The Beatles Invade America All Over Again In New Disney+ Doc

BEATLES ’64 (Dir. David Tedeschi, 2024)

There was a sketch on the IFC show Portlandia in which comedian Fred Armisen decides he wants to make a documentary about the Beatles. Despite his friend/comedy partner Carrie Brownstein skeptically replying “seems like there are so many,” Fred isn’t dissuaded, and declares that he will bring a new spin to the oft told tale, saying it’ll be about “Four mop-topped lads from Liverpool who changed the world…forever!” 

 

The rest of the sketch has Fred telling anyone who’ll listen what he’ll have in his film - the Beatles arrival at JFK, their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, their psychedelic experimentation, etc. – obviously all the expected historical highlights of the band’s career that have been done to death. The joke that Armisen had no new angle, spin, or take on the Fab Four for yet another doc came to my mind when I first heard about BEATLES ’64, which premieres on Disney+ this Friday, November 29.

 

Now, this Portlandia bit was from ten years ago, and there have been lots of Beatles docs since then - even one funnily enough about the band’s 1965 visit to Portland – but I had to wonder what new could be brought to the table about a period that was pretty well covered by Albert and David Maysles’ THE BEATLES: THE FIRST U.S. VISIT or THE BEATLES ANTHOLOGY or HOW THE BEATLES CHANGED THE WORLD or…well, you get the idea.

 

So the big selling point of David Tedeschi’s BEATLES ’64 (produced by Martin Scorsese) is that it features 17 minutes of never-before-seen footage that comes from the 11 hours of film the Maysles brothers shot for a program entitled What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A., which was aired on CBS in late 1964 as a special episode of the TV show, The Entertainers.

That show was later re-edited for the 1991 home video release, THE FIRST U.S. VISIT. Now, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that on VHS in the ‘90s, so I can’t say how much overlap there is here, but as a big fan of John, Paul, George, and Ringo, I am delighted to report that this third take on the material delivers a fresh, insightful exploration of that crazy time when the Beatlemania epidemic swept the country.

BEATLES '64 gives viewers quality time with their prized Pepsi vending machine replica transistor radio.

Tedeschi deftly packages the narrative of the Beatles arrival in America, and the days leading to their legendary appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, with present day commentary from Paul McCartney, and Ringo Starr, who we see showing his collection of clothes and gear to Scorsese (so makes me want a mini-series of Marty and Ringo just hanging out). 

There are also fascinating and funny interviews with Ronnie Spector, Smokey Robinson, and most touching, David Lynch, who saw the Beatles in Washington D.C. a few days after their stateside debut on Sullivan. There’s also a sideline story that producer Jack Douglas tells about travelling to Liverpool to tap into that Merseybeat magic, but not being able to perform without a visa and work permits might perplex at first, but pays off amusingly.

 

Another selling point is that the black and white footage pops with sharp crispness, which isn’t surprising as it was restored in 4K by Beatlemaniac Peter Jackson. And, of course, the music all sounds terrific, not just the Beatles, but of their contemporaries like Robinson, the Supremes, and Little Richard. 

 

In moments that play like a real-life A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, we see the guys clowning around in their Plaza Hotel room with highlights being when a cheeky McCartney tells the cameraman to “defy convention!” and shoot them from a lower angle so the mike can be seen, which he does to clapping from the group and entourage, and when Lennon calls a reporter a “wanker.” Meanwhile, the hubbub happening outside the Beatles’ bubble plays like a real-life I WANT TO HOLD YOUR HAND (Robert Zemeckis’ 1978 comedy about fans trying to get close to the band at the hotel) with groupies praising their beloved in street interviews, and being caught in the hallways by cops and hotel security.

 

All of this comes together now as a highly worthwhile watch even if you feel like you’ve seen and heard it all before. It’s especially recommended if the Beatles are new to you, and you don’t know how it went down, but I doubt many of those people would’ve read this far. Three years ago this week, Jackson’s monumental, and wonderful three part/eight hour GET BACK project was released, so if BEATLES ’64 is supposed to continue the trend for future Thanksgiving weekends, I’ll say what Paul’s father suggested should be the repeated refrain in “She Loves You,” - “yes, yes, yes.”

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At Long Last, Film Babble Blog’s 2021 In Review

So I’m finally getting around to appraise the films of 2021 – just under the wire, in fact, as the 95th Academy Awards ceremony is this coming Sunday (March 27).

It’s nothing new for it to take a few months into the new year to do this as many movies aren’t accessible until well into the awards season, and there’s a lot of films to catch up with. However, there are a lot fewer than in years past for obvious pandemic reasons. In the Before Times of 2019, there were 792 films released in the U.S. and Canada; in 2021, there were 403. I haven’t crunched the numbers to calculate how many movies of those that I’ve seen, but I think I’ve seen enough to say that it was a good, not great, year for film.

Like last year, I’m not posting a Top 10, but if I were, I would pick Paul Thomas Anderson’s LICORICE PIZZA as my #1 movie of the year. The film resonated with me as it matched my memories of being a kid with acting aspirations in the ‘70s, and delighted me with its radiant, real-feeling turns by its leads, Cooper Hoffman (son of Phillip Seymour Hoffman), and Alana Haim. A brash Bradley Cooper steals the show as producer Jon Peters (the inspiration for SHAMPOO!), which made much more of an impression on me than his performance in NIGHTMARE ALLEY.

Speaking of Guillermo del Toro’s NIGHTMARE ALLEY, that was one of a number of movies from the last year that I admired more than I enjoyed. Likewise, I found Jane Champion’s THE POWER OF THE DOG, a front-runner for the Best Picture Oscar, to be a fascinatingly weird western with a masterful performance by Benedict Cumberbatch, but I didn’t connect with it in any great, emotional way.

Same goes with DUNE. Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the first half of Frank Herbert’s iconic sci-fi bestseller is amazing looking, and powerful in its presentation, but I felt a bit distant to it when I wanted to be more inside the action.

That’s not to say that it isn’t a worthy epic as it boasts a strong ensemble headed by “it boy” Timothée Chalamet, eye-popping visuals, a primo Hans Zimmer score, and a solidly intriguing storyline, yet I was still left somewhat cold by it. DUNE received ten Academy Award nominations for good reason, but I’m just hoping that PART TWO, due for 2023, will resonate more greatly with me.

2021 films that did speak me include Joel Coen’s spare black and white Shakespeare adaptation, THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH, which earned Denzel Washington a Best Actor nomination (he deserves it for his intense handling of the “Is this a dagger which I see before me” soliloquy alone); Joachim Trier’s THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD, which should’ve gotten Renate Reinsve a nom; Kenneth Branagh’s BELFAST (read my review here); and Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s elegantly poignant DRIVE MY CAR, which I bet will win the Best International Feature Oscar on Sunday night.

James Bond movies usually don’t make my year-end best lists, but Cary Joji Fukunaga’s magnificent NO TIME TO DIE certainly deserves such accolades. Daniel Craig’s swan song as 007 is one of the series’ best, and you can read my reasons why in my review from when the film hit theaters. 

One category that flourished in 2021 is the musical documentary genre. Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s SUMMER OF SOUL leads the pack of pop infotainment with its colossal concert footage from the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival. How an event that featured such iconic performers as Stevie Wonder, Mahalia Jackson, Nina Simone, The 5th Dimension, The Staple Singers, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and Sly and the Family Stone (among other luminaries) could linger in obscurity for so long is baffling, but thanks to Questlove, we’ve got an essential, and joyous addition to the roster of classic concert festival docs that includes WOODSTOCK, MONTEREY POP, and SOUL POWER. 

Second to that in the rock doc division is Edgar Wright’s THE SPARKS BROTHERS with its loving breakdown of the eccentric career of Ron and Russell Mael’s Los Angeles-based band, Sparks. It’s one of the most entertaining, and funny rockumentaries I’ve ever seen, and since I’m a big fan of the genre, I’ve seen a lot of them. Wright’s film really should’ve been nominated for Best Documentary - I’d say instead of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s FLEE. Not that FLEE is undeserving, it’s just that it’s also nominated for Best Animated and Best International Feature too, so it’s pretty well covered.

Also worth seeing is Todd Haynes’ THE VELVET UNDERGROUND (read my review), Dan Lindsay and T. J. Martin’s TINA, about legendary singer, Tina Turner; and Garret Price’s WOODSTOCK 99: PEACE, LOVE, AND RAGE, which scarily depicts what’s been considered the worst music festival ever.

Finally, the musical documentary event of 2021 was THE BEATLES: GET BACK, Peter Jackson’s eight-hour exploration of the fab four’s sessions for their next-to-last album, Let it Be. We witness John, Paul, George, and Ringo rehearsing, joking around, arguing, and working on new material, capturing the band’s creativity as never seen before. The Apple Corps rooftop concert by itself makes for one of the year’s best docs as it’s been shown at IMAX theaters as a standalone film. Read my review of GET BACK here.

So there’s my overview of cinematic highlights of 2021. Friday, I will post my Oscar predictions for this Sunday’s broadcast. Hope to see you here.

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GET BACK Takes LET IT BE And Turns It Into A Beatles Extravaganza

Now streaming exclusively on Disney Plus:

The BEATLES: GET BACK 
(Dir. Peter Jackson, 2021)

In the 1978 Beatles parody, All You Need is Lunch, narrator, Monty Python’s Eric Idle announced that “in the midst of all this public bickering, Let it Rot was released as a film, an album, and a lawsuit.”

But while this three-part documentary doesn’t touch on any of the legalities surrounding the project, Idle’s spoof acknowledges that for a long time there’s been a dark cloud hovering above the Beatles’ original swan song. 

 

Now, the reason for this reputation comes down to the oft told narrative that the Beatles went into the GET BACK/LET IT BE production hating each other, suffered dreary sessions with mediocre material, and the film is a sloppy, badly edited rockumentary. 

 

Although the film was released in the early ‘80s on Beta, VHS, and laserdisc, it soon went out of print was never re-issued on DVD, Blu ray, or any home video format. The word is that Paul McCartney has regularly blocked re-issues of LET IT BE, but it should be noted that George Harrison, John Lennon, and Ringo Starr also despised the film.

 

So after 40 years, we’ve got this delicious docu-series that shapes the Michael Lindsay-Hogg shot footage into a trilogy treasure trove of revelatory footage. The story is now an accessible breakdown of the Beatles’ final days that at times makes us feel like we’re in the same room as the Fab Four.

 

Each entry begins with this disclaimer: “The GET BACK project in January 1969 produced over 60 hours of film footage, and more than 150 hours of studio recordings.” 

 

Part 1 kicks off with a 10-minute montage of old Beatles footage to give us their backstory leading up to 1969. This recap will surely be seen as redundant to many as these are tales well told, but nonetheless they get us to speed.

We join the Beatles as they rehearse at Twickenham Film Studios, where the plan is for the group to write, rehearse, and play live 14 new songs in two weeks for a TV special. Their time is short because the studio is due to be used for the shooting of THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN, starring Ringo and Peter Sellers. As they sit in front of Ringo’s drums, the boys appear to be in good spirits as they joke around and jam on such tunes as “I’ve Got a Feeling” and “Don’t Like Me Down.”

One of the most famous bits from the LET IT BE movie is when George and Paul seemingly have a scuffle in which George says “I'll play, you know, whatever you want me to play. Or I won't play at all, if you don't want me to play.” While it played as a harsh moment in Hogg’s film, we get to see it in full context, and understand that it was simply band bickering.

 

After an hour and a half of Beatle babbling (funny that George seems to be the most vocal in this first segment), working out songs, some of which are destined to later solo albums, covers of tunes by Dylan, Chuck Berry, Ben E.King, and even Hank Williams, the film builds up to a cliff hanger. One the members ups and quits (no Spoilers).

 

Part 2 gets even juicier as we hear a private conversation of John and Paul recorded by the filmmakers with a hidden microphone in a flower pot. This is followed by more of the same as the boys flesh the new songs out (expect a lot of “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “Two of Us,” and, of course, the title tune), engage in witty chats, and a pop-in by Peter Sellers, but it’s a bit of a let-down as he barely says anything. The Beatles then take their operations to familiar ground, the studio at Apple Headquarters, but not before Paul lays down a demo of “Oh, Darling” as the lights go out. Also, the TV special concept is abandoned.

 

But despite the change in scenery, the Beatles intend to go forward with their plan of recording songs without edits or overdubs, and now the idea to use the footage for a feature film. So as the lads from Liverpool goof around in the studio, the day that they need to come up with a big finale for the film looms nearer. So after considering several locations, they decide on the rooftop at Apple for their grand conclusion.

 

This brings us to Part 3, which contains the meat of the matter: the Apple rooftop performance – one of the most famous farewells in rock history, first though we’ve got to go through well over an hour of more studio stuff, but since this includes film of the Beatles cutting the version that appears on the album, Let it Be, it’s okay by me.”

Now, having seen LET IT BE numerous times, I don’t think it’s as doom and gloom some folks think, but Jackson’s new fangled remix is a massive improvement. This is apparent in the rooftop climax, which now can be seen as a joyous concert after the Beatles’ fruitful time in the studio. Without the time limitation, Jackson is able to use more songs, and make some amusing drama out of the cops that showed up to try shut down the gig. Also the people on the street get some funny moments answering the interviewer’s questions.

Jackson really pulled it off here. It seems his work on his first doc, the excellent 2018 war documentary THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD, proved to him where he could go in interpreting history. 

 

While neither LET IT BE nor GET BACK contain my favorite batch of Beatles songs, I have a new perspective on the material from seeing the Beatles working on songs, bullshitting with each other, and experiencing those precious moments when inspiration takes hold. Just be prepared for hours and hours of that. A lot of folks who aren’t hardcore Beatles fans, may find GET BACK boring, but since a large percentage of the world’s population are hardcore Beatle fans, that’s alright.

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My Boxing Day Tradition: The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour

It was 53 years ago today…that the Beatles presented to the world their first critical flop: the TV special Magical Mystery Tour. 

This is a repost from the 45th Anniversary of the program that first appeared on one of my other blogs, Pop Goes the Babble. Every year since then I’ve watched Magical Mystery Tour on this date as my Boxing Day tradition, and today is no exception. So here’s what I wrote in 2012:

On what the British call “Boxing Day,” December 26, 1967, BBC1 broadcast the 53 minute color musical special at 8:35 PM in black and white, and reaction was mixed to say the least. It was shown a few days later in color, but it was still given bad reviews. The program has gathered a better reputation over the years, because of the quality of the music and its capturing of the fab four in their psychedelic prime, but it still remains an oddity in their canon.

Since I received the Magical Mystery Tour Deluxe Box Set for Christmas, and today is the 45th anniversary, I decided to give the spiffy new Blu ray a whirl. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the full film, so I don’t remember a lot of it. I remember first seeing it on a VHS release in the ‘80s, and making fun of it with a Beatle-maniac friend of mine. As a kid I had loved A HARD DAY’S NIGHT, HELP!, and YELLOW SUBMARINE (and still do), but this was just weird.

One of the things I remember most from it was a grotesque scene in which John Lennon played a grinning waiter, who used a shovel to pile spaghetti onto a fat woman's plate. That's an image that certainly stands out in the color booklet that came with the original EP, and the U.S. album and is reprinted in this edition.

I later came to appreciate its psychedelic significance (i.e. it’s great if you’re stoned), but it was still weird. Let’s start with its flimsy premise - the Beatles join a odd assortment of people on a bus ride to an unknown destination. 

As Malcolm McDowell put it in his narration in the drab 1982 documentary THE COMPLEAT BEATLES: “Largely a project of Paul’s, the idea was to travel the English countryside in a bus filled with friends, actors and circus freaks, and to film whatever happened. Unfortunately, nothing did.” 

It opens promisingly with a bouncy montage set to the Paul-sung song “Magical Mystery Tour,” and introduces us to Ringo, still sporting his Sgt. Pepper mustache, as the main character (as he was in previous Beatles movies) buying tickets for the bus tour. John Lennon’s narration tells us that Ringo and his Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robbins), who he’s taking on the trip, are “always arguing about one thing or another.” 

They bicker throughout the film, never about anything specific, as it’s all improv. This was the biggest problem with Magical Mystery Tour - its famous lack of a script. There was some pie-chart-like break down of idea sections (reprinted in the slick book that comes with the box set), but no dialogue was written, so this makes the non-song parts formless and un-engaging. 

Ringo and Aunt Jessie board the bus and we meet more characters including tour director Jolly Jimmy (Derek Royle, who in a featurette on the disc tells us once played a corpse on Fawlty Towers), Hostess Wendy Winters (Miranda Forbes), Mr. Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler), a little person photographer (George Claydon – later an Oompa-Loompa in WILLY WONKA & THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY), a bunch of folks just credited as passengers on the bus, and the rest of the Beatles themselves, who are never properly identified or given much to do. 

The Beatles don’t even give themselves anything to do when dressed as wizards in groovy red robes and hats (their roadie Mal Evans appears as a fifth wizard), who are overseeing the bus tour from someplace up in the sky. Lennon tells us that they spend their days casting “wonderful spells,” but they don’t do anything that has any effect the entire film. Nor do they make us laugh. 

Another unfortunately unfunny element is Victor Spinetti as a indecipherable motormouth Army Sergeant. At least, since he was in A HARD DAY’S NIGHT and HELP!, Spinetti, who died last June, offers some sort of continuity to their first three film projects. 

A lame love montage sequence between Aunt Jessie and Mr. Bloodvessel comes along to test viewer’s patience and make us wonder how could the Beatles at the height of their power think their fans would be into this? 

The best parts are, of course, the songs. Like the musical bits in their other films, the song scenes have been called precursors to modern music videos, and they’ve even been extracted and played as music videos by MTV and VH1. 

“Fool on the Hill” mainly features Paul McCartney walking around the countryside looking introspective, “Blue Jay Way” has George Harrison sitting looking bored lip-syching while his fingers move on a piano keyboard drawn on the floor with chalk (there’s a better version of this with George smiling and seeming more engaged in the bonus features), but the show stopper is the “I Am The Walrus” sequence, featuring the Beatles miming the song amid the towering concrete structures at the West Malling Airbase while superimposed imagery and trippy visual trickery surrounds them. The “Your Mother Should Know” closer with the moptops in white tuxedos dancing in formation is pretty cool too. 

Surprisingly, despite these Beatles classics, the most interesting music number comes from the obscure comical rock band The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band doing the lounge lizard showcase of a song “Death Cab For Cutie.” Neil Innes, who would later embody the Lennon caricature in Eric Idle’s Beatles parody The Rutles: All You Need is Cash, can be seen plunking away on the piano. The song also features a censored strip-tease by Jan Carson for no real reason at all. 

In his “My World of Flops” entry on Magical Mystery Tour (its combined with a take-down of Paul's 1984 dud GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROAD STREET), the A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin wrote that Magical Mystery Tour “anticipates both MTV’s early days, when it seemed like anything was possible and the cost of entry was exhilaratingly low, and the gleeful absurdism of Monty Python.” 

Indeed, several of the segments seem like dry runs for later Python premises – Victor Spinetti’s absurd military man is echoed in Graham Chapman’s Colonel character, a marathon involving the passengers that turns into a car chase heavily resembles the “Twit of the Year” competition sketch, Lennon’s snotty waiter from the aforementioned restaurant scene is a recognizable Python archetype (see John Cleese in MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE dealing with the surreally obese Terry Jones), and even the footage of a large crowds’ reaction that’s interspersed throughout is reminiscent of the film of old ladies clapping that appeared to be in every episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

This new re-mastered version of Magical Mystery Tour boasts a bevy of special features including a 20 minute “Making of” documentary, featurettes concerning “Ringo the Actor” and the supporting cast, an interesting “Hello Goodbye” promo, and a few cut scenes including a song by Traffic (“Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush”). The best bonus feature is the commentary by Paul McCartney, but that’s more because it’s often unintentionally funny than it is insightful.

Sample quotes: “I was surprised, years later, to hear, I think it was Steven Spielberg say that they’ve shown this and taught him about it in film school as an example of a different approach to film making” and “In a way, it's sort of a disgusting scene” (guess which scene).

So there you have it, The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour TV special, still weird after all these years, finally gets a spot on my shelf. It’s a fun film to re-visit, even with its frustrating flaws. The folks at Capitol did a good job with this deluxe package. Now, please, release LET IT BE! Maybe next Christmas? *

* Looks like we're finally going to get LET IT BE (at least digitally) next summer along with Peter Jackson’s GET BACK, which just got a neat sneak peak earlier this week. 

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NON EXCLUSIVE: A Sneak Peek At Peter Jackson’s GET BACK & More

Another NON EXCLUSIVE! Sure, most everyone who has any interest has already seen this, but I still wanted to blog about the first look at Sir Peter Jackson’s upcoming rockumentary THE BEATLES: GET BACK due out sometime in 2021. Plus I want to give some back story to the project, which Jackson assures is a lot more that a reworking of the material that made up LET IT BE, which documented the beginning (or maybe the middle) of the end of Beatles’ career. But first, here’s the nearly 6 minute clip that just dropped today with an intro by the LORD OF THE RINGS filmmaker:

As you can see this lively, fun montage centering around a rehearsal of the classic “Get Back” indeed whets fans appetite for the finished film. But how did we get here? Well, Sherman set the wayback machine for early 1970 when the Beatles got together at a sound stage at Twickenham Film Studios, where they shot scenes for their films A HARD DAY’S NIGHT and HELP!, to rehearse songs for their next record, intended to be a back to their roots record (advertised with the tagline: “The Beatles as nature intended”) with the working title of “Get Back,” after McCartney’s newly written rocker. Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who had shot a batch of the group’s promotional films, and a crew were hired to shoot John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr as they worked on new songs.

The sessions were frankly kind of boring, and had some cringe-worthy moments when the tired-looking blokes were caught bickering by the cameras. They moved the project to Apple Headquarters and things went a bit better as they laid down the studio tracks for the album that would come to be named Let it Be. The grand finale involved the Beatles performing a set on the rooftop of Apple, which concluded with “Get Back” as police approached.

In Eric Idle’s Beatles parody, The Rutles: All You Need is Cash, Idle’s David Frost-style narrator said, “In the midst of all this public bickering, Let It Rot was released as a film, an album and a lawsuit.” This wasn’t far off, as there were pesky legalities in the dissolution of the band. As the band wasn’t really happy with either the album (Lennon said the “recordings were the shittiest pieces of shit we ever recorded”), they decided to go out on a much higher note with their final album, Abbey Road, though it was released in 1969 before the Let it Be album, and movie dropped in 1970, one month after the Beatles’ break-up.

In the years following its release, the film, LET IT BE, was shown on TV multiple times, but nowhere near as much as the Beatles’ other movies. In the ‘80s it was released on videotape on both VHS and Beta formats, but it went out of print before the end of the decade. Still, I remember seeing copies of it (on VHS, not Beta) at various video stores in the ‘90s, but it was still hard to find, and currently it sells for hundreds of dollars on eBay. 

In 2003, a new remix of the album entitled Let it Be...Naked was overseen by McCartney, who wanted to fix the songs that he felt producer Phil Spector ruined, in particular removing the orchestra from “A Long and Winding Road,” and stripping down other tracks. 

At the same time, it was planned to re-master and re-release the movie on DVD, but both McCartney and Starr felt that it was still too dark to re-visit and blocked the release. In 2016, McCartney spoke in an interview about finally putting it out: “I keep bringing it up, and everyone goes, ‘Yeah, we should do that.’ The objection should be me. I don’t come off well.”

The full film of LET IT BE has shown up on YouTube in fairly decent quality over the years, but has been quickly taken down. The last time I looked it wasn’t there.

Cut to 2019, when it’s announced that Jackson will be tackling the 56 hours of footage the Lindsay-Hogg shot, and putting together a new version of the project which will revert to the original title, GET BACK. Jackson’ intent is to construct a film that utilizes different, unseen footage of the Beatles from the sessions, and give the material a more uplifting spirit. As Sir Jackson said at the time, “Sure, there’s moments of drama - but none of the discord this project has long been associated with.”

The other good news is that the original LET IT BE will finally get a re-release, although only in a digital format. Still, that’s something.

As the above montage shows a lot of promise, this is an exciting time for fans who have waited for the redemption of the reputation of this ill-fated project. With the success of his 2018 doc, THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD, which featured painstakingly restored footage from WWI, Jackson has shown that he can pull off wonders in reviving history. I do wonder how he’s going to deal with the legendary rooftop concert as the original film contained a great deal of the performance. You can’t really have a film about this chapter in the Beatles’ story without it, so he’s got to include it.

I am beyond psyched to see THE BEATLES: GET BACK as soon as I can. The set release date is August 27, 2021 - 51 years, and a few months, after both the album and film, LET IT BE, originally dropped. Here’s hoping that we’ll all still be around next summer to see it.

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That Time A Beatle Had A Cameo In A Monty Python Film That He Financed

Every now and then, someone posts on Facebook, Twitter, or some social media network that they just noticed that Beatle superstar George Harrison appears briefly in the 1979 comedy classic MONTY PYTHON’S LIFE OF BRIAN. They usually note that they have seen the film many times, but only now did they see Harrison’s cameo.

This is because he is easy to miss in a crowded set that does little to single out the legendary musician, despite that John Cleese’s character introduces him to Graham Chapman’s Brian as “the gentleman who's lending us the mount on Sunday.” Watch the 10-second scene:

Harrison only had one line – one word actually (“Hullo!”), but since it was noisy and he was barely audible, it was later dubbed by Michael Palin, doing his best Liverpudlian impression. The bit part was uncredited, but the former Beatle was given a priceless moniker: Mr. Papapadopoulos.

The cameo came about because Harrison was one of the movie’s Executive Producers, and that came about because he largely financed the hilarious biblical satire. According to Eric Idle, a good friend of Harrison’s since they met in Los Angeles in 1975 at a screening of MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL, Harrison “pawned his house and arranged a loan of $5m. When he was asked why, he just said: 'Because I want to see it'. Not many people pay $5m for an admission ticket.”

It wasn’t Harrison’s first foray in a Python-related project as the year before BRIAN, he played a television journalist, credited as “The Interviewer,” in Idle’s TV movie parody of the Beatles, The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash. The almost unrecognizable Harrison appears in two scenes in the mockumentary, both set outside the headquarters of Rutle Corps. Watch one of the scenes, featuring Palin’s spoof of Beatles press officer Derek Taylor:

Several years before that, Harrison put in a performance of “Pirate Song” which begins as “My Sweet Lord” then becomes a rowdy sea shanty on Idle’s BBC2 comedy program, Rutland Weekend Television:

Idle directed videos (then called promotional films) for two songs from Harrison’s 1976 album, Thirty Three & 1/3: “Crackerbox Palace” and “True Love.” Both are highly amusing Pythonesque (of course) films - click on their titles to watch them. 

After BRIAN, Harrison and his manager Denis O’Brien worked on over two dozen films for the studio they founded, Handmade Films, including such classics as WITHNAIL & I, and such flops as SHANGHAI SURPRISE (1986), in which he put in a cameo as a Night Club Singer (that’s how he’s credited).

Anyone who would read such a post as this would no doubt be aware that yesterday was the sad anniversary of Harrison’s death at the all too young age of 58. Luckily he left behind a wealth of timeless work, so much so that it’s easy to forget he’s gone.

The fact that people are still finding and being delighted by a blink and miss it moment in one of the most re-watchable comedies of all time is a testament to his massive legend. To respectfully contradict his good friend, Idle, it’s a legend that will last many lunchtimes.

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Every Movie I’ve Ever Seen Ranked (You Won’t Believe What’s #4081!)

Sorry for the clickbaitastic headline, and as you might’ve guessed I’m not going to really rank every movie I’ve ever seen (but if you’re wondering what #4081 is – it’s John Schlesinger’s PACIFIC HEIGHTS, pictured above, which is a solid #4081). I just wanted to call out those ever so prevalent pop culture lists that rank every Tarantino movie, or Beatles song, or Seinfeld episode from worst to best. Like these*: 

All 49 Marvel Movies Ranked, Including ‘Black Panther’ 

Every Best Picture Oscar Winner, Ranked: How All 90 Movies Stack Up 

Every James Bond Movie Ranked from Worst to Best (also The Best James Bond Actors, Ranked, Ranking: James Bond Theme Songs From Worst to Best, etc) 

All X-Files Episodes, Ranked Best to Worst (this one is actually from a site called ranker.com)The Complete Works: Ranking All 374 Rolling Stones Songs 

* I’m not linking to any of these, so you are are your own finding these if you want.

Now, I’m not against lists - I’ve posted plenty of them on this blog - I just don’t like it where there’s dozens and dozens of entries of whatever pop culture thing as they aren’t very useful. I mean, if you rank the Beatles’ studio albums, there’s only like a dozen of them so somebody approaching their catalog might benefit from the recommendations of “Revolver” or “Sgt. Pepper” or whatever records are high on the list, but what good does it do anybody to know that Vulture.com thinks that “Rocky Raccoon” from “The While Album” is #166 out of #213? 

Now, I know some people like these lists, and find them fun enough to share and argue about, etc. but I usually skip them. The ones I do click on, I just skim them quickly and move on. I find Top 10 lists, or 20 at the most, to be more useful. 

The lists I get most annoyed by are the ones that basically say ‘hey, that thing you like sucks’ like these: 

12 Movies You Probably Love That Are Overrated, According To Reddit 

15 Overrated Movies Everyone Pretends To Love 

5 Recent Movies That Got Way More Praise Than They Deserved 

I particularly don’t like the word “overrated” because to me it means: I hate this thing that everyone likes, and they’re wrong (underrated being the obvious opposite: I love this thing that everyone hates, and they’re wrong). 

Yeah, I know that the words “overrated” and “underrated” are ubiquitous in our culture, and aren’t going away any time soon, but I don’t use them on my blog because I find them to be meaningless.

One strong case against them is that President Trump uses the word “overrated” a lot – he’s used it to insult former President Barack Obama (no surprise there), Meryl Streep, Jerry Seinfeld, Megyn Kelley, the musical Hamilton, and politicians in general (again, no surprise). I don’t think he’s ever said that anything or anyone is “underrated,” because he probably doesn’t know that word. 

Lately, I have been trying to not be on social media too much as I get really annoyed by these things, and stuff like long lists that have slideshows so they can fit in more ads, but I’m not going to get started on those. 

This concludes my rant. Stay tuned for coverage of the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival that kicks off this Thursday, April 5, and for reviews of upcoming films like Wes Anderson’s * ISLE OF DOGS, and the roster of highly anticipated summer films around the corner. 

* A filmmaker who is often considered overrated.

More later…

Babblin’ ‘Bout BLAIR WITCH, SNOWDEN, & The Beatles

Clint Eastwood’s SULLY, starring Tom Hanks as that airline captain that water landed his plane in the Hudson river back in ’09, was the #1 movie at the box office this last weekend, beating out two sequels that opened last week: BLAIR WITCH and BRIDGET JONES’S BABY. I found the third BRIDGET JONES film to be a fine, just funny enough follow-up, but the third in the BLAIR WITCH franchise struck me as a bogus retread. 

Actually horror filmmaker Adam Wingard’s (YOU’RE NEXT, V/H/S) BLAIR WITCH is supposed to be seen as a direct sequel to the 1996 smash hit THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (the original filmmakers Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez executive produce), and we’re supposed to forget about or not count what happened in Joe Berlinger’s much maligned 2000 follow-up BOOK OF SHADOWS: BLAIR WITCH 2, which is easy for me as I’ve never seen it.

So this new entry is yet another reboot that’s also a remake (see: THE THING, ROBOCOP, INDEPENDENCE DAY: RESURGENCE, every other movie from the last five years), which deals with another group of 20-year olds getting lost deep in the woods near Burkittsville, Maryland on a quest to solve the mystery of what happened to the three people from the first movie. One of the characters, played by James Allen McCune, is the brother of the missing Heather Donahue who you may remember from this iconic image:

See? I knew you'd know that image!

McCune is joined by Callie Hernandez as his girlfriend, and another couple, Brandon Scott and Corbin Reid who all are equipped with headset cameras, GPS devices, walkie talkies, and an aerial camera drone on their hike inspired by an image on a videotape that was found in the forest by a couple of sketchy locals, played by Wes Robinson and Valore Curry.

Robinson and Curry invite themselves along on much to the annoyance of the others, but after they awaken the next morning to find those classic stick figures twined together hanging from the trees surrounding their camp, the four friends suspect the couple to be pranking them and they kick them out of their group.

If you’ve seen the first you can guess the rest – the gang tries to head back to civilization but they get even more lost and circle back to their same campsite again (just like the river in the first one), one of them disappears, and the remaining kids wind up at the same spooky house from the original, and despite more action involving tunnels and the freaky naked witch that you can only see in quick flases of light, it ends pretty much the same way.

It’s a pretty tedious exercise full of jump scares and the shakiest of shaky camerawork in the entire found footage genre. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the first movie, and I only saw it once at the theatre (a multiplex in Greensboro if I remember correctly) but its imagery is burned into my brain as it was a fresh approach at the time. Despite all the new tech, BLAIR WITCH ‘16 doesn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of story or ideas, nor does it do anything to flesh out the series’ mythology.

We just get that there’s this supernatural, evil force that can uproot trees, change time and space, and can screw with your leg injuries (Reid sprains her ankle early on and the witch does what she can to make the wound worse just so there’s some gore) and these kids are stupid to think that they can solve any mystery about it, what happened to the previous party, and give us anything more than a bunch of jump scares. A found footage fail for sure.

I was also disappointed by Oliver Stone’s Edward Snowden biopic SNOWDEN, about the former CIA employee who in 2013 leaked tons of sensitive data about the scary extent of the United State’s mass surveillance, currently #4 at the box office. 

I’ve been a big fan of Stone’s work in the past (still think JFK is a masterpiece), and I love Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but their film falls way short of greatness. Pop culture critic extroadinaire Nathan Rabin once wrote that “there comes a moment in every cinephile’s intellectual and creative development when he or she comes to realize that Oliver Stone is full of shit.” And I laugh because, yeah, I remember when that happened for me (U-TURN).

But I wouldn’t say that SNOWDEN is full of shit, but just that it’s a by-the-numbers biopic that adds up to a preachy bore.

I’ll start with how takes too many liberties with its subject’s background. Stone dramatizes Snowden going through basic training as a candidate for Special Forces until he breaks his leg, but in real life he was only in the military briefly and had not undergone any training. Also Snowden’s role as a NSA security contractor is exaggerated, and the man most surely did not smuggle tons of classified CIA files on a SD card hidden inside one of the squares of his Rubik’s Cube. Actually that’s one of the better scenes in the movie but I still wasn’t buying it.

I also hear that Snowden’s relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Lindsay Mills played by Shailene Woodley, isn’t represented truthfully, but I was amused at how he becomes obsessed with the government spying on him, and everyone, through laptop webcams – one thing Stone does well is paranoia – but Woodley’s Lindsay doesn’t care and says things to him like “so what? I’ve got nothing to hide.”

By the time Gordon-Levitt morphs into the real Snowden (biopic rule #13: show the real person at the end) we’ve basically gone through all the ripped from the headlines motions and true story tropes Stone could squeeze out of the story. It does help that Stone has assembled a great cast – Gordon-Levitt is joined by the likes of Melissa Leo as filmmaker Laura Poitras, who made the Oscar-winning Snowden doc CITIZENFOUR, Zachary Quinto as journalist Glenn Greenwald, Tom Wilkinson as The Guardian writer Ewen MacAskill, and a bunch of fabricated characters or amalgams portrayed by Scott Eastwood, Logan Marshall-Green, Timothy Olyphant, Rhys Ifans and Nicolas Cage.

Stone’s SNOWDEN has noble intentions – to make a hero out of a man that exposed a great injustice – but it’s an underwhelming experience bereft of the epic angriness that gave his early work its “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore” fire.

Lastly, I’m happy to report that Ron Howard’s THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK – THE TOURING YEARS has been such a success that its run has been extended for another week at my local indie film venue, the Rialto Theater in Raleigh (it’ll run through September 29th). 

The wonderful rock doc, which I raved about in my review last week, is also currently available on Hulu, but I highly recommend making the pilgrimage to see it at an art house near you because the scores of great archival footage deserves to be seen on the big screen, and the 30-minute bonus film “The Beatles Live at Shea Stadium,” which looks and sounds amazing owing to its recent digital restoration, is an in-theaters-only exclusive.

More later…

Opie Cunningham’s EIGHT DAYS A WEEK Brings Beatlemania Back To The Big Screen

THE BEATLES: EIGHT DAYS A WEEK - THE TOURING YEARS (Dir. Ron Howard, 2016)

With hope, Ron Howard’s new documentary, which serves up a greater inside look into the worldwide sensation The Beatles at their live performance peak than has ever been explored before, will help dispel the idiotic notion that the Fab Four sucked live.

Anyone who’s ever given the two volumes of The Beatles Live at the BBC, or the newly remastered release of Live at the Hollywood Bowl (released on CD for the first time last week), or many of the band’s bootlegs (this guy makes a great case for their 1963 Swedish Radio Show being one of the best performances by anyone) a good listen should know that the idea is bogus, but for those who believe the oft told tales that the teenage girls screamed so loud that the Beatles didn’t even try to play their instruments or sing at their best, this doc is essential viewing that should right that wrong.

From the opening footage of the quartet at Manchester's ABC Cinema in 1963 (among the earliest color films of the group) to their historical TV debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 to their equally historic Shea Stadium show (the first rock concert ever staged in a stadium) in 1965 to their final concert at Candlestick Park in San Francisco in 1966 we see the Beatles play and sing their asses off despite the roaring audience. I won’t trust anyone who watches this material, much of it never officially released before now, and says that they were a bad band live. 

Howard, who despite his big league movie directing career will always be Opie Cunningham * to me, and editor Paul Crowder (no stranger to rock docs as he co-directed and edited “Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who”) supplement the wealth of rare footage with new interview segments with surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, along with archival interview clips of John Lennon and George Harrison.

Paul and Ringo don’t really have any insights that they haven’t shared in countless other docs or interviews, but I’m always happy to see them reminiscence about the time that they were the biggest music act the world has ever known, and it’s touching to hear McCartney admit that “We were all pretty scared.”

There are also tasty testimonials from the likes of Sigourney Weaver (love the clip of her as a teenager being just another emotional, screaming fan at one of their shows), Whoopi Goldberg (her mother took her to the Shea Stadium show), Elvis Costello, Eddie Izzard, and broadcast journalist Larry Kane, who accompanied the Beatles on every date of their first two US tours.

Although I understand that he doesn’t fit into the “four guys against the world” narrative, it doesn’t seem right that original drummer Pete Best isn’t mentioned at all. The Beatles’ early years are glossed over pretty quickly to get to when they broke big – I get that – but Best deserves at least a quick shout out. 

There are some other subjects that are perhaps too tidied up as well, like the bit about Lennon’s famous quote about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus that led to album burnings and threats from the KKK, and it would’ve been nice to note the time that Ringo was replaced for a leg of their 1964 tour by a temporarily lucky bloke named Jimmy Nichol, but if Howard included every great anecdote, clip, or song from the band’s touring years it would be a mini-series half a day long.

Credit must be given to how much history Howard crams into this project; the Beatles’ own big screen offerings during the period, A HARD DAY’S NIGHT and HELP (cash-ins on Beatlemania that became classics in their own right) are even covered properly. 

As a big Beatles fan since birth (it at least feels that way), I adored EIGHT DAYS A WEEK, and know that the bulk of Fab Four fans will completely groove on it too. I can’t speak for the non fans, but I bet they wouldn’t have read this far.

The film, which premiered last evening in my area at the Rialto Theater in Raleigh, and is now showing at many indie theaters across the country (it also premieres on Hulu on Saturday, September 17th), is augmented by a 30 minute bonus film of the complete Beatles “Live at Shea Stadium” concert. It looks and sounds great owing to its 4K restoration, and it wonderfully keeps the joyous Beatles live vibe going if the one hour and forty minutes of Howard’s doc isn’t enough for you.

As one could easily deduce from this review, EIGHT DAYS A WEEK only scratched the surface for me, but I’ll take it as it’s undeniably a powerful primer.

* For those who don’t get it, Opie comes from Opie Taylor, Howard's role as a kid on ‘60s sitcom The Andy Griffith Show (where he was when Beatlemania went down), and Cunningham is from Richie Cunningham, his role on the ‘70s sitcom Happy Days (which took place in the ‘50s). Sigh, wish I didn't feel like I had to explain these things.

More later...