Everything That Dies, Some Day Comes Back

As a teenager I read a fair amount of science fiction, but somehow never got around to Frank Herbert's 'Dune'.   Having now sat through this interminable adaptation (155-minutes!) of just part of the book I don't feel as though I missed much. Defenders of the film wave away complaints that it is ponderous and turgid by saying that it necessarily has to do a lot of "world-building".   To which my riposte is that the  original 'Star Wars' film manages in a mere two hours to do a hell of a lot of world-building whilst also entertaining us with exciting action sequences and creating a host of memorable and iconic characters And despite the amount of time spent in this film on world-building I still came out of it none the wiser as to what was so great about the all-important spice.    It doesn't help that this is one of those irritating films whose main purpose is to set up the sequel rather than tell a compelling standalone story.   I guess I will ge...

This film follows Bob Dylan from his arrival in New York to the infamous appearance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, infamous because he chose to be backed by an electric rock band.  The story of how Dylan moved away from his folk roots is one I'm familiar with having already watched the excellent Scorsese documentary 'No Direction Home'  but Edward Norton does a good enough job playing Pete Seeger to make this aspect of the film watchable.    There are two other relationships of note - one with Sylvie (a fictionalised version of a real girlfriend of Dylan’s) and the potentially more interesting one with Joan Baez.  I was pleased that Baez takes no nonsense from Dylan in this telling of his story - she's no victim.  Their scenes together are memorable even if their relationship doesn't get resolved in any emotionally satisfying way.  And that's the key problem with this film - it's all a bit bloodless and unengaging.   The title has a doubl...