Roger Ebert reviews the new movie Across the Universe, which tells a story of the Vietnam era set almost entirely to Beatles songs.
Yet when I say "story," don't start thinking about a lot of dialogue and plotting. Almost everything happens as an illustration to a Beatles song. The arrangements are sometimes familiar, sometimes radically altered, and the voices are all new; the actors either sing or sync, and often they find a mood in a song that we never knew was there before. When Prudence sings "I Want to Hold Your Hand," for example, I realized how wrong I was to ever think that was a happy song. It's not happy if it's a hand you are never, never, never going to hold.
The story sounds a bit like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the movie, mixed with Hair, the movie, one hopes a little bit (or a lot) more the latter than the former. I've always said the problem with Sgt. Peppers was not that making a musical out of the songs of the Beatles is an inherently bad idea.
If I start listing what the problems were with Sgt. Pepper's, we'll be here all afternoon. But Hair is a pretty great movie, even though it loses its way once or twice (including with an ending which, though heartbreaking, is staggerly unlikely))
Other reviews of Across the Universe have been pretty evenly mixed, but I still want to see it. Paul McCartney likes it, supposedly.
No comments:
Post a Comment