[This is my very first blog post. I wrote it over fifteen years ago.
It sucks.]
There is the casual Beatles fan, and then there’s me and Mark Lewisohn. (If you get that reference, you can join me and Mark Lewisohn.) About five people now have asked me if I’m going to see the new Beatles-oriented flick Across The Universe, and my answer is “No, and if you go see the Across The Universe and I find out you did, then you and I are no longer on speaking terms.” What director Julie Taymor has concocted is a paen to “casual” Beatles fans and obnoxious, aging Baby Boomers, and a slap in the face to “serious” Beatles fans everywhere.
OK, that last sentence was a little obnoxious itself, but, dammit, I’m upset. So let me lay my case out slowly and clearly, simple enough for even a Doors fan to understand.
First of all, I hate movie musicals. I’ll admit, I can enjoy a musical live on stage, where a certain larger-than-lifeness is required, but the minute a musical tries to be translated to celluloid, it becomes overblown, hokey, and uncomfortable. A sensitive viewer comes to feel genuinely bad for the performers high-stepping across the screen, mouthing the typical banalities of a “musical theater” number as their sweating, straining mug is projected in close-up twenty feet high on a large screen for viewing by movie audiences, half of whom are misguided enough to draw some kind of pleasure from this, and the other half dragged into the theater unwillingly by the first half.
The whole purpose of a song in the musical is to further the plot or illuminate the motives of the characters. Trying to shoehorn a cluster of unrelated Beatles songs into this format will do neither the songs nor the audience any favors. Not even if you name the lead characters “Jude” and “Lucy.” (Jeeeeeeeesus!) Has no one learned the lesson handed down by the 1978 Bee Gees movie Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? (Female lead: “Strawberry Fields.” Male lead: “Billy Shears.” Results: Trainwreck.) Beatles songs exist on a universal plane, and to try to corral them into a half-assed narrative benefits no one.
Let’s talk about Julie Taymor, director of Titus, Frida, and the Broadway version of The Lion King. Although I was struck by some of her visual ideas in Titus, I’ve always felt there was something a little too PBS about Taymor. When you watch her stuff, you are going to Learn, by God. You are going to Appreciate. With this new film, she is making a BOLD STATEMENT about the SIXTIES and DRUGS and VIETNAM.
The music of the Beatles is timeless, not topical, and Taymor has misjudged that. By using their songs to make her “statement,” she has reduced them to another token of a bygone era. In her mind, their “cultural” impact is more important than their musical impact. They have been reduced to headshop novelties, lumped in with tie-dye, VW buses, and Che Guevara T-shirts. They have become cause-oriented sloganeers, figureheads rather than the best rock band of any era. Continue reading
Holy Bee of Ephesus 