Movie Review: Across The Universe
Netflix coughed up this movie as a recommendation for me. I saw a preview for it on another NetFlix disc recently, and the eye candy it presented seemed irresistible. Who was I to resist?
The general premise is that it's a musical constructed from Beatles Songs. Good Beatles songs, weird Beatles songs, and obscure Beatles songs. Bono and Eddie Izzard make appearances as a psychedelic guru-figure and Mr. Kite respectively. Joe Cocker appears as a triple character, including as a pimp sporting an impossibly-wide purple shirt collar. The choreography, merely hinted at in the preview I saw, was amazing and fun. I totally ate it up.
A while back, I tried Moulin Roluge. I wanted desperately to like it. It was visually and auditorially stunning, just like AtU, and surreal/hyper-real like much of AtU as well. But I didn't like it. It took me a while to puzzle the difference out. MR is at its heart a tragedy. It's central theme can be boiled down to "Isn't tragedy BEAUTIFUL" (cue back of hand to forehead). The characters are like puppets caught in their separate motions, or flies caught in amber; for all that they interact with each other, it is in proscribed and contrived way. You really don't see the characters making connections with each other. I feel similarly about Miss Saigon. It's got some great songs, but it's all about Tragedy being like Sculpture, distant, cold, and beautiful in an inhuman or inhumane way. AtU is about as socially conscious as Miss Saigon is, with draft dodging, war resistance rallies, domestic terrorism, and various historical events of the Vietnam era depicted and lampooned throughout. I don't think the 'deepness' of the social commentary had anything to do with my reaction...as I said, I wasn't fond of Miss Saigon either. AtU, though, is ultimately a comedy (in the Shakespearian sense: it has a happy ending with couples coming together), but you're not always sure it's going to go that way.
There is a strange detour into psychedelia, ushered in by the aforementioned Bono's interesting rendition of I am the Walrus, which is ultimately just a side show. But so was the Magical Mystery tour. There are hints of songs that don't actually appear (Sexy Sadie comes to mind, and boy was she), echoes of events in the Beatles professional and personal lives (the last sequence involves a concert on a rooftop that is very obviously a reference to the famous Get Back performance), characters named transparently to refer to various songs (Jude, Lucy, Prudence, etc.), and *lot* of eye candy. The singing was generally pretty good to excellent, though I think I detected some voder intervention on a number or two.
If you like the Beatles, Moulin Rouge was a near miss for you, or you don't find happy endings automatically shallow, give Across the Universe a look and a listen.
BTW, I immediately went to lala and swapacd to put the soundtrack recording on my want lists.
The general premise is that it's a musical constructed from Beatles Songs. Good Beatles songs, weird Beatles songs, and obscure Beatles songs. Bono and Eddie Izzard make appearances as a psychedelic guru-figure and Mr. Kite respectively. Joe Cocker appears as a triple character, including as a pimp sporting an impossibly-wide purple shirt collar. The choreography, merely hinted at in the preview I saw, was amazing and fun. I totally ate it up.
A while back, I tried Moulin Roluge. I wanted desperately to like it. It was visually and auditorially stunning, just like AtU, and surreal/hyper-real like much of AtU as well. But I didn't like it. It took me a while to puzzle the difference out. MR is at its heart a tragedy. It's central theme can be boiled down to "Isn't tragedy BEAUTIFUL" (cue back of hand to forehead). The characters are like puppets caught in their separate motions, or flies caught in amber; for all that they interact with each other, it is in proscribed and contrived way. You really don't see the characters making connections with each other. I feel similarly about Miss Saigon. It's got some great songs, but it's all about Tragedy being like Sculpture, distant, cold, and beautiful in an inhuman or inhumane way. AtU is about as socially conscious as Miss Saigon is, with draft dodging, war resistance rallies, domestic terrorism, and various historical events of the Vietnam era depicted and lampooned throughout. I don't think the 'deepness' of the social commentary had anything to do with my reaction...as I said, I wasn't fond of Miss Saigon either. AtU, though, is ultimately a comedy (in the Shakespearian sense: it has a happy ending with couples coming together), but you're not always sure it's going to go that way.
There is a strange detour into psychedelia, ushered in by the aforementioned Bono's interesting rendition of I am the Walrus, which is ultimately just a side show. But so was the Magical Mystery tour. There are hints of songs that don't actually appear (Sexy Sadie comes to mind, and boy was she), echoes of events in the Beatles professional and personal lives (the last sequence involves a concert on a rooftop that is very obviously a reference to the famous Get Back performance), characters named transparently to refer to various songs (Jude, Lucy, Prudence, etc.), and *lot* of eye candy. The singing was generally pretty good to excellent, though I think I detected some voder intervention on a number or two.
If you like the Beatles, Moulin Rouge was a near miss for you, or you don't find happy endings automatically shallow, give Across the Universe a look and a listen.
BTW, I immediately went to lala and swapacd to put the soundtrack recording on my want lists.