À travers l'univers

Pure emotion. No one can mix theater with film like Julie Taymor. From beginning to end the film takes you on a psychedelic beatle ride that grips you by the ears, the heart and the soul and never lets go. Even now. Hours after the projector was shut off. Every song adaptation interpretation and setting is spot on, fans of the Beatles will recognize that every detail in Taymor's images recall an instance, a photograph, a line or a quote from the band. Even the girl that comes in through the bathroom window. Nothing is left to chance, everything is on purpose. Amazing. Easily the best film of the year. And in regards to people saying it's a two hour music video.. well... yeah, what the heck were you expecting???

A phenomenal feature length video clip with the Beatles songs and Julie Taymor's eye at the helm. The story, of course, is wafer thin but who cares, right? We're not here for intellectual enlightenment but for the forceful, visionary, smart ass style of one of the female filmmakers that has already revolutionize the Broadway stage without, really, changing anything. I believe that's the kind of revolution that leaves a sign. The kind that reassures rather than confuse and "Accross the Universe" does just that. The Beatles are reassuring their message is reassuring. Little did that generation know that things were going to take a terrifying turn. Love! Love! Love! All You need is love. Still true but we've never been, as a society, so far apart. It was great to see teen agers humming the Beatles tunes coming out of the theater. The lyrics are like Gospel or lullabies. Was it only yesterday? It feels like centuries ago. The innocence seems foreign and at the same time so real. It will be nice to go back with the experience of hindsight. It doesn't work like that, does it? No, I'm afraid not. In the meantime the great Julie Taymor gives as a beautiful reminder. And a lovely evening out at the movies.

I'll say up front that this film will almost certainly go on my list of films to see before you die, only one of two that I allow from each year.

Let's get the problems out of the way first.

The overall container of this is a date movie. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl back by professing love in a public venue. Its about as tired a formula as there is.

The songs are produced by T-Bone Burnett, a sort of reliable movieworld musical handyman. He's probably a nice man who once knew what it meant to have soul, but now he's a factory man. These songs are performed by the actors you see, and while admirable, it further diminishes the power compared to the originals. Also, I saw this in a multicinema, and they tend to turn the speakers down because of leakage into other spaces. So the songs here don't have the power we know they do.

Neither does the girl. In other date movies, we are supposed to fall in love a little ourselves, or at least see why she's the object at the center of everything. This actress doesn't have what it takes, and I suppose that's a result of the filmmaker being a woman and openly against objectifying women in this way. So its a bit schizo in that the form the woman chose demands something the woman won't give.

The thing gets off to a slow start. Its probably necessary for the strategy for most of the movie, which depends on growing extremes in cinematic fantasy. But you will probably go through what I did, think during the first 25-20 minutes that I had made a great mistake.

Additionally, there's some bad history in here. Its probably excusable if you consider it all just a shorthand to indicate context. But if you were there and depending on that real context to enrich your experience, you'll be a bit annoyed.

But with those shortcomings (and I'll mention some others), even in spite of them, you'll find this to be one of your deepest cinematic experiences.

Taymor isn't quite old enough to have experienced all this first hand. But she and her team do seem to have gotten the tone right. The world was turning against its inhabitants in a way completely unknown. The youth in the US responded in a way that was deeply moral and committed in a way unknown before or sadly since. This truly was the greatest generation. Think of it: we got rid of a lying scoundrel of a president, despite his best use of unconstitutional force!

Everything was up for re-examination and reinvention. Sure some of this -- most perhaps -- was stupid, opportunistic and damaging. But the imperative to re-invent wholesale was there, however colored by idealism. And this was led by the Beatles. If it hadn't been in the context of reinvention -- if religion in its old form wasn't part of what was tossed -- then surely these guys would have been the core of a new religion. One of their hangers on actually is.

What Taymor is about is a similar reinvention of cinema. She's a risk-taker. She knows her stuff, and she's willing to place it right in that sweet spot between the commercially viable and the imaginatively provocative.

Her tools are derived from Japanese and Indonesian masks, outsized intrusions and a notion of space that prefers enveloping. These three combine to create some amazing achievements in stagecraft. That's what this is all about, stagecraft and the yearning of characters to place themselves in context at the same time the filmmaker (and explicit external world forces) set context boundaries, mostly denoted by uniforms.

The first of these is the most apparent, the first time you'll see this. There are some absolutely amazing experiences in store for you just on this score. The large and small are manipulated and bent to an extreme I have only seen in small bits of Tarkovsky. She knows how and when to combine this with confinement and openness, and often when she does you'll have play with matters of scale that are unique. And its not just one device, but many, never repeated. Its as if a whole life of imagining what to do were collected in one place.

If these were songs by the Mamas and Papas, I'd still be blown away. If it were Robert Stigwood's script maybe even. But those Beatles songs....

With "Rubber Soul," the Beatles started their program to actually write songs that collectively built narratives. John and Paul were obsessed with the power of words that aggregate, and some of their projects really do have a narrative coherence similar to what we can read here, but much deeper than a date movie and a sketch of oppression. So in a way, its a weakness of what she's done to mix songs before that commitment (1966) with those done within it. It fights the DNA of what they created.

And some of the songs carry immediate narrative. "Sexy Sadie" was about the falsity of religion. Here, Sadie is a redheaded Janis Joplin gal. What?

But still, its the stagecraft, and the cosmic placing she's found. See it and have your spatial reasoning ability either broken or enhanced.

See it, and either feel bad about your life or empowered to be.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

... and it's nanny was Julie Taymor ...

This probably sounds like I hated the film, but I actually loved it.

It has the time line and self-consciously-culture-smart soundtrack of Hair, yet the campy fun and karaoke stylings of Moulin Rouge. Julie Taymor takes this combination and makes it fun, instead of extra cheesy, and it is visually fascinating instead of the obnoxious MTV-video nightmare it could have been.

I cared about the characters - and the cast of 'unknowns' have great star power and voices. Even though I knew exactly what would happen, the journey there was great. The cameos were fun. The lead was sufficiently hot. The soundtrack is stuck in my head as I write this (the new versions, not even the original songs) All corny jokes and references, and lapses in plot are forgiven, because Ms. Taymor manages to take a movie chock full of things that have been done a million times before and makes it as fresh and exciting as if it were all done for the first time. You may know exactly what's going to happen but you never know how. This is the director's movie!

Definitely a movie journey worth taking.

I have been anticipating this movie ever since I saw the trailer on IMDb like everyone else. When I first saw the trailer, I said to myself, I'm either going to consider this my favorite movies of all-time, or it's going to be trash. Being a huge Beatles fan and owning all their albums on CD, I had huge expectations about the covers of the songs. I saw it with my friend, who is also a huge Beatles fan but not a huge musical fan. Both of us saw it on opening night to the public and to our surprise it was really good! The covers of the songs were actually really good! Now don't get me wrong, the original Beatles songs will always be the best versions but for what they did, they did a pretty decent job. One of my favorite scenes was the "I've Just Seen a Face" bowling alley scene. So creative and fun! Also the "I Want You (She So Heavy) scene was…interesting…but fun to watch. Eddie Izzard's scene as Mr. Kite was hilarious! Both me and my friend where on the floor laughing. Also Bono's scene singing "I Am the Walrus" was great. Don't listen to the critics that say that "it doesn't do the Beatles justice". Actually, it's the opposite. Any hardcore Beatles fan will appreciate all the jokes that were thrown in there. Even if you're not a hardcore Beatles fan, you will appreciate the fantastic love story.

Just one word of advice, go to this with an open mind. Don't expect Oscar-worthy script and dialogue, expect clichés, not a whole lot of character development from the supporting cast but don't let that ruin the movie for you. Appreciate the artistic mind of the director. I mean who cares if they threw in a character like Prudence just to sing Dear Prudence? It's a great song! For all you "I hate every movie that comes out" critics don't see this. It's too artsy for you. Go see this with an open mind not expecting it to win Best Picture for the Oscar. This is one of the best experiences you will have watching a movie. I'm buying the DVD as soon as it comes out. See this movie Beatles fans!!! It does them justice!!! Please email me with any comments you have.