Upcoming Flick About Life Of Dylan

Here's a trailer for the upcoming movie about the irrepressible artist known as Bob Dylan, starring many actors playing Dylan across his career, these include Cate Blanchett as the early Bob Dylan and David Cross as Allen Ginsberg.

Here's a snippet from a 2006 article published in Slate magazine:

Dylan and Staples had a musical reunion in 2002 to record his gospel number "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking," and, compared to the 1979 version, Dylan sounds not like a white Negro but a soul survivor. When he rasps about sitting at the "welcome table," he sounds like he's earned his right to sing the blues. Dylan and Staples' intonation and phrasing wouldn't have sounded so uncannily alike back when she was rebuffing his proposal. This is the millennial Dylan who shouts out to Keys on his latest record, a Dylan who is curious about Keys because he has already made himself more like her—the kind of affinity not lost on Todd Haynes when he considered casting Beyoncé as one of the six actors playing Dylan in his upcoming biopic I'm Not There. Dylan's earlier lyrics alluded to his interracial eroticism, but a more recent lyric could apply to his transformation. He's not dark yet, but he's getting there.

Read it all here at Slate.

Joy Division Is Now A Documentary

JOY DIVISION has reached the end of production. The feature length documentary, a US/UK co production, produced by Hudson Productions Ltd partners Tom Astor and Tom Atencio in association with Brown Owl Films’ Jacqui Edenbrow, is directed by Grammy nominated Grant Gee (Radiohead's Meeting People Is Easy, Director of Photography & Editor Scott Walker: 30 Century Man) and co-written by acclaimed journalist/writer Jon Savage (England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond).

In 1976 four young men from ruined, post-industrial Manchester went to see the Sex Pistols. They formed a band, Joy Division. Three years later the lead singer, Ian Curtis committed suicide just as they were on the brink of worldwide success. Together Gee and Savage investigate why Joy Division's collective musical genius and singular vision enjoys a larger audience and influence thirty years on.

Featuring the unprecedented participation of the surviving band members of Joy Division, now known as New Order, the film chronicles a time of great social and political change in England of the mid-70's and tells the untold story of these four men who transcended economic and cultural barriers to produce an enduring and profound legacy, one that resonates fiercely in today's heavily careerist music industry and over mediated pop culture.

The band's remarkable story is depicted through atmospheric never-before-seen live performance footage, photographs both iconic and personal, period films and newly unearthed audio tapes; taking us through the band’s early years as individuals finding their voices and then later as a band, building their ideas and ideals. The documentary situates the band not just in the musical context of punk and post-punk but in the culturally starved, claustrophobic landscape of post-industrial Manchester that surrounded them and suffuses every note of their music.

This unparalleled visual account of a time and place is coupled with heartfelt and animated, present tense accounts from the surviving members of the band Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook and Stephen Morris, plus other key characters in the story, including friend and similarly isolated musician Genesis P. Orridge, legendary Factory Records owner Tony Wilson, iconic graphic artist Peter Saville, photographer/ filmmaker Anton Corbijn, Annik Honoré and others.

JOY DIVISION is a Hudson Productions Ltd Production in association with Brown Owl Films.