Review 784: A Complete Unknown
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0:00Review 784: A Complete Unknown
0:13Introduction
5:34Trailer
8:03Review
34:28The Verdict
37:12Goodbye
[music] Hello everybody and welcome to the Sport of the Warning podcast. This is review number 784 with a review of A Complete Unknown. I'm Christopher Schnazee. And I'm Stephen Miller. And if you're joining us for the first time, the Sport of the Warning podcast is a weekly film review program. Each week on the show we're going to dive in, debate, discuss, and argue over the latest films coming to a theater near you this week. We're rushing out to see the new Bob Dylan biopic flick. Same difference I guess. It works. Stephen, you a fan of the old BobbieD? Oh yeah. I mean some my dad was, if not quite a Dylanologist or whatever you would call them, like my dad was definitely a big Bob Dylan fan. He had one of those kind of drawers full of vinyl sleeves, like multiple pieces of furniture devoted to that, vinyl and CD sleeves. And I remember like two full rows being just Bob Dylan things. And so obviously when I was like coming of age musically in like high school, especially, I listened to a good bit of Bob Dylan, especially the run from freewheel into like blonde on blonde, which is basically the time that this movie takes place plus maybe one year. So I can't say I know that much about his like 70s and 80s career. Like I've listened to a few records, but the stretch of time that this movie is about, I'm like very familiar with every song that was performed. So yeah, I would say I'm a Dylan fan. Now I haven't listened to him intentionally in many years until the last few days where I've been listening to him kind of nonstop. How about you? What is your relationship to Bob Dylan? Yeah, like my my relationship to Bob Dylan is mostly just through osmosis in the culture, right? Like before literally this afternoon, I had never intentionally hit play on a Bob Dylan song. The closest thing was probably the nine days song called Bob Dylan, or they quote him a few times during a few sections after the course. But I just, you know, it was one of those things where like I was aware of Bob Dylan's existence, I heard his music, you know, played live before people's backyards and stuff as people cover those songs. But I've never, I never like really got into Dylan, right? But you know, as as I kept constantly watching the trailer, I was like, I could probably listen to some Bob Dylan. Like, you know, like I had heard some not great things about this film leading up to sitting down to watch it. But I was also kind of like, if this is just two hours and two and a half hours of like pretty damn good music, I won't hate this. You know what I mean? So I was in a way like I wasn't excited, but I was liking what I was getting from Timothy Chalamet's like performance of Bob Dylan and the trailers. And I was kind of excited to figure out what we were going to get. All right. So you play Bob Dylan intentionally for the first time. What do you reach for? Do you just go on like Spotify and hit the top song? Do you do an album like Highway 61 revisited? Like, what's the move? I just went to the album that has the famous cover that they shoot in the scene in this movie. And I just played that album. Yeah. So yeah, that was my move. That I kind of had the same journey that I'm learning Dylan went on or people did in the moment where when I was in high school, it was freewheel and in the times they are changing like the classic kind of folk protest music that he played. That was what really blew my mind because I could like understand the lyrics, right? Like there's a song Masters of War that gets played in this movie where he's singing right after the Cuban Missile Crisis that is like very damning of the government and as a like brooding high schooler, I was like, oh hell yeah. This song is so edgy. And then you get a little older and you realize that it's kind of like the more interesting poetry that's hard to understand of his later work that gets you more excited. So I kind of had the same basic progression that Timothy Chalamet does in this movie. Yeah. So you were really into him before he picked up an electric guitar and then ruined everything, right? Oh yeah. When he went electric, I was out. I did one last Dylan story is I did maybe the first concert I ever went to with my dad was seeing Bob Dylan play it. It was called the Cox Arena, I think actually down in San Diego. And that is when I learned what is apparently very well known about Dylan, which is
Transcription truncated.
In this episode, Christopher Schnese and Stephen David Miller bring you a review of A Complete Unknown.