I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

OK, where to start? Depending on your disposition or frame of mind, this will either strike you as something brilliant or a complete waste of time. Maybe it could be both, I'm not sure. For one thing, it would help greatly if you've lived the last half century to get some takeaway from the picture. Dylan made his bones in the turbulent Sixties with songs that questioned dubious politics, war and even life itself. But what was the substance of his message? Most of the time he couldn't tell you because he was making music, music that reached out and conveyed an ethereal quality that was blowin' in the wind somewhere. Fans would get hung up on the meaning of an album cover when it was just an album cover. Sometimes it didn't get any deeper than that, but there was this hunger for some meaningful introspection that just wasn't there."Masked and Anonymous" is like that. With a backdrop of various Dylan tunes ("All of the songs are recognizable, even if they're not recognizable" - Uncle Sweetheart), the story meanders along hinting at a flash-point when the revolutionaries will turn everything upside down. But the fact is, everything's upside down anyway. Dylan himself looks like a Central American dictator, often back-dropped by characters looking like John Paul II, Ghandi and Abe Lincoln. The supporting cast is formidable, but they all seem to be in different movies. Of the bunch, Val Kilmer is brilliant as a visionary animal wrangler who deftly handles a poisonous coral snake and pretends to kill a rabbit. That it was a White Rabbit might have been another subtle attempt to bridge the past with the present, but then again, it might not.The one thing I can unquestionably say I enjoyed about the picture was Dylan's rendition of 'Dixie' - very cool. I groaned slightly when the young girl did 'The Times They are a Changin' because it was so expected. I think though, if Dylan really wants to tell us something, he should just come out and say it.

Bob Dylan is certainly one of the great songwriters of the second half of the 20th century, or at least the most pleasurably enigmatic. His songs are poetic, but he doesn't consider himself one (or does, depending on what IMDb quote you read that contradicts another), and like Jean-Luc Godard his output from the 1960s is consistently groundbreaking and with a lot that holds up for the right fan. But this goes without saying one thing: he can't write a screenplay for s***. Sorry to curse, but it's apprporiate. The rules that might apply, if any, to screen writing can't be carried over into film-making. This is probably not a new thing to Dylan- he apparently wrote (and directed) a film in the 70s that almost didn't even get released in most sections till it was cut to just the songs- but he doesn't know how to keep from having his characters go on and on and on about this or that, making platitudes for something that is meant to make him (playing a character named Jack Fate, ho-ho) look all mystical and wise or just confused at not responding to anyone. If it is even written- sometimes it looks like the actors might be making it up as they go along- it is one of the worst screenplays of the decade.It goes without saying that it isn't all Dylan's fault. In fact, him and co-writer/director Larry Charles (usually of the much more spot-on Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld and Borat terrain) do have the occasional scene or line that does work, in its own Dylan-esquire way (which is to say, I can't explain why it works except that a line is read truthfully or doesn't sound completel s****y). Plot: not much, except that Fate is let out of prison early in order to do a benefit concert as the bottom-of-the-barrel pick of John Goodman's indebted promoter and Jessica Lange's shallow TV producer, and is hounded by the press (or rather *a* press member, as a weird amalgam of Dylan's frayed connection with the press via Dude Jeff Bridges), while getting ready for a disaster in the making. This sounds substantial, but it isn't by that much. The compensation is that there are, of course, a lot of Bob Dylan fans out in Hollywood, so there's a lot of guest stars. Val Kilmer mumbles a lot, till making a great point about death and animals, while handling a snake. Giovanni Ribisi plays a quixotic Mexican rebel. Christian Slater's in for a couple of scenes. Don't forget about Like Wilson. And then there's Cheech Marin, and...oh, forget it.Strange thing is, I didn't necessarily outright hate the movie. It's more complicated a reaction than that. Dylan seems to be making his flaws here as unique as he would accomplishments; seeing a scene like the one where he and Charles muck up a perfectly moving scene with a little black girl singing "Times They Are a Changin'" by the whim of a brutal mother making her little girl memorize all Jack Fate songs like a robot by suddenly putting over it a flashback of Fate getting roughed up years before with a mumbling voice-over, couldn't happen in any other movie. And, to be sure, when Dylan and his band plays, sans the incomprehensible Dylan singing, it's still pretty good. But the problem is less outright hatred of the material but disdain for the self-indulgence. You can tell the actors and the people behind the picture think there's grand statements being made behind what looks like a mysterious Dylan-esquire fable about greed and socio-political status in the media and music and culture. But behind it is really pandering to the ideas without questioning them. Maybe there is more than I saw in the material, yet is there enough time during the day to give another viewing to look deeper, unlike Dylan at his best with his songs? I'm not sure.

Get in the right frame of mind to watch this movie. Bob Dylan has a unique ability for understatement, while at the same time doing broad irony. Here he stays in character. At least he looks right at the camera. Like a Dylan song. Don't look for the standard movie structure. Much seems to be about the doing rather then the getting it done. It's great fun watching the characters. They never looked better then in this film. Bob always attracted the best backing group. And then there's the music. It's the songs that make little sense that really set the tone. Those who don't get it never will. While it's not Dylan's greatest moment, it still holds interest since it's born of his determination and the draw of his energy.

I watched "Masked and Anonymous", and really thought it was going to be good. It had to be good, it had Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Jessica Lange, Bruce Dern, Ed Harris, Cheech Marin, Chris Penn, Luke Wilson,Giovanni Riblisi and Bob Dylan! This movie was awful and all sorts of levels, it did not make sense, it was disjointed, and the only decent thing about it was the music of Bob Dylan. After a brief period of time (about the time they introduced Cheech Marin's character, I just FF to Bob Dylan. All I can say is don't nus this piece of crap.Next time you assemble all these great actors together, call the Coen Brothers, P.T. Anderson, myself, a fourth grader or a crack smoking monkey with a pen and vengeance in his heart. Has to be better than this.Senor