Bob Dylan goes through four breakups in A Complete Unknown. The ugliest and most violent one is when he dumps the folk music nerds. 

That probably sounds harsh for the folk music nerds but honestly, I’m on their side.

As a country music nerd I fully believe that everytime a great country artists releases a pop, rock, punk, rap or EDM album an angel loses its wings. 

It isn’t easy to make any kind of movie but music biopics like sports dramas, seem to me, an outsider, to be a genre permanently set on the lowest difficulty level. 

If you like the artist, you likely will enjoy the songs and background scenes between songs will be interesting because fans can’t get enough of this stuff. 

A Complete Unknown is a little better than most of the rest for a host of reasons. 

The first, of course, is that Director James Mangold and writers Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald fill the film with early Dylan hits. 

There is other music here too, of course, but mostly the movie gives you the early catalogue of one of the world’s greatest songwriters. 

As Aces go, that’s not a bad one to have up your sleeve. 

Also, I’ve heard all of these songs thousands of times but the movie gives them context (whether true or not I can’t say) that brings even more meaning to the tunes. That’s standard music biopic stuff but it’s still wonderful to experience it with say Master’s of War, It Ain’t Me Babe and finally (spoilers) It’s All Over Now Baby Blue. 

The next solid choice is that the movie is mostly unafraid to present Dylan as a paranoid jerk. I’ve never met Mr. Dylan but paranoia and jerkitude radiate from him at least as much as his singular musical genius. 

Timothy Chalamet plays him – after he becomes famous – with a permanent snarl. And that pretty much jives with what I gleaned from all of his records between 1962 and 1979 when he found Jesus and released Slow Train Coming. 

The movie gives enough time to the music legends in Dylan’s orbit, Peter Seeger (Ed Norton), Joan Baez (Monica Barbara), and Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) to give you a sense of their lives at the time. But it never strays far from the main course — Bobby Zimmerman conquering the world. 

You get to see the most famous photo shoot in rock music history with Dylan and his then girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning).

And you get Dylan’s love life, the 1960s folk scene and a picture perfect New York City.  The flick also builds to its central conflict; that Dylan is too big for folk music and is going to leave the genre for rock and roll. 

If Woodie Guthrie was Jesus and Pete Seeger was the Apostle Paul then Dylan is Seeger’s child in the faith. The movie opens as Dylan seeks out Guthrie, finds him in a hospital and also meets Seeger. 

One impressive song at the foot of a hospital bed later and Seeger adopts the new kid and helps him get his start. 

Seeger and the Folk crew see Dylan as someone who will finally take their vision of music and politics to a wider world. Dylan succeeds beyond all reasonable hopes and then … 

Well, what’s next after you have conquered the world? Especially, if you are permanently paranoid and unsatisfied no matter how good life gets. 

And, it ain’t like anybody anywhere is asking Bob Dylan was he wants. Dylan discovers that fame is just a host of people who want something from him in every moment of his life. 

And he wasn’t exactly Mr. Sunshine before that revelation. 

One of the tough lessons I learned from my father is that unhappy people are going to remain unhappy no matter what you do. 

Money, fame and relationships just won’t cut it when you’re a guy like Bob Dylan. 

Like any good ‘historical’ movie A Complete Unknown never lets the facts get in the way of the legend. My favorite bit of lore is that guitarist Al Kooper inserted himself into Dylan’s recording of Like A Rolling Stone by pretending he could play the organ even though he had never touched the thing in his life. 

The organ part in Dylan’s signature song is amazing. And in this telling Kooper somehow plays it just after someone shows him how to turn the machine on! 

Did that really happen? 

Well, by that point it didn’t matter. I wanted to believe. 

Don’t think twice, it’s alright. 

Sometimes you see a movie a quarter of a century later and you think, eh, maybe I was wrong. 

It’s not so much that my tastes have changed it’s that a lot of current movies look cheap and small. 

I didn’t hate this but I never got the full scale love that all my peers had for it back when I was in college. I just never could let go of several dumb turns of the plot and how pointless most of the violence seems to be. I mean this thing ends with a sword fight between a gladiator and an emperor. 

It’s a turn of events so ridiculous that I probably just threw up my hands. But the secret of gladiator is to embrace the ridiculous. It’s to accept that Director Ridley Scott left ‘this is all ridiculous’ safely back in the first half hour. 

Watching it again I couldn’t get over how great it all looks. It’s like suddenly watching Cecil B. Demille after a marathon of How I Met Your Mother. There’s nothing wrong with tv, I love tv, but movies can be a lot more if people will finance a great director and take the time to write a great script. 

Gladiator lacks a great script but it gets away with it. 

They used CGI to make a convincing Parthenon but they also had film cameras and hundreds extras throwing on armor and running at each other. Hard to explain this people now but up until the last 20 years or so every World War Two battle, Civil War conflict or samurai sword fight in the movies was recreated by the painstaking work of costume designers, production managers, camera operators and hundreds — sometimes thousands —  of extras who put on costumes and faked a war. 

We didn’t know what we had. 

The score by Hans Zimmer and Lisa Gerrard is wonderful. It just screams classic adventure moviemaking. It’s probably a little too happy for the dour revenge material but when it swelled I was moved regardless of what was happening on screen. 

Russell Crowe had been a big brute in American movies but between this and The Insider he became a star. He’s in another phase of his career now and he seems happy to play heavyweight older guys in mildly trashy movies. 

But seeing him in his prime makes me wish he would drop 50 pounds and move mountains again. 

Joaquin Phoenix is the smarmiest villian to ever smarm. And the rest of the cast are doing the heavy lifting character work that pulls a production like this along between one action scene and the next. 

In Gladiator 2 I was waiting for the Denzel scenes but here all the fun is had in the arena. The difference may be that all the other plot building in Gladiator didn’t make me cringe. It’s not Shakespeare but it’s serviceable.

Who knows, maybe in another 25 years I’ll be able to say I love this thing.

The best comic of 2024 is Patrick Horvath’s Beneath the Trees.

It’s a serial killer tale set in a world of anthropomorphic animals. Well-drawn and sharply written, it’s perfect for Dexter and Silence of the Lamb fans and it is a great example of someone creating a story that can only work in the language of comics.  

It’s not that you can’t translate this to other mediums, in America you could do it with the muppets (not that Disney would) or in Japan you could do this with anime. But in comics, one person with the talent and drive can turn in a masterpiece mostly by himself. 

I can’t wait to read what Horvath does next. 

Grommets from writers Rick Remender and Brian Posehn and artists Brett Parson and Moreno Dinisio was a book that surprised me all year long. Here’s the description from Image:

“Two best-friend outcasts navigate the Sacramento suburbs of 1984, where they find a home in skateboard culture and punk rock.”

This may be one of the few comics that could accurately be described as a hang-out book. I loved hanging out with these 1980s era lost boys. 

If you pick this up and enjoy it I also recommend The Sacrificers from Remender, Dave McCaig, Max Fiumara. It is an entirely different sort of thing, a weird fantasy full of strange gods and creatures but wonderful all the same. 

Ok, let me tell you about two books I should have hated or at least completely ignored that I loved this year. 

I was both too old and too young for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles when they came out. Too old for the toys and the cartoon to mean anything to me and too young to have read the Frank Millar comics they were lampooning. But this year’s relaunch was written by Jason Aaron and he is one of the best writers working in comics. It’s a wonderful action book with art by Joëlle Jones. It’s friendly enough for new readers and so good that I’m tempted to pick up a few omnibuses to see if there is anything in the 40-year publication history that I may have missed. 

The other is Transformers. I have never, ever, never cared for any version of Transformers. Not toys, not shows, not comics nor Michael Bay movies. But tell me Daniel Warren Johnson, truly one of the great writers and artists of his generation, has taken the reigns and I am in. And man, did that ever work out for me. 

Johnson and artist Mike Spicer craft a bold, fun take on the characters that is full of crazy robot action and just enough heart, and humanity, to make it worth your while.   

I’ve just scratched the surface of great comics this year.

Here are a few other highlights: 

Helen of Wyndhorn by Tom King and Bilquis Evely, Wonder Woman by Tom King and Daniel Sampere. Helen’s story plays with Conan The Barbarian both the fiction and the fact about the Cimmerian’s author. Wonder Woman explores new territory in character that is almost a century old.

I read and loved everything Mark Waid wrote at DC including World’s Finest and Justice League Unlimited with artist Dan Mora and Batman and Robin Year One with Chris Samnee  

Ice Cream Man continues to be a dark little dose of Twilight Zoneesque horror. 

Fantastic Four (writer Ryan North, and artists Ivan Fiorelli, Carlos Gomez, and Iban Coello) is as fantastical as it should be.  

Gail Simone and David Marquez turned in a very fun Uncanny X-Men  

And Birds of Prey by Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero passes the “are you not entertained” test every single month. 

My bank account and the long boxes in my office tell me this isn’t close to everything but these are some of the highlights. If you haven’t caught them yet I hope you try some of these out in the new year.

I liked everything about it except the script. 

Hollywood still has a few old lions roaming around ready to slay dragons and entertain the masses.

Denzel Washington is still money. All day.

Director Ridley Scott lucked out with Russel Crowe (and Joaquin Phoenix) a quarter century ago. Here he lucks out again getting the movie star equivalent of prime Mike Tyson to come in and knock out fools. 

“Your house, I own it,” Denzel’s Macrinus says at one point. He might as well have been saying, “Your movie, I own it.” 

The rest of this is such a mess that I quite literally felt relief everytime Denzel showed up. 

“Thank goodness, it’s another Denzel scene,” I whispered to myself at one point. 

That … is not the sign of a healthy movie. 

Of course, I know that most people aren’t wired like me and don’t come to something called Gladiator 2 for the intricacies of the plot. No one’s looking for Ben Hur or I, Claudius here. Or Spartacus. Or even Quo Vadis. 

And yes, those are all the Roman epics I can remember off the top of my head. 

They actually do the ‘I Am Spartacus’ moment at one point. It’s played for laughs but it was funny and I wasn’t offended. But I hope someone sent Dalton Trumbo’s family $50. 

Paul Mescal does what he can with a movie that isn’t all that interested in him except as a violence delivery device. 

The flashbacks fail him, the characters around him are all cardboard cutouts instead of real boys and he doesn’t get one line of dialogue as cool as, “Are you not entertained!” 

He seems like he’s having fun and we mostly go with it even when it’s ridiculous. Maybe especially when it’s ridiculous. 

Poor Connie Nielsen gets it worse as she campaigns for a return to a Rome governed by the senate and has to deal with a nonsensical subplot involving Mescal. 

Again, the writing fails the audience because at no point does anyone ever articulate why the old Rome is any better than the new. The movie clearly sides with Macrinus who believes that the old Rome is a lie and the only thing that ever meant anything was power. 

At one point he hisses about killing someone and says, “Politicssss.”

I can’t remember the full line and I can’t find it anywhere but I’m never gonna forget how Denzel added about 4 S’s to the end of ‘politics.’

Again, Denzel is Babe Ruth and the rest of the cast are just ballplayers. 

Pedro Pescal was given enough to do that you care about his fate. And because you cared about him when he and Mescal face off in the arena you actually care about the outcome. 

It’s the best arena scene and the other three had baboons, a rampaging rhino and frickin’ sharks! 

Funny what happens when you care about the characters. 

Ok here’s the rant you can ignore. 

I’ll tell you, sincerely, that I believe a lot of directors can do a lot of magical things and I enjoy a lot of what Ridley Scott, Denis Villeneuve and Michael Mann bring to the table. But I also am so incredibly tired of watching movies where every shot, special effect and camera movement was meticulously planned and no one gave two moments to think about the dialogue, motivations or whether anyone would give a shit about the characters. 

I’ll give you a perfect example. In any classic movie you have ever seen someone takes the time to introduce the other gladiators. Not a lot of time, just a bit of dialogue, a backstory or two. And there is some scene that explains why the gladiators would follow our hero to the death. Usually, he saves them and they connect and then they’ll die for him. 

Right? 

Ain’t none of that here. 

If you have seen this can you tell me with any certainty what Macrinus actual plan was? Did he want to be emperor? Did he just want to destroy Rome? Was he (spoiler) after vengeance against Poor Connie Nielsen because he was once a slave to her father? 

All of these things could be true and yet none of them could be true at the same time. 

In other words, this thing was a mess. A fun mess, to be sure. 

At the end Mescal is called on to deliver a speech in front of a horde of soldiers. That speech is supposed to signify … something about a new and better world. 

Damned if I can remember a word of it. And you can’t either. And that’s Gladiator 2 baby. 

As old Shakespeare once said, and Faulkner emphasized, it’s all sound and fury and not one gold denarii more. 

A decade or two ago I interviewed two miscreants who were spending their first night in jail and were about to spend a few years as guests of the State of Florida. 

They were in their early 20s and the state of Kentucky owed them a refund on their public education. 

He had shown up at her shack with a tank full of gas and fifty dollars in his pocket, professed his eternal love for her and said he would take her anywhere she wanted to go. 

She liked Spring Break and they picked my hometown of Panama City, Florida. 

When the money ran out they took to stealing cars and robbing stores and it didn’t take long until they were leading three sheriff’s agencies on a high speed pursuit through most of north Florida. 

When I got to him (let’s just call him Mickey) he denied everything. But when I said the driver pulled some real Smoky and the Bandit type maneuvers on the highway he smiled like someone had just given him a GED. 

She (let’s call her Minnie) denied everything too and never slipped, even a little bit, when I asked her what had happened. 

“We were just under the pier, hanging out and they all showed up and arrested us,” Minnie said. “We didn’t do nothing.”

Well, what did you think when 40 deputies showed up under that pier and arrested you? I asked. 

“I was dumbified,” Minnie replied. 

… 

I’m pretty sure we put dumbified in the headline. 

I thought of those two, for the first time in years, while watching Miami Blues. 

Alec Baldwin is fresh out of jail and he’s looking to share some of the meanness he learned in the joint with the rest of the world. 

He’s fun to watch because you can see that he only knows two types of people those who are about to be his marks and the victims of his violence. 

Jennifer Jason Leigh is a prostitute who is most likely underage and not experienced enough in the business to understand just how dangerous life with Baldwin’s Freddie Frenger will become. 

At one point in their relationship Leigh maps out a possible future involving buying a burger franchise, saving money, buying a house and living happily ever after. 

Freddie counters, let’s skip all that and get to the happily ever after. Why not, if they need cash there are always people he can assault and rob. 

There is a detective here (Fred Ward) who is, I suppose, chasing Freddie. But mostly he’s amused by Freddie. We meet him when he laughing about the manner of death of a Hare Krishna while the victim’s friend cries nearby. 

He’s clearly spent his career drunk, cynical and corrupt. Mind you, he’s no more corrupt than any other cop in this story and he does eventually, track Freddie down and confront him. 

It goes about like you might suspect. 

Ultimately, this is a black comedy that makes its mark on the crime genre. 

I thought it carried its weight and moved smoothly from one ridiculous moment to the next. 

I think the thing I enjoyed the most is that everybody on this movie was just so dumb. 

You’d hate to have dinner with any of these people but they are amusing from a distance. 

This movie is still around in my head because of one scene. 

A scene that I kept seeing over and over again as it showed up in various times on cable. That’s how we discovered stuff back then.

Someone who owned a cable network decided to play Roadhouse, The Princess Bride and The Sandlot in a near endless loop. 

The Princess Bride is one of my absolute favorite movies but I know that’s partly because when I needed an escape from the world it could always be found on television waiting for me.

And so it is with this scene in With Honors. 

I almost never saw what happened before that scene and almost certainly lost interest quickly after it. Because the movie can’t really sustain its premise. Though it tries to find other things (a mild love story, a tragic origin, and college theses) to keep you involved. 

But despite the failings of the rest of the movie this scene is near perfect and I’m going to give you the crux of it now.

Brendan Fraser (idealistic student) brings homeless guy (Joe Pesci) to a class at Harvard and they get into it with a smug politics professor played by (Gore Vidal!). 

And after some fooling around we get to the point: 

Simon Wilder (Pesci): You asked the question, sir, now let me answer it. The beauty of the Constitution is that it can always be changed. The beauty of the Constitution is that it makes no set law other than faith in the wisdom of ordinary people to govern themselves.

Proffesor Pitkannan (Vidal):Faith in the wisdom of the people is exactly what makes the Constitution incomplete and crude.

Simon Wilder: Crude? No, sir. Our “founding parents” were pompous, white, middle-aged farmers, but they were also great men. Because they knew one thing that all great men should know: that they didn’t know everything. Sure, they’d make mistakes, but they made sure to leave a way to correct them. The president is not an “elected king,” no matter how many bombs he can drop. Because the “crude” Constitution doesn’t trust him. He’s just a bum, okay Mr. Pitkannan? He’s just a bum.

That scene was fun in 1994. It roars like thunder today. 

My belief, based on nothing, is that screenwriter William Mastrosimone had this scene in his head first, wrote it up and then tried to build the film around it. 

Alas, the rest of the movie, as I said, can’t live up to it.

Pesci gives his homeless character a catch phrase, “boy o boy.” The stakes are too low (no one cares about a Harvard thesis including the people studying at Harvard) and the phrases from classic literature don’t land like they should. 

By 1994 With Honors was joining a smorgasbord of movies about an eccentric guy who teaches young, naive young men how to live. 

Robin Williams had been our captain in Dead Poets Society and Al Pacino was an angry, blind, retired military officer in Scent of a Woman (Hoo-ah!). 

With Honors turned into the nadir of the genre and bombed at the box office despite some other scenes and moments that show promise. 

Watching it 30 years later and I got to enjoy how one character has the Flock of Seagulls haircut, the smooth 90s pop soundtrack and Brendan Fraser’s idealistic government student changing his thesis to say that the internet was coming to usher in a utopia yet undreamed of by our current reckoning. 

Sigh, if we only knew. 

This movie includes every grizzled detective cliche in the crime movie book … and I freaking loved it. 

Jude Law plays an FBI agent who is not so much a human being as he is an angry open wound. 

He chain smokes, his family is gone, he’s got a health problem he’s ignoring and he has escaped a brutal career dealing with the worst the mafia has to offer in exchange for a quiet life as the only FBI agent (initially) in the Rocky Mountains. 

This job transfer does not go well.

Yes, almost all of these things are familiar. This is supposed to be based on a true story but, I’m sorry, detectives like this only exist in the movies. 

Not one bit of all that unreality matters as the flick moves from one cool bank robbery scene, to the next crime, and on the cop side from a murder investigation to a neat interrogation scene to the moment (found in countless crime movies) where the detective actually meets the ice cold criminal but doesn’t know who he is. 

No one in the movies this year is as cool as hollowed out Jude Law in detective mode. By the end he’s no longer an investigator, he’s Captain Ahab going after one more white whale.

Meanwhile, Nicholaus Holt is on point as an evil Nazi cult leader. 

And Marc Maron continues his string of playing guys who are an awful lot like Marc Maron. 

They saturated this thing in that 70s colorvision they do now to let you know the movie takes place in the past. But you could figure that out the minute Law lit up one more cigarette and nobody reminded him that Marlboro man died of cancer.

You should get yourself to a theater and check this one out. And when it comes to streaming play it for your dad. 

He’ll watch it standing up in front of the tv. 

There is a scene in Prizzi’s Honor where a woman throws a baby at a mafia bodyguard during a kidnapping. 

The “baby” is a doll but the bodyguard doesn’t know that and he knocks the flying infant away and pulls his gun. 

After the kidnapping is over (more or less) the two kidnappers discuss what just happened and we get this exchange. 

Irene Walker: I can’t get over it. What kinda creep wouldn’t catch a baby? If it was real it coulda been crippled for life.

Charley Partanna: He wasn’t paid to bodyguard the baby.

Partanna, is Jack Nicholson and Walker is Kathleen Turner and they are both funny and interesting in Prizzi’s Honor. 

Although I may have just given you the best line in the movie I have not given away the best scene. 

Until we got to the baby doll kidnapping I was iffy on this whole enterprise. I’m no fan of mafia comedies as I like my mobsters serious and not screwball. The only obvious example is The Sopranos which was both deadly serious and one of the best comedies on television for its entire run. 

But please save me from all the times DeNiro or Matthew Broderick or whoever decide to make me an offer of laughter. 

Watching this I was reminded that Goodfellas and My Blue Heaven are about the same gangster, Henry Hill. 

The Marty Scorsese picture (serious and funny) is a classic and the Herbert Ross, Nora Ephron screwball comedy (funny but not serious) is mostly forgotten. 

Prizzi is written by Richard Condon and Janet Roach and based on Condon’s book series about the Prizzi crime family.

Legendary Director John Huston was at the helm but this is not the sort of movie that calls for either grand vistas or director tricks. 

One hit takes place in a garage and we hear the gunshots but never see the action. It’s just that kind of movie. 

It’s a movie that is very concerned about turns in the plot and how the characters react and think through their various predicaments. 

At one particular plot point I thought, “I love it when a movie turns the screws.” 

And that’s the long and short of it. Do you go to movies for amazing visuals? Or do you enjoy a good soapy plot? In this case, you won’t get both. 

I can’t believe Angelica Houston won an Academy Award for this for best supporting actress. She’s very good but she’s also barely in it. 

However, I was amused to see that the great William Hickey got a supporting actor nom for his work as the elderly don.

If you know Hickey at all you probably know him as the cigar smoking uncle in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Here he’s once again called on to play someone that is more corpse than man. 

He could be the head of a family of vampires as easily as the son of a crime family. 

But he’s so good here and so fun to watch as he becomes the living embodiment of ruthless cunning.

It took a bit for me to get past the Nicholson casting as I never imagine him as an Italian mobster. He doesn’t look right for that to me but sooner or later you either go with it or you don’t. 

He also is playing against type in another way as this mafioso is no deep thinker or planner in the way a Corleone might be. 

I think the direction Huston gave Nicholson ought to give you an answer on whether or not this flick is for you. 

Before every scene Huston apparently turned to Jack and said, “Remember, he’s stupid.”