I would have bought a card, but Bob Dylan's 70th birthday snuck up on me before I could get to Hallmark. They grow up so fast! Nevertheless, we can honor the iconic singer/songwriter with a few quick glimpses back at his feature-film history:
1. Dont Look Back (1967)
D.A. Pennebaker's documentary, which chronicled Dylan's 1965 tour of the UK, remains the standard-bearer of Dylan on film and would come to influence four decades of both rock-docs and musicians -- not to mention provide the definitive glimpse of Dylan at the height of his insolent power:
2. Eat the Document (1972)
Pennebaker also filmed Dylan's notorious 1966 European tour, which Dylan himself eventually edited to make this weird, woozy doc. It was essentially made for TV but never aired, and it remains a bootleg-only curio to this day. One can only hope Dylan's 70th birthday festivities can rival the blotto fun he had in this immortal car ride with a vexed John Lennon:
3. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)
Sam Peckinpah reportedly had never heard of Dylan before he was recommended to write music for Peckinpah's 1973 Western, the last of his unofficial genre trilogy that also included Ride the High Country and The Wild Bunch. It's a memorable score for a famously troubled production, including a little ditty called "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" -- just the right tune for Slim Pickens's slow, gutshot demise.
Bonus: Dylan co-starred in Pat Garrett as well, playing the knife-wielding Alias. See if you can spot him in the final scene:
4. Renaldo and Clara (1978)
Dylan's one and only dramatic directing credit, an epic (four hours!) exercise in concert-tour surrealism featuring himself and wife Sara in the title roles, with Joan Baez and blues-rock legend Ronnie Hawkins appearing in support. It's also unreleased on DVD and exists only in bootleg format. You can pretty much glean Dylan's unconventional auteurist taste from this clip, featuring Baez's anonymous character covering -- perhaps ironically -- the Leonard Cohen ballad "Suzanne":
What did make it into circulation from Renaldo and Clara was a variety of perfomance footage filmed during Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour; the most indelible remains "Tangled Up in Blue" (and apologies in advance for the commercial at the front of this official clip):
5. Hearts of Fire (1987)
It's difficult to overstate how misguided and terrible Dylan's next screen effort would be: From the minds of Return of the Jedi director Richard Marquand and Showgirls writer Joe Eszterhas came this very, very '80s rock drama, featuring the WTF cast of Dylan, mononamed then-pop star Fiona, and Rupert Everett in a triangle of conflicting creative and romantic relationships. Here are the first 10 minutes; I'd advise wearing headphones (until it's just unbearable, anyway):
6. Masked and Anonymous (2003)
Dylan co-wrote the part-satire/part-vanity project/all-nonsense Masked and Anonymous with director Larry Charles, also starring as an ex-con enlisted to headline a benefit concert organized under shady circumstances in the early stages of a country's civil war. Yeah. Despite a kind of mind-blowing cast that included Jessica Lange, Jeff Bridges, John Goodman and Penélope Cruz, this one was DOA both critically (the NY Post's Lou Lumenick called it "a strong contender for the worst movie of the century"; clearly he never saw Hearts of Fire) and commercially (earning only $533,000 in five months of limited theatrical release). It has its fans, though -- and a scene-stealing turn for the ages from Val Kilmer:
7. No Direction Home (2005)
Where Dont Look Back, Eat the Document and later nonfiction Dylan films represented fragments of his evolving career and persona, Martin Scorsese sprawling documentary provided Bob Dylan in full. Take Dylan or leave him, but as a cinematic tour through his half-century of musical and cultural history, the profound No Direction Home has no peer.
8. I'm Not There (2007)
Finally, with his 2007 film I'm Not There, writer-director Todd Haynes took the radical step of telling Dylan's story with seven different actors playing variations on the singer-songwriter's mystique more than playing the singer himself. One of them, Cate Blanchett, earned an Academy Award nomination for her performance, making her the first and only (and probably last, honestly) Oscar-winner to be nominated for another Oscar for playing another Oscar-winner. (Dylan's contribution to the Wonder Boys soundtrack, "Things Have Changed," won Best Original Song in 2000.) More than 40 years after Dylan tore up the UK in Dont Look Back, Haynes and Blanchett paid homage to that film's arrogant, strung-out, journo-thrashing legend -- as well as his sociopolitical influence in the mid-'60s. Happy birthday, Bob!