NOW LET'S SEE – the last time Bob Dylan wrote, directed, and starred in a movie was about a quarter-century ago with Renaldo and Clara. At 292 heavily improvised minutes and shot in glorious GrainyVision, it was perhaps the single most unwatchable movie of the 1970s. Having bided his time before following up that harrowing indulgence, Dylan at least hired professionals to make Masked and Anonymous, a ponderous, narcissistic exercise in jaded-celebrity moral outrage. TV-trained director and co-scenarist Larry Charles (Seinfeld, Curb Your Enthusiasm) knows where to point the camera. The film's production design, with its vaguely futurist air of urban collapse that makes downtown Los Angeles look like Colombia, is intriguingly distinctive. But beyond that, abandon all hope. Dylan (whose acting still bears comparison to a cement block) plays Jack Fate, a laconic former rock superstar bailed from jail to play a televised benefit concert that will uplift the downtrodden, mythical nation – or at least goose the stalled luck of neurotic publicity hack Jessica Lange and scrappy promoter John Goodman. Wouldn't you just know that Jack also happens to be the estranged son of the nation's ailing dictator – quel prodigal son! Jeff Bridges plays a cynical journalist who asks stupid questions, thus indicting the entire media. Concert sequences and eventual martyrdom ensue. Supposedly, this movie makes some sense if you've paid a lot of attention to the lyrics on recent Dylan albums; for the rest of us, it's quasi-surreal, limply metaphorical, solemnly pretentious wankage unredeemed by the gratuitous oh-my-god-I'm-acting-with-the-Voice-of-His-Generation star cameos by Angela Bassett, Ed Harris, Fred Ward, Mickey Rourke, Giovanni Ribisi, Val Kilmer, Penelope Cruz, Luke Wilson, Bruce Dern, etc. (Dennis Harvey)