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80See it in one glorious shot, grab as much from it as you can and run like hell. I say that not because I hated Masked & Anonymous, but because I loved it.
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Isn't a good movie, at least by any conventional definition of the word good. But it's not a bad movie, either. It's a Bob Dylan movie.
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75If you dissect Masked line by line, it would be, like a Dylan song, indecipherable. But if you take the allegory as a whole, by simply asking the questions, it somehow makes a statement. Is it muddled? Yes. Imperfect? Sure. Impenetrable? Well, that's open to interpretation.
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A strange and convoluted film that is as rewarding as a Dylan song, and just as perplexing.
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50It's only when the film attempts to express its ideas in spoken English that logic dissolves into a muddle that would test the most rabid Dylanologist.
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50"Masked" is erratic and volatile, too, from scene to scene, moment to moment. The script is chaotic, but the top-flight actors play their hearts out.
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50A messy, ambitious comedy.
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50Requires tremendous restraint not to conclude that this entertainingly apocalyptic mess is about nothing, since it may well be about everything. But I doubt it.
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50This one's painful.
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50A fascinating, vexing, indulgent, visionary, pretentious, mesmerizing pop culture curio.
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50For all its pretensions and avant-garde narrative dislocations, the star-studded cast...keeps this buzzing.
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40Though Dylan shuffles through the dramatic sequences like a dessicated mummy, the music sequences are strikingly vibrant -- he's never looked worse or sounded better.
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40Bob Dylan might have been wrong when he sang that "there’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all." His new movie, although a complete narrative mess, is a thoroughly Dylanesque escapade.
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40Only Giovanni Ribisi, with a back-of-the-bus speech about the betrayals of insurgent and counter-insurgent politics, finds a genuine moment. All the same, for some unfathomable reason, Dylan's autumnal self-salute is not particularly difficult to watch.
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40The film strains for some kind of meaning, but asks you to do the work it can't and won't perform on its own.
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38An apocalyptic Bob Dylan song made cinematic, with all the vision and poetry dissipating in the transfer. It's as if the filmmakers listened to "Desolation Row" just one time too many.
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30After a zippy first hour, the wackos wear out their welcome and the director, perversely, fails to show the big concert.
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30The look of the film is great, the soundtrack glorious, but more often than not the dialogue is atrocious, featuring a lot of long-winded gobbledygook.
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30An unholy, incoherent mess.
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30Simply painful to watch as the doomed vehicle it's trapped in comes whistling toward a fiery crash landing.
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25The exact cinematic equivalent of a classic Bob Dylan song. It's also proof that what is towering genius in one medium can go insanely wrong in another.
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25There are people who find treasures in celebrities' garbage cans so it's a reasonable gamble they might want to buy tickets to watch their throwaway home-movie projects as well.
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20A nearly complete and total disaster.
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20Dylan's performance doesn't offer any clues. He's an icon and he delivers an icon's performance, literally: He could easily have been replaced by piece of wood with his face painted on it. That distance also means he remains more or less untouched by the embarrassment going on around him, even though it's largely his own creation.
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20Evinces no interest in such niceties as credible dialogue, character motivation or forward momentum.
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12A vanity production beyond all reason. I am not sure, however, than the vanity is Dylan's. I don't have any idea what to think about him.
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10Here’s a good rule of thumb: Any movie featuring a quote in its ad from the poet laureate of Great Britain—“Deeply engaging!” -- is in trouble.
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0An incomprehensible Bob Dylan vanity project that is not only nearly impossible to sit through, but embarrasses a long list of stars who lined up to work for scale opposite the legendary musician.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 17
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Mixed: 1 out of 17
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Negative: 4 out of 17
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[Anonymous]1
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jw6Like a rare poison dart frog, I can appreciate the miracle of its evolution without wanting to pick it up and kiss it.
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SammyM.9