Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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193 of 206 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Best Dylan documentary ever, September 13, 2005
Found this at The Rogovoy Report (He is a cultural critic for WAMC Northeast Public Radio)
I've seen the complete No Direction Home Martin Scorsese documentary, upcoming on American Masters on PBS in a couple of weeks (9/26-27), and it's really great. I didn't realize that it includes extensive new interview footage with Bob Dylan himself, appearing in his most straightforward, seemingly normal role EVER -- even more than on the 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley -- normal enough almost to take him at his word on his extensive comments on particular songs, his background, incidents in his career, etc.
The film includes terrific interviews with dozens of key figures from Dylan's life and career, including Izzy Young, Harold Leventhal, Joan Baez, Paul Nelson, Bob Neuwirth, Al Kooper, Bruce Langhorne, Pete Seeger, Mark Spoelstra, Suze Rotolo , and fortunately, Allen Ginsberg and Dave Van Ronk when both of them were still around.
The film also includes a tremendous amount of vintage film clips, concert footage, and still photography, a lot of which I've never seen before -- and I think I have had access to most if not all of the unofficial stuff circulating from that era. It even includes footage from postwar Hibbing, as well as early recordings (some of which of course are reflected in the companion CD "soundtrack"). It includes a lot of Newport Folk festivals and "Eat the Document" era concert and incidental footage in the best quality I've ever seen or heard any of it, and a lot that I don't think was included in the original ETD.
The home DVD version also includes extensive full-song versions of concert songs that will not be screened on TV.
More important than all these parts, the sum total is a fascinating "interpretation" of how Robert Allen Zimmerman became Bob Dylan up through and including summer 1966, weaved subtly by master filmmaker Scorsese simply through vintage clips, interviews, and really smart editing. The way Scorsese handles the combination of interviews and songs reminds me of The Last Waltz, but he does an even better, more subtle (and more complex) job here.
I think it's as valuable a document that has ever been made about Bob Dylan -- as valuable as any book or biography, including Chronicles itself.
Now, if only Scorsese spent equal time and effort on 1966-2006, but I imagine that's not likely to happen.....
I've gotten some feedback already that Scorsese didn't originate this project and had nothing to do with the original footage, but of course that doesn't matter -- the point is he and/or his team organized it in a way that makes it a coherent narrative, and one with a particular point of view that has the imprimatur of Bob Dylan himself. For those who take issue with that, I suggest, as Dylan himself said all those years ago, eat the document.
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194 of 210 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Not my review, but that of a UK viewer, September 9, 2005
I was very frustrated by the lack of credible reviews, so I hunted down a review from the UK Observer newspaper:
"Bob Dylan is a private man who is notoriously camera shy. The TV interview he gave around the publication of his autobiography, Chronicles, last year was his first in two decades, so there was some surprise when Martin Scorsese announced he was making the definitive TV biopic with the man's full co-operation. It seems that in his sixties, Dylan - who has spent so much of his career laying false trails and telling downright lies about himself - has decided it's time to set the record straight and get his version of his life and times on the record, both in print and on film. And Scorsese, who directed The Last Waltz, the 1977 film about Dylan's former backing group, the Band, was the obvious man to do it.
Almost four hours long, No Direction Home deals only with the early part of Dylan's career, ending in 1966 and the tumultuous world tour on which he was booed by folk purists unable to accept his new-found rock'n'roll ways. It airs on BBC2 next month and is a riveting piece of film-making that draws on wonderful contemporary footage, much of it previously unseen, as well as revelatory new interviews. Scorsese and his team also turned up a treasure trove of unreleased music, which constitutes the latest volume in the 'official bootleg series' Dylan launched in 1991 to combat the pirates who have conferred on him the dubious honour of being the most bootlegged artist in history."
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35 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
As good as it gets, September 21, 2005
When you get to the end, you want to start all over again. That's the No. 1 reason to own the DVD version of Martin Scorsese's "No Direction Home." Coming from a project so awash in audio and video treasures, it seems odd that the only meaningful extras are complete versions of Dylan numbers trimmed in the documentary. That said, there are some great performances in the extras -- for example, the 8-minute version of "Like a Rolling Stone" with the band that became the Band.
The DVD's Dolby Digital 5.1 audio achieves reference quality. Images are TV-friendly full screen, with pleasing grays and medium contrasts. The video texture is amazingly consistent given the Babylon of sources.
The film's subtitle should be something like "Bob Dylan, 1960-65." Dylan acts as his own witness throughout -- at ease, clear, sometimes funny and seemingly pleased to take control of his legend. "I don't feel like I had a past," Dylan says, but the assembled evidence proves otherwise. Part 1 unspools much like a video companion to Dylan's vastly entertaining biography "Chronicles, Volume One," which covers his years on the Greenwich Village folk scene, the epicenter of American hip in the early 1960s.
"No Direction Home" becomes A Film By Martin Scorsese in its dark concluding act. Like "Mean Streets" and "GoodFellas," it captures the paranoia and disintegration as the central character's life implodes. The artist faced a far-flung confederacy of dunces, Scorsese shows us, over and over: moronic reporters, abusive audiences, uncomprehending music lovers, petulant folkies, teenagers who shrieked, fawned and grabbed. No one seems to have any sense except for Dylan and his in-crowd.
Dylan's songs play non-stop in that gorgeous DD audio, but there is little discussion, surprisingly, of the groundbreaking music he produced in the mid-'60s -- no recognition of the vast Baby Boom audience that heard the genius in his explorations and embraced them. No one testifies to the deep and immediate influence of "Highway 61 Revisited" on rock innovators up to and including John Lennon.
Still, it's easy and satisfying to buy into Scorsese's view of Dylan as underdog. The slant and subjectivity give "No Direction Home" much of its drama and depth, especially in the final hour. Bottom line: No one has made a better rock documentary.
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