I'm Not There

I have seen pretension, and its name is "I'm Not There," the onanistic, impressionistic, POS biopic of Bob Dylan. The shtick is that Dylan is played by six different actors meant to embody different personas he's adopted over the years -- Richard Gere as Cowboy Dylan, Cate Blanchett as Fellini Dylan, Heath Ledger as Heath Ledger Dylan, and Christian Bale as Born-Again Dylan (who, perhaps deliberately, does a bad GW impression). But the most inspired casting choice is David Cross as Allen Ginsberg. Cross of course brings his baggage as Tobias Funke from "Arrested Development," and we can't take him seriously as an overrated goofball poet who wrote one good thing (Yes, I'm thinking of "Howl."). So when Cross reads a poem as Ginsberg, you imagine Tobias auditioning for "The Prosecution," probably a CBS procedural, reading something he knows, which is of course an Eve Ensler-penned monologue. Other than this unintentionally funny five-second snippet, I can't think of anything nice to say about this movie.