I'm a believer that you can tell if a movie is going to be good in the first five minutes. Sometimes less. You just get a sense that either the filmmakers have this thing under control and going somewhere or they don't. I'm eternally proud of the fact that I was at a screening of The Phantom Menace a week before it opened… and after the first scene I leaned over to my friend and said "this movie is going to be a train wreck." Truer words were never spoken.
With trailers it's a little harder to tell — obviously they're going to show us the best parts, not the worst. I've certainly been fooled over years — I'm sure all of us have.
But, fingers crossed, this trailer for A Complete Unknown, the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, looks fantastic. Timothy Chalamet doesn't look exactly like Dylan and that's ok. What's more important is that he feels like him. Sounds like him. And he really does.
Even the on-line armchair warriors are impressed. Here's one of these "fans and experts weigh in" kind of articles and I'd say even the professional skeptics are looking forward to this film.
Director James Mangold has a knack for making sharp, stylish looking films — here's hoping he's pulled it off again with this one.
Previously:
• When William S. Burroughs met Bob Dylan
• Bob Dylan Hallowe'en costumes
• Nobel laureate Bob Dylan publishing a new book about songs by Elvis Costello, Hank Williams, Nina Simone, and others
• If 'This Year' was written by Bob Dylan
