Last weekend featured an attempt to watch I'm Not There. While Cate Blanchett's performance particularly impressed me (I played a couple of male roles in college theater and remember learning to walk and move like a man), and I liked the image of the young runaway, on the whole the film was spliced incomprehensibly together in an overly, self-consciously "artsy" fashion that lacked completely the tight and controlled premeditation behind the apparent randomness in Magnolia. We made it through forty minutes before shutting it off in disgust.

My irritation was increased by my own lack of knowledge of Bob Dylan -- a knowledge vital to understanding the film. I don't deal well with pretension and with the pretentious flaunting of knowledge in the face of others' ignorance, and so, cantankerously, I found myself suddenly deeply interested in learning more about Dylan.

(Yes, evidently I'm easily manipulated. I'm not unaware of the irony.)

So I picked up a copy of Rolling Stone's Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews for a couple of dollars the other night and started reading.

So far, of course, I'm loving it. It helps that the book is really nicely bound. I'm hoping some of the interviews were ones that appeared in what little of the film I saw.

I still have no interest in finishing the movie.