I've long been known as a hyperbolic person, so forgive me, but I'm Not There is the best movie I've ever seen in my life.1. There are movies that I love almost as much and maybe in some ways more, but this one seemed somehow on a higher plane due to its non-linearity; I don't see super-arty movies a lot, so maybe its artiness was a new thing to me, but the fact that it was arty and I understood it made me love it even more.2. It was a rock movie, which I generally love, but with the songs not just adding to it, but being the movie.3. Cate Blanchett4. The amazingly accurate (except for the telephone that had a 310 area code on it, which didn't exist until 1991) L.A. 60s/70s house, with Charlotte Gainsbourg and her hair with rain in it and her leather jacket and the trees and art books everywhere. (Here is The Devastationalist Manifesto on a C. Gainsbourg song that he likes.)5. Ditto their 1960s New York, with the poetry and motorcycles6. Heath Ledger being his usually impossibly loveable dude7. The crazy early 60s black-and-white surreal vibe of the Cate Blanchett parts, but instead of being weird for weirdness's sake, and pretentious, and going over my head, it was showing how someone could seriously get lost and confused in all that8. The amazing weird beautiful song performed at that town pavilliony thing in the Richard Gere part.9. This is obvious, but the fact that it showed all these different sides of someone's personality and artistic makeup, and how important each side is, and how that makes up the whole. Even the gospel dude (BeforeI learned John Doe was singing for him, I thought, man, Christian Bale should make a gospel album!)10. The fact that the protagonist escaped, was freed at the end, away from all his confusion and jerkiness and people not getting him, and was able to continue being an artist because that's what he needed to do.And we know the end of the story...he was/is a great artist.

One more note: when I was a kid we had a bunch of Dylan records around and I certainly knew what he was all about, but my biggest BD memory was of this guy who would sit on his apartment balcony (here's a map showing pretty much the exact spot of his apartment) down the street from us and play Dylan songs for hours. I would wander down there and listen to him, standing on the sidewalk, and that's how I really learned most of the songs. I don't think I ever talked to him, or that my parents even knew I did this. It's a very L.A. memory, with apartments, and apartment-type foliage, and whiling away the afternoon in lovely weather, but loneliness and adventure too. I've been meaning to write a song about it forever.