Across the Universe

Started by hedwig, January 02, 2007, 08:40:04 PM

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MacGuffin

For me, it started off as High School Musical, and I understood why 14 year-old Julie Taymor fans wet their panties over this. But as the film went on, it's like that 14 year-old matured, and it was with the powerful Let It Be sequence. It completely showed the beauty of images and music. And that's when I got hooked in to the rest of the film, and yes, the 14 year-old girl in me even shed a tear at the end. Sure there were some flat moments and the cheesy in-joke Beatles references (she came in through the bathroom window, or the silver hammer line), and I could have done without the Prudence character, but the film worked when it was less choreographed and more about the visuals. And the actors' renditions of the songs were excellent; varying the tones to fit the mood, yet still keeping in the spirit of The Beatles.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

last days of gerry the elephant

This was a pile of shit. The Celine Dion renditions of the Beatles put me off completely and you couldn't go more than 2 minutes before the little shits broke into a song. Most of the time this didn't add jack shit to the plot... at all! What I'm I to make of this? This should have been called High School Musical 3 (Beatles Edition). At least I sat through Crash in its entirety, this on the other hand, I could not bare past the 30 minute mark.

NEON MERCURY

i though this film was awesome.  whoever didn't like this film needs to get their panties tugged on.

Jeremy Blackman

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on November 11, 2007, 06:21:50 PM
This completely worked for me in every possible way. Seriously. I don't know what's wrong with you people. I'm so depressed/horrified by the reactions I've read in this thread that I really have to end it there.

Re-watched this tonight, and it holds up. There are five or six moments in this movie that absolutely kill me.

I discovered that Evan Rachel Wood is the soul of the film. Such a tastefully sincere and affecting performance, but there's something else about what she's doing here that I can't quite put my finger on.

The Let It Be sequence completely wrecked me this time. (No coincidence that it begins with ERW.) Quite an accomplishment, because I've never particularly liked that song.

It could lose two or three songs (Dear Prudence, For the Benefit of Mr. Kite), but otherwise it's basically perfect. I love this movie so much.

Jeremy Blackman

Lottery [24|Feb 09:41 PM]:   The Beatles musical? Yeah, that wasn't particularly good.
Reelist [24|Feb 09:42 PM]:   My sister loved it
Lottery [24|Feb 09:43 PM]:   The definitive Beatles-related film is yet to exist.
Jeremy Blackman [24|Feb 10:18 PM]:   :yabbse-angry:
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 01:32 AM]:   Can I explain exactly why it works for me? Perhaps not (though I tried).
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 01:32 AM]:   Does it still work for me? Yes.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 01:42 AM]:   
polkablues [25|Feb 02:43 AM]:   It's a perfectly charming movie, but I remember thinking the story was kind of a disjointed mess, which is a common issue with jukebox musicals.
polkablues [25|Feb 02:47 AM]:   Trying to reverse engineer a story out of a discography will rarely result in anything organic enough to have lasting impact.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 02:50 AM]:   The seams of the reverse engineering are clearly visible, yeah.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 02:51 AM]:   But there's something about accepting the mechanics of a musical that completely opens it up for me.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 02:52 AM]:   The movie knows it's ridiculous, it takes pleasure in all its goofy movie musical elements, and yet it also has a sincerity that's totally affecting.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 02:54 AM]:   The songs themselves are probably the only thing that allow the tone-shifting to work.
polkablues [25|Feb 02:54 AM]:   It's a well-made movie, by all means, and I can very easily enjoy the individual pieces of it, it just doesn't hang together as a movie to me.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 02:56 AM]:   Hmm. Yeah. I guess I'm probably so giddy after watching it that I feel like I can't possibly expect anything more.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 02:57 AM]:   I fully accept it as a novelty.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 02:57 AM]:   Honestly though I think more meaning came through on the rewatch.
polkablues [25|Feb 02:57 AM]:   And that's legit.
polkablues [25|Feb 02:58 AM]:   I do also remember getting a little annoyed at the way the movie had the characters Forrest-Gumping their way through events of the era.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 02:58 AM]:   There's a bit of that... but really it was mostly just about Vietnam.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 03:00 AM]:   And the civil rights movement in the Let It Be sequence
polkablues [25|Feb 03:00 AM]:   My memory is probably overstating that aspect of the film.
Jeremy Blackman [25|Feb 03:00 AM]:   Which somehow hit me hard this time and didn't quite land with me on the first watch


And here's the clip I linked: