Some bloated Bob Dylan
PBS says Bob Dylan songs are the most bootlegged tunes in history, which is why security was so tight around the screening of the Martin Scorsese documentary “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan.” And why these people love titles with colons is beyond me. Critics can’t watch it for review unless they buy the DVD, which goes on
sale a week before the film airs on PBS.
So after a day of back-to-back
sessions, critics boarded the shuttles to go to the Fox studios to watch the three-and-a-half hour film. It’s magical walking around the sound stages once inhabited by the likes of Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe – even the hedges have the drama/comedy masks cut into them.
Sitting through a bloated film? Not so magical. Scorsese spends way too much time inflating the concert footage of Dylan playing in Newcastle, England, where people piled into a theater only to heckle Dylan for leaving his protest-song roots. After your seat has lost all feeling, as fellow critic Ellen Gray says, you want to yell “We get it. Electric instruments bad, acoustical good.”
No one would argue that Public Enemy co-founder Chuck D. is a serious guy. But what makes him such a fan of PBS? After a session on the PBS documentary, “Get Up, Stand Up: The Story of Pop and Protest,”Chuck D. expressed surprise that people might find it difficult to believe that he’s a PBS groupie.
“My mind is not geared toward the frivolous,” he says in a massive understatement. “I have to watch it, it’s the only thing on TV you can watch without losing your mind.” Which explains why TV critics seem like they’ve slipped a few brain gears.
To hear what Chuck D. thought about a recent awards show on BET, in which Beyonce did a lap dance on Magic Johnson with her dad in the audience, click here. 
To hear Sean “Puffy” Combs talking about changing his priorities in life, clickhere.
Bob Newhart does deadpan like no other. So you can’t quite get the real feeling for his exquisite comic timing unless you hear him say it. In one, Newhart is praising the unique comic timing of Hollywood great Jack Benny, while in the other he sounds rather astonished at Oscar-winner George C. Scott’s “Patton” assessment of his comic skills.