Somewhat predictable, occasionally contrived. Not an award winner or must-see. But enjoyable. And very, very sweet. Nice to see Steve Carrell dialed down for the occasion.

HATED it. Yes. Hated. Thought it was one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. Badly, badly written. Hard to judge whether the directing and acting were good or not / when the basis of the movie is that bad, the other things don’t even seem to matter.

The “funny” parts were awkward and misplaced; the scenes with the neighbors seemed to belong to some other movie, perhaps a Stephen King-type horror flick; there wasn’t really a single character (except perhaps the teenage boy) who had normal human reactions to anything that happened. And frankly, I could not even find one person I cared about, was interested in, or didn’t think was a moron. There were many times in this movie, during arguments between various characters, where one person would be yelling at the other “But you’re so smart! You’re so intelligent!” I didn’t see a single iota of evidence of that.

Tracy yelled out “Give me a break!” at one point; and we could hear people muttering “wow, so bad, so bad” as we left the theater. Since Tracy and I have rarely agreed on movies in the past month, I was surprised to find we both hated it equally. Michelle, on the other hand, seemed to like it. It cracked me up to read her comment: I find myself still thinking about this movie days after I saw it, and that’s something; because until the moment I read that, I had completely wiped this movie out of my mind. (And then I read her post and thought “OH FUCKING HELL I’ll actually have to think about it long enough to write it up. Yuck!”)

Hated it.

A very original/unusual take on the biopic. The many past and possible lives of Bob Dylan, were he a few (five? can’t remember exactly) different people. Some of it was very entertaining and well done, other bits I could have done without. Similar to, say, Being John Malkovich, you’re either going to be able to go with it or you’re not.

Thought Cate Blanchett, Heath Ledger and Christian Bale were all excellent. Blanchett and Bales’s sections were some of the most factually-based bits; there were moments in Blanchett’s that were straight out of filmed Dylan interviews I’ve even seen. (Michelle Williams’ bit part was really, really nicely done and Charlotte Gainsbourg was excellent as well.) But they could have left out the entire Richard Gere segment and I would have been fine with that (except for missing a great cover) – that imagined life just did nothing for me. More of a fairytale aspect going on there. And I didn’t find the segment with the little boy that engaging either.

Enjoyed the music, enjoyed a lot of it. Didn’t love it. But certainly worth seeing. Not going to see many things like it.