying to break INTO the prison to hear his concert. The story was covered by the national press who'd never seen such a thing before (or since).
There's little to be proud of this kind of justice delayed, but thank God for the human spirit and the prophets who hear its cry.
I'm Not There
"It's not just that Robert Zimmerman, a Jewish teenager growing up in Eisenhower-era Minnesota, borrowed a name from a Welsh poet and the singing style of an Oklahoma Dust Bowl troubadour and bluffed his way into the New York folk scene. That was chutzpah. What followed was genius..."
So begins the New York Times review of a film that, while leaving me much less impressed than the elusive singer song-writer whom this film is modeled after, has at the very least a remarkable Academy Award nominated portrayal of the troubadour in question by (of all people) Cate Blanchett. Certainly Bob Dylan remains an enigma going out of his way repeatedly to shake up popular misconceptions about who he really may be whether that takes the form of going off on a Jesus kick for a while to stifle anyone who might hang a Jewish stereotype around his neck or performing an entire show in garbled unintelligible speech only to make those who marvel at his poetic insights and clarity of thought on social justice retreat for a while to scratch their heads in their own confused cognitive dissonance.
Bob Dylan may not in fact be there. He is everywhere it seems and nowhere at the same time. Bob Dylan may not be God but certainly he is one of His Prophets.
End Credits / Closing Remarks:
Given that the greater part of our site's purpose here on the Street of Prophets is to provide a place where people who might describe themselves as faithful progressives can come together to explore not only faith but the larger questions that revolve around it and our hopes of impacting the world in a positive, progressive way, I am providing these sometime weekly film reviews (whenever). I thought that submitting reviews of controversial or off-the-beaten-track films that often nudge this kind of thought and discussion might be a plus. I'll be offering this each week on Fridays (as the Spirit moves me) and would happily entertain recommendations for future reviews. Feel free to post comments about the films reviewed here today as well as your own recommendations of films you feel may fall along these lines.
My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live. Miguel de Unamuno