superstar - The Screengrab

Unwatchable #84: "It’s Pat"

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

When we looked at Hobgoblins the other day, I mentioned that it might be possible to construct a Bottom 100 list made up entirely of Gremlins ripoffs. Now it occurs to me that you could probably do the same with Saturday Night Live spinoffs, a thought that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. What horrors await me further up the list? Coneheads? Superstar? A Night at the Roxbury? But after watching It’s Pat, my mind was put at ease. For there to be another SNL movie on the list, it would have to be worse than It’s Pat, and science has proven this to be impossible.

By “science” I mean “me sitting through all 77 minutes of It’s Pat.”

Hoberman Hails Haynes

In a long piece in the Village Voice, J. Hoberman calls Todd Haynes's I'm Not There "part of the larger, ongoing Dylan revival brilliantly orchestrated by his manager, Jeff Rosen" and also "the movie of the year." Hoberman suggests that this might be the Bob Dylan movie that Dylan himself repeatedly tried to make but never could have achieved; nobody but Haynes, "who studied film as semiotics" and who in Superstar and Velvet Goldmine had already "taken pop stars or pop music for a text," could have. As Hoberman sees it, only a filmmaker as audacious as Haynes could be worthy of this subject. "Certain cultural figures have a particular inevitability. Charles Chaplin and Elvis Presley rode technological waves, surfing to superstardom on powerful socio-economic currents. Had Chaplin never come to America, another slapstick comic would have emerged to reign over the nation's nickelodeons; Elvis might never have been born, but someone else would surely have brought the world rock 'n' roll. No such logic accounts for Bob Dylan. No iron law of history demanded that a would-be Elvis from Hibbing, Minnesota, would swerve through the Greenwich Village folk revival to become the world's first and greatest rock 'n' roll beatnik bard and then — having achieved fame and adoration beyond reckoning — vanish into a folk tradition of his own making." — Phil Nugent

Posted Nov 28 2007, 03:00 PM by Peter Smith with | with no comments

Filed under: phil nugent, todd haynes, i'm not there, velvet goldmine, village voice, bob dylan, superstar, j hoberman