Let The Beatles Be.

Okay. I wrote this in bits and pieces while I was watching the movie, so it might be a touch disjointed. But since there are only two or three people reading this (wow, I wish that was self-deprecating humor instead of a simple fact) I decided to just more or less leave it haphazardly constructed as it is.

So. I'm watching the movie Across The Universe. And here's the thing. They put the character named "Prudence" into a closet for no reason that makes sense from the plot thus far, but so the other characters could sing "Dear Prudence". I can only wait for when the character named "Sadie" does something so the other characters can ask her what she has done. Oh, and Martin Luther from The Roots is playing a character that comes as close as possible to being Hendrix. And he is good. And Bono plays a Timothy Leary type named "Dr. Robert" who sings "I am the Walrus". Which is weird, but not in the way that it was meant to be. Oh, and Eddie Izzard does a spoken word kind of thing from "For The Benefit of Mr. Kite" that's really very awesome. Because Eddie Izzard is awesome, and takes the Beatles song merely as a point of departure, instead of slavishly sticking to the material, He has the balls to riff on the lyrics, (rather than just changing the tempo or the arrangement) and that is fantastic. Honestly, the main reason I went ahead and moved the movie to the top of my Netflix queue. was to see the Eddie Izzard performance. that, and Michael Clayton is horribly backlogged. The only other performer I recognized was Evan Rachel Wood, who is from Raleigh and might or might not be dating Marilyn Manson. I read something about it in the paper once, but I don't care enough to invest any more time in finding out if they are still together, assuming they ever were.

The movie is a mess, not unlike Idlewild and Moulin Rouge, which are the two films this one most reminds me of. (Oh, and Pennies From Heaven, which I always think is a sort of unrecognized precursor to Moulin Rouge, and contains one of my favorite Steve Martin performances, but no one seems to remember. That movie is awesome). The concept is lifted from the Broadway shows that formed narratives built around the songs of Billy Joel (successfully) and Bob Dylan (unsuccessfully, but it's more troubling is to try and contemplate the kind of mind that sees a coherent narrative in Dylan lyrics. This is the kind of brain that sees connections between FEMA and the Freemasons.) The Beatles have more songs that resonate with more people than either Dylan (a lot of Dylan's most popular songs are not his best songs) or Joel (who is probably underrated by the musical intelligentsia), but the whole thing feels like a gimmick through a lot of the film. And actors performing Beatles songs is not more interesting than the actual Beatles songs. For a Beatles nerd like me, the movie quickly became a kind of guessing game of what song would come next. (I never would have guessed that "Oh Darling" would make an appearance.) It also occurs to me that if one wanted to make a movie built around Beatles songs, it really ought to be better than than the movies the Beatles made. And it is very hard to make a movie about rock music that even compares to A Hard Day's Night.

The movie desperately wants to be about the sixties, but doesn't seem to have anything new or interesting to say about what might be the most over analyzed bit of recent history. So it really feels like it's about nothing much at all. Has there been a really good movie looking back at the 1960s as "The Sixties"? Hair was good, but not great. Forrest Gump comes to mind, but that doesn't help because I really hated Forrest Gump. There are plenty of great movies that address major parts of the sixties (Mississippi Burning, JFK, Full Metal Jacket, The Right Stuff are all obvious examples). But I can't think of a good film about the hippie part of the sixties. Which might prove the point that hippies are incredibly annoying. The attempts to equate the Vietnam war with the war in Iraq are obvious and heavy-handed, and have all been made before.

The movie is not terrible. But it's not particularly good either. But I can't help but thinking the larger concept of the film could be interesting if it went farther. The trick might be to divorce the era depicted from the songs chosen. Like doing a musical set in late Victorian London to Radiohead songs (is "Knives Out" too obvious for the Jack The Ripper sequence?) or Tom Waits songs in a movie about the Depression.

For the record, my three favorite pieces of art that play with the Beatles considerable iconography are the book Paperback Writer, the B-Sharps episode of the Simpsons and the Danger Mouse mash up of the Beatles with Jay-Z's Black Album. Tomorrow night is the free Brand Nubian show at the Cradle, so I'll probably write a little something about that.

(You have no idea how proud I am of that "Knives Out" idea. I'm now trying to think of what song to have Oscar Wilde sing.)