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A Complete Unknown (2024). A new Bob Dylan biopic featuring the world’s hottest actor Timothy Chalamet in his least demanding role. All he needs to do throughout this film is smoke and look surly. That’s not to say he is not charismatic while on stage but we all know Dylan was far from the world’s greatest performer and IMO the worst singer who ever stepped up to the microphone. His strength lied in songwriting, and songwriting is hard to translate to film. But the story is compelling enough and the director James Mangold (Walk the Line) is competent enough to make this tale of Dylan’s rise to fame thoroughly enjoyable. The real acting star in this film is, of course, Edward Norton, perfectly depicting Pete Seeger (whom I greatly prefer to Dylan). Seeger’s mentorship of Dylan illustrates the growing conflict between the “old” (folk music) and the “new” (rock’n’roll). Dylan starts out as a folk musician, then, one by one, absorbs other genres, and, finally, in the famous 1965 Newport Festival, he goes full electric, generating a massive controversy. With sadness, Seeger observes how the man crowned “the spokesman for his generation” who was supposed to be the big battering ram for the “folk revival” that Seeger championed, slips away towards something he (Seeger) does not comprehend or endorse. At one point in the movie Seeger is portrayed as perfectly outdated, strumming his banjo on B&W TV. Oddly enough, the only songs that Seeger performs in this film are “This Land Is Your Land” (written by Woody Guthrie) and “Wimoweh” (written by Solomon Linda), shortchanging him as a major songwriting force. In the film’s culmination he comes dangerously close to chopping the cables with an axe before his wife Toshi tells him to cool off. The “new” always wins. Another showstealer is Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro): her voice is truly angelic. And I gotta say: some of the most moving moments are those with Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), withering away with Huntington’s disease.
So the age-old story of “old” giving way to “new” is depicted very well. If nothing else, this movie should expose scores of young Chalamet fans to folk music (and, as evidenced by a new “Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan” section in Seeger’s Wikipedia entry that references A Complete Unknown). 7/10
The Conclave (2024). The Pope is dead, long live the Pope! Ralph Fiennes, in the first unequivocally positive role of his career, plays a cardinal tasked with watching over the process of electing the new pope. This movie’s first 30 minutes are excellent: intense, suspenseful, foreboding. But then it suddenly becomes very boring. Nothing happens, the suspense is gone by the wayside, the conflict feels trivial and underdeveloped. The Big Reveal is not only mega-woke, it’s lame. His Wokeness becomes his Holiness. I am not Catholic but, to me, on the scale of 1 to 10 (10 being certain and concrete, 1 – completely unrealistic) this event happening in reality is somewhere in the “-20” range. It makes the Vatican in-fighting in Angels and Demons seem positively credible. It can fire up the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Improbability Drive. This is what happens when you woke-program ChatGPT and let it write scripts. 3/10 (for Fiennes and the first half an hour).
The Substance (2024). No reality here at all. A fading celebrity takes a mysterious drug that splits her body into two: herself and her much younger self. Predictably, things deteriorate rapidly. Despite the name, this movie is more about “style” than “substance.” Imagine Stanley Kubric going for the full-scale, gross-you-out effect, like The Shining meets Requiem for a Dream meets Doom but far more gross. This movie is masterfully made but I will be honest with you: we could not finish watching it and had to first fast-forward it and then simply turn it off. I hate horror as a genre but Arina loves it and yet it was too much even for her to stomach. So I cannot tell you exactly how it ends. After last year’s success of Poor Things, it’s not surprising that directors will attempt to outdo each other in sheer shock factor. If you are in the least bit sensitive, stay the hell away. The allegory is clear (too clear) and Demi Moore is very good here (people looking to reward her with some kind of an award after such a successful career finally got a good excuse) but it’s just too revolting (another thing that’s revolting is all men in this film, from Dennis Quaid on). 4/10.
A Complete Unknown (2024). A new Bob Dylan biopic featuring the world’s hottest actor Timothy Chalamet in his least demanding role. All he needs to do throughout this film is smoke and look surly. That’s not to say he is not charismatic while on stage but we all know Dylan was far from the world’s greatest performer and IMO the worst singer who ever stepped up to the microphone. His strength lied in songwriting, and songwriting is hard to translate to film. But the story is compelling enough and the director James Mangold (Walk the Line) is competent enough to make this tale of Dylan’s rise to fame thoroughly enjoyable. The real acting star in this film is, of course, Edward Norton, perfectly depicting Pete Seeger (whom I greatly prefer to Dylan). Seeger’s mentorship of Dylan illustrates the growing conflict between the “old” (folk music) and the “new” (rock’n’roll). Dylan starts out as a folk musician, then, one by one, absorbs other genres, and, finally, in the famous 1965 Newport Festival, he goes full electric, generating a massive controversy. With sadness, Seeger observes how the man crowned “the spokesman for his generation” who was supposed to be the big battering ram for the “folk revival” that Seeger championed, slips away towards something he (Seeger) does not comprehend or endorse. At one point in the movie Seeger is portrayed as perfectly outdated, strumming his banjo on B&W TV. Oddly enough, the only songs that Seeger performs in this film are “This Land Is Your Land” (written by Woody Guthrie) and “Wimoweh” (written by Solomon Linda), shortchanging him as a major songwriting force. In the film’s culmination he comes dangerously close to chopping the cables with an axe before his wife Toshi tells him to cool off. The “new” always wins. Another showstealer is Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro): her voice is truly angelic. And I gotta say: some of the most moving moments are those with Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), withering away with Huntington’s disease.
So the age-old story of “old” giving way to “new” is depicted very well. If nothing else, this movie should expose scores of young Chalamet fans to folk music (and, as evidenced by a new “Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan” section in Seeger’s Wikipedia entry that references A Complete Unknown). 7/10
The Conclave (2024). The Pope is dead, long live the Pope! Ralph Fiennes, in the first unequivocally positive role of his career, plays a cardinal tasked with watching over the process of electing the new pope. This movie’s first 30 minutes are excellent: intense, suspenseful, foreboding. But then it suddenly becomes very boring. Nothing happens, the suspense is gone by the wayside, the conflict feels trivial and underdeveloped. The Big Reveal is not only mega-woke, it’s lame. His Wokeness becomes his Holiness. I am not Catholic but, to me, on the scale of 1 to 10 (10 being certain and concrete, 1 – completely unrealistic) this event happening in reality is somewhere in the “-20” range. It makes the Vatican in-fighting in Angels and Demons seem positively credible. It can fire up the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Improbability Drive. This is what happens when you woke-program ChatGPT and let it write scripts. 3/10 (for Fiennes and the first half an hour).
The Substance (2024). No reality here at all. A fading celebrity takes a mysterious drug that splits her body into two: herself and her much younger self. Predictably, things deteriorate rapidly. Despite the name, this movie is more about “style” than “substance.” Imagine Stanley Kubric going for the full-scale, gross-you-out effect, like The Shining meets Requiem for a Dream meets Doom but far more gross. This movie is masterfully made but I will be honest with you: we could not finish watching it and had to first fast-forward it and then simply turn it off. I hate horror as a genre but Arina loves it and yet it was too much even for her to stomach. So I cannot tell you exactly how it ends. After last year’s success of Poor Things, it’s not surprising that directors will attempt to outdo each other in sheer shock factor. If you are in the least bit sensitive, stay the hell away. The allegory is clear (too clear) and Demi Moore is very good here (people looking to reward her with some kind of an award after such a successful career finally got a good excuse) but it’s just too revolting (another thing that’s revolting is all men in this film, from Dennis Quaid on). 4/10.
