I’ve seen, read or listened to almost everything about or relating to the Beatles. It’s a herculean task, but pretty much a reasonably good use of time. If people actually listened to what they sang about, the world would be a much better place.
There’s just no way I’m ever going to see this movie even if it is by modern consent the funniest, most meaningful, and well executed film in the history of cinema.
I suppose I would see it if a wonderful girl (sorry woman – both titles of songs by John Lennon) wanted me to take her to it on a first date, and she would then in turn potentially complete me and raise me to a higher level of consciousness like Yoko Ono did for John, but at this point that would take a deal with the devil to set into motion.
“Most Beatles songs were purposefully written to work as children’s songs…”
If I’m going to sell my soul to the devil, my asking price is a tad higher.
Right now, I sort of think just watching this movie is selling your soul to the devil.
If taking your kids to see this thing is going to turn them onto the Beatles that’s fantastic, but I don’t have kids and I already love the Beatles.
Most Beatles songs were purposefully written to work as children’s songs. If you want to change the world, you need to change the children, which is why rich people with different agendas are always donating and pushing their agendas at early education.
“Yellow Submarine,” is clearly a children’s song, and so is “All Together Now,” which was the only real contribution the Beatles made to the movie of that name. When they sing it at the end as themselves, the title appears in every language. They did the same thing when John sang “All You Need Is Love” on the first worldwide broadcast. The Beatles were sort of one world socialists, don’t let your friends know.
Even something like, “Hello, Goodbye” works as a children’s song, and Paul McCartney will tell you that it helped bring down the Berlin Wall. Russians learned those words from Beatles music. Russia has had a lot of issues, but their biggest seeming incentive to revolt was Levi’s and the need to hear the Beatles.
But we aren’t talking about an unappreciated artist here. There are plenty of ways to introduce your children to the Beatles, and their music itself is always the best start. They are still omnipresent, and the people who make money from the use of their music and images all pretty much do a ton of charitable things with it. Apple was first the name of a charitable collective the Beatles started. They broke up because it was making them broke.
“Most of John Lennon’s early music is merely the sound of girl groups mixed with the black R&B and early Rock and Roll he loved…”
Across the Universe was a fantastic movie with wonderful choreography, and it showed how good the band’s early music sounded sung by the young girls that were initially their biggest fans. Most of John Lennon’s early music is merely the sound of girl groups mixed with the black R&B and early Rock and Roll he loved, with some Everly Brothers harmony tossed in because he met a guy who was epically talented too that sounded like he was part of John’s own DNA.
You can’t go wrong watching anything that involves Ian Hart playing Lennon. I recently found out that he made a third effort at playing Lennon on a 2013 British television show called “Snodgrass,” where they ponder what would have happened if Lennon had left the group in 1962 after refusing to let George Martin release “How Do You Do It” as a single.
You can see it on YouTube for free, it is fantastic and has some wonderful original music that comments on the story that was done by Martin Carr originally of the Boo Radley’s.
Carr was actually nice enough to respond to a message from me on Twitter about buying the soundtrack, and he was also generous enough to tell me that I could have it for free if he could actually find it. He couldn’t, so please don’t bother him.
It ends with an over 50 Lennon defiant over his perceived failures sneering into the mirror, “I used to be a Rock and Roller. I used to be Dr. Winston O’Boogie…I still am!”
“…shows just how ruthless John Lennon was about becoming successful, yet over and over it shows his compassion.”
I hate Dick Clark, but I have a weak spot for the movie he did with Pete Best, Birth of the Beatles. It shows just how ruthless John Lennon was about becoming successful, yet over and over it shows his compassion. He’d wink at you, smile, and tell you to cheer up work harder and live a happier more successful life.
Lennon put on a suit and bowed for a while, so he could speak the truth and subvert a system based on money forever with varying degrees of success until some lowlife, lazy loser ended his life.
I’ll watch anything with a portrayal of John Lennon in it. I don’t care if it is a video of a local Hungarian theater group that didn’t even try to mimic the Liverpool accent one little bit, but John Lennon isn’t really in this new movie is he?
People left and right keep telling me, “You have to see this!” It’s usually something new. Well, I don’t have to do anything, and that was pretty much Lennon’s credo. Listen to how many of his lyrics talk about achieving the freedom to do whatever you want as long as you are somewhat moral about it and do your best to not hurt and maybe even help other people.
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free!
He didn’t even write the lyrics to their cover of “Money (That’s What I Want),” but he doesn’t want money in that song. The line he screams out with passion is “I wanna be free!”
I hate that everything is formula and geared towards money now. It always has been, but it’s just pathetically so today. I saw countless articles lauding the marketing campaign for the movie Crazy Rich Asians. I guess that’s fine, but I don’t want to read or see a marketing campaign. I want to see a good movie.
“Are the makers of Yesterday ironically commenting on the movie’s world with no Beatles dystopia with their title or are they merely picking the most covered song of all time for monetary reasons?”
Every movie has to fit into Final Draft these days. I’m fine with most of it. Wes Anderson makes great films but they are tailored to the traditional Greek plot arc every step of the way, which is why the only thing new I truly must see these days is something by Quentin Tarantino or Charlie Kauffman who have spent their lives subverting traditional forms.
Sure, whenever they innovate Hollywood adjusts and copies, but it is what it is.
It’s just ludicrously stupid how awfully corporate this movie is.
First, it was a “Twilight Zone” episode back in the 80s where a Partridge Family type group were the only ones that knew the material sometime in the future.
Are the makers of Yesterday ironically commenting on the movie’s world with no Beatles dystopia with their title or are they merely picking the most covered song of all time for monetary reasons? Does anyone remember that the only reason A Hard Day’s Night was made was so the movie studio could get their hands on their music?
“Get Back” or “Revolution” would have potentially been a movie I might have wanted to see.
Now I need a place to hide away
Oh, I believe in yesterday
Did I mention that the play “The Misanthrope” where the protagonist Alceste hates the politeness of modern society and abandons it in favor of living alone in the woods has been my favorite since I read it at 15 and is probably my end game strategy too?
People raised in India are smart, hardworking, and deserving of respect, but isn’t this casting exactly the most profitable and inspirational thing to do right now. God help us if someone like Steve Earle was singing these songs on late night talk shows.
Steve Earle’s cover of Paul’s “I’m Looking Through You,” is wonderful by the way and he never pretended that he wrote it.
The hero of a modern movie must also achieve a point of epic doubt so of course his secret knowledge that he is pilfering the hard work done by the Fab Four, is going to make him feel guilty eventually and probably endanger his chance of achieving true love in the end. That’s in the Greek arc. It is called the hero’s moment of greatest despair, which he must conquer to earn the happy ending.
There’s nothing heroic to me about purporting that you are writing Beatles classics off the top of your head. It sounds a lot like the lazy jealousness of Mark David Chapman to me.
At least when Ricky Gervais convinced a woman that she had to sleep with him right away to save the world in The Invention of Lying he didn’t go through with it.
If you want to see the exact same movie as far as beginning a relationship with a lie and having to convince her to trust you, there are plenty of other things to see going back far before Elvis (John’s hero) did it in GI Blues with Juliet Prowse. Have you ever seen Juliet Prowse? I’m going to watch GI Blues again instead every time.
If you want a much better movie try 10 Things I Hate About You, the wonderful parody of Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew” that made Heath Ledger a star and showed off Julia Styles as a true feminist icon at the same time. You gamble with new releases. Waiting to hear what turned out to be good is a much better strategy.
“I show my mother some Beatles videos, and I become choked up and in tears while explaining why it means so much to me…”
If you want to go highbrow, try the Tao of Steve, and you will learn a lot more than wasting your time hearing people do songs worse than the originals for less than savory reasons.
I can name at least ten sports related movies with the same plot like It Happens Every Spring or Flubber. Why do these great scientists always want to cheat at sports?
If you really want to see an accurate movie about a future world that talks about how we are all getting more and more stupid every single day, watch Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. It’s part of his brilliant canon that no one watched until later because he was never marketed correctly like Office Space. Judge really is a genius for getting stupid people to eventually earn him money though calling them stupid.
Then again there really is nothing in either of those two efforts that wasn’t already in “Beavis and Butthead,” and that show was far less depressing. Just watching them laugh has helped me survive the lower moments of my life.
So go put on your Beatles outfits, fight the crowds, pay a fortune for popcorn and soda, while you get annoyed at the people who talk and don’t turn off their phones. I’ll be home watching my DVD of Backbeat. I’ll be listening to the Beatles straight off of my phone minus the actor from “The Big Bang Theory” mindlessly telling me why I should appreciate their music after having read the same things that I did.
I’m really a decent guy, but prolonged exposure to Sirius’ Beatles channel makes me into a raving lunatic. Paul McCartney has told the same stories about 50 million times now, and he still won’t let you see the band not getting along by re-issuing Let It Be.
I know everyone’s favorite pop culture is what they grew up on or what they love the most. Everyone wants to share it with others.
I show my mother some Beatles videos, and I become choked up and in tears while explaining why it means so much to me.
I do try to get people to let me show them old movies as I talk over them endlessly and show the Easter eggs I found myself like Kevin Smith outfitting a security guard with a certain hat in Mall Rats to pay homage to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Doing that with someone special is my biggest desire, but it’s not essential. I’ll watch one of yours if you watch one of mine, but in today’s world the other person’s turn never comes. People have become incredibly selfish. It’s all about them.
“…prolonged exposure to Sirius’ Beatles channel makes me into a raving lunatic.”
That is not the message of the song “All Together Now,” and I’m not paying my money to see if Himesh Patel stole that one either.
Keep it a secret. John Lennon thought you were peasants, he said so profanely in “Working Class Hero.” He can’t see it. It will take a crack military unit to get me to watch it, and they’ll probably have my eyes vice locked opened A Clockwork Orange style. The future doesn’t look bright from where I sit. No one who made this movie imagined a world with no countries or possessions.
John Lennon did “sugarcoat” the song “Imagine,” because he had greater hopes for humanity, but that dude told the truth as much as he could and on the same album he reviewed this movie.
So Sgt. Pepper took you by surprise
You better see right through that mother’s eyes
Those freaks was right when they said you was dead
The one mistake you made was in your head
Ah, how do you sleep
Ah, how do you sleep at night
You live with straights who tell you, you was king
Jump when your momma tell you anything
The only thing you done was yesterday
And since you’re gone you’re just another day
Ah, how do you sleep
Ah, how do you sleep at night
Ah, how do you sleep
Ah, how do you sleep at night
A pretty face may last a year or two
But pretty soon they’ll see what you can do
The sound you make is muzak to my ears
You must have learned something in all those years
Ah, how do you sleep
Ah, how do you sleep at night
John Lennon
Author Brad Laidman
Brad Laidman has been writing since he was 4. He has been known to howl at the moon on occasion like Crash Davis; is incensed that anyone alive thinks Kevin Hart is anywhere near Eddie Murphy’s ballpark; and doesn’t particularly like where and when he lives right now. A collection of his previous Film Threat work and his other books can be found on Amazon in a book entitled The Key Largo Essays. His entire catalog can be found on Brad Laidman’s Author Page.
