atmaspheric | endeavors

As a movie, “Masked & Anonymous” is an unholy, incoherent mess. As a Bob Dylan artifact, it is endlessly, perhaps morbidly, fascinating. [New York Times: Arts]

The intent seems to have been to capture the feeling of one of Mr. Dylan’s surreal, shaggy-dog ballads on celluloid (not to be confused with cellulose): not an especially good idea, perhaps, but certainly an interesting one. Filmed in picturesque, run-down corners of Los Angeles, the movie fuses Coen Brothers Americana with Gabriel García Márquez magic realism. (It also, speaking of the Coens, reunites John Goodman and Jeff Bridges, who speak lines that might have been dreamed up by their characters in “The Big Lebowski.”)