This week, Martin Scorsese’s NO DIRECTION HOME premieres on PBS, marking the first time in many years that Dylan has appeared in a documentary. These days, the man tends to pop up in strange places. He appears in Victoria's Secret commercials, poorly received independent films, in the pages of his own rambling autobiography. Rarely, though, does he consent to interviews. Watching the epochal 1967 rock doc DON'T LOOK BACK the reason for this decision is clear: the man hates interviewers.

Throughout this fascinating, confrontational film, Dylan is at his worst when addressing the media. Every answer is a confrontation. No, he doesn't have anything to say about his songs, he just writes them, and for no reason either. No, he doesn't consider himself a folk singer. During a particularly heated exchange with a writer from Time on the eve of his concert at Royal Albert Hall, he accuses him and writers like him of refusing to print "the clear picture" of reality. When asked what that might entail, Dylan replies "A tramp vomiting, man, into a sewer."

Dylan's desire to confront and challenge people would soon spill over into his music. A few months after the English tour captured in DON'T LOOK BACK, Dylan shocked and outraged fans at the Newport Folk Festival by performing on electric guitar with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Observing his subject's aggressive demeanor, director D.A. Pennebaker named his documentary DON'T LOOK BACK. A confrontational title if ever there was one, it is less an invitation than a warning, or even a threat.

The portrait of Bob Dylan offered by Pennebaker is a complicated one. Sometimes, when captured in profile in moment of reflection, he seems touchable, a real, tangible human being. Other times, particularly in the brief excerpts from his concert footage, he seems even more distant and unknowable than on any of his records. Perhaps this is a fitting image for a complicated individual, and perhaps Pennebaker intended it. Perhaps he had no choice, as a result of Dylan's own refusal to reveal too much to the cameras (As the director notes on his website, the star "was sort of acting throughout the film.")

As a longtime fan of the Maysles Brothers' Rolling Stones documentary GIMME SHELTER, I always took the horror and tragedy of the Altamont concert as the a key death of the ideology and idealism of the 1960s. One could claim that DON'T LOOK BACK suggests that those values were dead well before they were "killed," and never existed anywhere but in the minds of the truly innocent and naive. Dylan, after all, seems completely disconnected from his own music and messages, which he refuses to expound upon. Pennebaker does not shy away from the seedy business of concert promotion; one of the film's longest scenes is a wide-eyed glimpse into manager Albert Grossman's efforts to play one venue against another in order to ensure the highest possible payday for his client (while referring to "the kind of money we were looking for for Bob.").

Asked only a year ago, I could have only categorized myself as a Bob Dylan admirer, not a fan. Though his circumstances do not excuse his often rude and poor behavior, something about the way he seemed to make music for himself and no one else appeals to me. His whiny voice irked me until I found Nashville Skyline; he chose to sing that way as another act of defiance and self-pleasure.

It certainly couldn't be easy being Bob Dylan. He gave the world "The Times They Are A-Changin'" and the world responded by loving the song so much they demanded he play it wherever he went. And so throughout the film he plays it over and over, and we can't help but feel some sort of cruel joke is being played against the man. He claims the times are changing. From his vantage point, things remain frustratingly static.

IF YOU LIKED DON’T LOOK BACK, CHECK OUT: NO DIRECTION HOME: BOB DYLAN (2005), Scorsese’s witty, extensive, and utterly compelling retrospective of Dylan’s early career through his electric guitar flame out in 1966.

THE BAD

Everybody knows Popeye, and probably most people like him, but does anybody really care about him? I worked at a comic book store for a few years, and during that time the special wedding issue of Popeye and Olive Oyl came out. Our owner bought a ton of copies and sold maybe 10% of them; when I go home every couple of months to pick up my books, I can always count on seeing a couple of them lying in the discount bin, scattered amongst the kids comics.

I have never cared less about Popeye and never hated him more fervently than when I watched the live action, big-screen POPEYE, made in 1980 by Robert Altman, one of my favorite directors. I don't know what he was doing or thinking, and I certainly don't want to know what he was smoking. A friend of mine actually recommended the film, telling me that it's a misunderstood classic.

It’s possible that this friend and I will never speak again.

POPEYE has its backers, and received a couple fairly positive reviews when it was released (Roger Ebert's and Vincent Canby's are available online). I'm certain someone reading this will tell me the film is brilliant, that I've missed the point. I can live with that, as long as you don't make me watch the movie again to find what I've missed. This movie is not like watching paint dry, because if you watch paint dry you watch something happen. This is like staring at dry paint and waiting for it to get wet again.

Robin Williams doesn't particularly look or sound like Popeye, but he does have freakishly large, highly phony-looking arms and a corncob pipe, so we'll call him Popeye. He comes into the lavishly designed town of Sweethaven looking for his father and spends two hours in a tedious, hard-to-follow adventure battling a Bluto (Paul L. Smith) whose incessant growling makes him sounds less like a brutal killer and more like an asthmatic. Shelley Duvall does look like Olive Oyl but her role consists of mostly screams "Popeye!" while looking like Olive Oyl.

Robert Altman has some affinities to the material, and certainly, the insular harbor town of Sweethaven bears a visual (and to a lesser degree, thematic) connection to Presbyterian Church, the setting of his classic MCCABE & MRS. MILLER. But, working from a script by the also talented Jules Feiffer, he directed one of the mostly purely boring movies I have ever sat through. Many of Altman's movies are characterized by a difficulty understanding the character's dialogue. Typically, that's because he lets the actors improvise their lines and the characters tend to talk over one another. POPEYE is the first I've seen where you can't understand the dialogue simply because Robin Williams mutters it all under his breath. Particularly in the lengthy opening sequence, when Popeye arrives in Sweethaven and wanders the town talking to himself under his breath, he looks a lot more like a raving psychotic than a beloved cartoon icon.

I've liked movies less than POPEYE, but I can't remember ever wanting a movie to end more. The only moments of interest to me were those where POPEYE seemed to be acknowledging its own horrendousness, such as a scene where Bluto eats a glass cup and half the town watches in horror, mouths agape, eyes wide. Coming, as it does, thirty minutes into this canker sore of a movie, one can't help feel Altman is almost anticipating the frightened looks from his frightened audience at that very moment.

It would be convenient if Popeye was a character I knew a lot about so that I could declare the film a shameful mutilation of everything he stands for, but I suspect that the opposite might be true. Popeye; he's a nice guy, but I wouldn't watch a movie starring him.

INSTEAD OF POPEYE, CHECK OUT: MASH (1970), Altman’s breakthrough film about the lives of triage doctors on the front lines of the Korean War. Watching POPEYE is sort of like one of their surgeries: a bloody mess that frequently ends in deep, agonizing pain.

THE UGLY

If you're looking for concrete proof of the use of mind-altering drugs throughout the 1960s, you need look no farther than THE FAT SPY, a movie so incredibly illogical it could only be produced by (or, for that matter, understood by) someone out of their gourd on some controlled substance. I saw the movie under the influence of nothing more than a couple of Fudgicles, but by the end I felt so disoriented that I convinced myself that I could eat my own head. Without any overt onscreen drug use, THE FAT SPY more trippy than THE TRIP, more heady than HEAD and a whole lot dumber than DUMB & DUMBER.

It should come as no surprise after that description that the movie is not really about a fat spy. There are a pair of mildly overweight gentlemen in key roles (both played by Jack E. Leonard), but neither does anything remotely related to the espionage trade. One romances a very obviously pregnant Jayne Mansfield, the other a very obviously ancient Phyllis Diller. Coincidentally, was that woman ever young? I've seen cave paintings that looked younger than Diller in this movie -- and this movie is 40 years old! It should be noted that while Leonard's certainly not a spy, it's hard to qualify him as fat either -- if he claimed he was just big boned you'd be inclined to believe him.

The plot also involves a group of fab BEACH BLANKET bimbos and mimbos, searching for a treasure buried on a sunken Spanish galleon. They're not terribly focused on digging, they spend most of their time boogying down to a series of groovy tunes by a long-forgotten (if, in fact, they were every remembered in the first place) band named The Wild Ones. Their name makes about as much sense as THE FAT SPY — the wild ones? Jeez, the band in AIRHEADS was named The Lone Rangers as a joke, but it never seemed funny until now, when it dawned on me that some bands really act like that.

The Wild Ones music is forgettable, but the lyrics are a kick. In the opening, they roar "People sure act funny/When they get a little money." and "People sure act strange/When they get a little change." Sure sounds like Commie propaganda to me! Why isn't the Fat Spy looking into this stuff instead of trying to get into Phyllis Diller's pants?

There are other subplots that continue to not make sense as long as you remain sober while considering them. One of the teens takes a raft onto the ocean, falls in, and is saved by a mermaid. They have a charming scene where he realizes she has a tail and screams "A TAIL!" and the screen promptly fills with an enormous orange and yellow word balloon that says "A TAIL!" It's thoughtful for deaf viewers, but a tad redundant for everyone else. Though the two separate, he later decides he cannot live without his mermistress, and gallops bravely out into the sea to live with her. Amusingly, the character never reappears to help in the quest for the galleon, suggesting that either the mermaid thing worked out really well or the dude drowned. Either way, he was spared the embarrassment of having to act in the climactic fountain of youth scenes, whose logic operates along parameters the screenwriter likely described as "The fountain of youth works however the fuck I want it to work.” If you're old it makes you young. If you're already young it makes you really old, then young once again. And sometimes it also makes you Ponce De Leon.

No really, one of The Wild Ones is Ponce de Leon. After you watch THE FAT SPY you will need a couple Wet Ones to clean the blood from the multiple stab wounds you inflict on yourself in order to get out of watching it.

IF YOU LIKED THE FAT SPY, CHECK OUT: CATALINA CAPER (1967), a similarly chaotic and illogical beach blanket bonanza starring the always appealing (if only for his relative lack of acting ability) Tommy Kirk. Featured on a classic episode of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000.