Musical Mondays-Week 5-Across the Universe

[EllenM2.0 412]

Hey, speaking about how dumb Valentine's Day is (was that this thread? Or another one?) - anyone see the Netflix Michael Bolton Valentine's Day special? Lots of Earwolf talent in there. I saw it last night, meaning to watch five minutes and not being able to look away. It's something else, alright.

I unbashedly loved it.

 

Also to my fellow Hamilheads out there, my mom is taking me to Chicago (for my law grad present) to see HAMILTON!!!!

[Cakebug Tranch 6873]

I unbashedly loved it.

 

Also to my fellow Hamilheads out there, my mom is taking me to Chicago (for my law grad present) to see HAMILTON!!!!

[Cameron H. 23786]

I feel like we still haven't heard why T.A.P. (Yeah, I'm making that a thing) loves this movie so much.

 

Taylor, please, make your case...

[taylor anne photo 11311]

I feel like we still haven't heard why T.A.P. (Yeah, I'm making that a thing) loves this movie so much.

 

Taylor, please, make your case...

(I already made that a thing when I had my first gallery showing )

 

Honestly this is one of those movie where I genuinely can't explain why I love it so much. Like everything those who hated it have said is valid and I understand all of those points. I think maybe those little nuanced things that don't make sense just make sense in my head. Like I understand why Sadie and Jojo fought and broke up and then got back together, all of that shit just connected in my brain. I think those two things I brought up are the only two things I actually didn't understand.

 

I feel like a lot of it has to do with just the music and the visuals. I could honestly take or leave the story as a whole but those times when they are singing are so good to me that I do not give a fuck about how little anything makes sense. Give me Evan Rachel Wood singing "If I Fell" over and over, give me Joe Anderson singing "Happiness is a Warm Gun", and fuck YES give me Dana Fuchs singing "Why Don't We Do It in the Road."

[tomspanks 9039]

Did you guys know that ERW was married to Jamie Bell, aka Billy Elliott, and they have a child together?

[Cakebug Tranch 6873]

I feel like a lot of it has to do with just the music and the visuals. I could honestly take or leave the story as a whole but those times when they are singing are so good to me that I do not give a fuck about how little anything makes sense. Give me Evan Rachel Wood singing "If I Fell" over and over, give me Joe Anderson singing "Happiness is a Warm Gun", and fuck YES give me Dana Fuchs singing "Why Don't We Do It in the Road."

 

100% agreed Taylor and I are the only ones with taste, confirmed

[Cakebug Tranch 6873]

And just to distract from that obnoxious post just above:

 

On Monday, Fister said that he had 'so much to say about this film' but a busy work schedule prevented him that day.

 

Have we truly had the full onslaught of Fister opinions on this movie? Time's running out...

[tomspanks 9039]

100% agreed Taylor and I are the only ones with taste, confirmed

 

To be fair, we all knew that about the Notorious T.A.P. before this.

[FisterRoboto 7499]

And just to distract from that obnoxious post just above:

 

On Monday, Fister said that he had 'so much to say about this film' but a busy work schedule prevented him that day.

 

Have we truly had the full onslaught of Fister opinions on this movie? Time's running out...

A lot of what I had to say has already been said, and I didn't want to just quote a bunch of posts and be like, "Yes." The biggest takeaway for me was that this movie was trying so hard to do a Forrest Gump-esque look into American culture. And usually, I'm all for that. But what makes it not work is that it's all set against a Liverpudlian immigrant coming to the US and viewing it through the filter of The Beatles. As I said previously, part of what made Forrest Gump so great was that it was a slice of Americana accompanied by great American musicians of that time: Elvis, Wilson Pickett, Credence, Simon & Garfunkel, Harry fuckin' Nilsson.

 

From a musical perspective, I feel like this movie is overtly heavy-handed. It's been brought up before, but my biggest complaint is that there's no subtext at all. One of the biggest rules for writing dialogue is that people don't often say what they really mean; they talk around it. That goes for movies, too. MILD SPOILER ALERT FOR LA LA LAND: if we look at, say, "City of Stars" from La La Land, it's a song about what Sebastian is feeling for Mia, but the lyrics of the song are literally the stars in the sky. We feel his feelings, but he's not saying, "Man, I've developed feelings for Mia, but I'm also trying to figure out how to make my dreams come true. Is everything really about me?" Instead, we get a beautiful song that we can tie to his emotions both about Mia and his dreams.

 

Meanwhile, in Across the Universe, we get songs that seem reverse engineered to meet the situation we are presented with. As Cameron pointed out, "Revolution" is the worst offender. Lucy's entire involvement with the SDR seems to only exist because Taymor wanted a good opportunity to sing the song and tell us quite literally that she "want a revolution" and to mock it. That not only fails on a literary level of "show don't tell," but it also cheapens the message of "Revolution," which ultimately was, "Yes, we agree that shit is fucked up, but we're all doing the best we can. We're not your enemy just because we don't want to set the White House on fire."

 

And that's to say nothing of the scattered narrative rife with too many characters that are all sorely undeveloped. If the movie was a straightforward romance movie set in the backdrop of the Vietnam War, then I could at least partly get on board, but it spends so much time (and expends so much of its better moments) on characters that are far more interesting than the bland, uninteresting lead duo.

[Cameron H. 23786]

Oh, it's Day 4, and I'm not done...

 

I woke up this morning and realized that we haven't even touched on one of the worst aspects of this movie--namely, what a HUGE cockrocket Jude is. Throughout this 2 Hour movie, Jude is tied to at least 3 other woman besides Lucy--either romantically or sexually. And while you could argue that this could be representing the "free love" ethos of the era, Lucy certainly doesn't get a chance to share in the spoils. She gets exactly ONE boyfriend, and she only splits with him because he dies, which, while tragic, is a real convenient way to preserve her "purity." Compare that to Jude who leaves his serious Liverpool girlfriend without an explanation, trades sex for rent with Pru (which I believe Max was paying for at the time anyway), and just leaves his current "girlfriend" at the club so he can make his move on Lucy. Even earlier, when confronted with the fact that Lucy already has a boyfriend, he replies through a shit eating grin, "[so what?] I have a girlfriend..." And not only all of that, but when Lucy just talks to another guy, Jude flips is motherfucking lid!

 

So, Jude gets to whore around and be a general shit to Lucy, but because he legally obtains his visa and sings "All You Need is Love" from the rooftop, I'm supposed to get goose pimples? Shit, she's not even the first woman Jude has sung a love song about in this movie, why should I believe for a second that this relationship will end any differently?

[Cameron H. 23786]

Also, in hindsight, I kind of wish I had used, "They should be radical. You should be radical. We should all be radical!" as my signature quote.

[Cakebug Tranch 6873]

Well, it seems to be unanimous. Tomspanks, you owe me a coke for getting you off the hook as being the person who made the worst pick ever. Apparently this was the JaMarcus Russell of musicals...

[Cam Bert 8145]

We're still early into the picks so you might want to hold off on that coke. The pick I wanted to make might have been as controversial but it doesn't look to be streaming and not sure if I want to make people pay for it.

[taylor anne photo 11311]

To be fair, we all knew that about the Notorious T.A.P. before this.

[Cameron H. 23786]

Here's something I was going to say over in the discussion we were having on my hard hitting, insightful review of this movie over on Letterboxd, but I thought I would bring it up here so everyone has a chance to weigh in.

 

Do you think the reason this movie is so divisive is because of how middling the non-Musical portion is? Everyone seems to love or hate it--there's not a lot of, "yeah, it was okay...". It seems to me, regardless of whether you're a Beatles fan going into this or not, this movie hinges completely on how you respond to the music and visuals. The fact that the rest of it is so forgettable just means that that nudge in either direction is going to make you go all out in one way or the other.

[tomspanks 9039]

Well, it seems to be unanimous. Tomspanks, you owe me a coke for getting you off the hook as being the person who made the worst pick ever. Apparently this was the JaMarcus Russell of musicals...

 

Love it or hate it, Across the Universe was an interesting choice. It's pretty interesting that nobody was "meh" about it.

 

We're still early into the picks so you might want to hold off on that coke. The pick I wanted to make might have been as controversial but it doesn't look to be streaming and not sure if I want to make people pay for it.

 

You're so considerate. Also - my bad, everyone, for not considering this earlier.

[Cameron H. 23786]

You're so considerate. Also - my bad, everyone, for not considering this earlier.

 

Yeah, I OWN Tommy now!

 

 

To be fair, I thought I would like it more

 

[Cameron H. 23786]

We're still early into the picks so you might want to hold off on that coke. The pick I wanted to make might have been as controversial but it doesn't look to be streaming and not sure if I want to make people pay for it.

 

Is the problem it's not available to stream anywhere or that we'd have to pay money to stream it? If it's the latter, I wouldn't worry too much. I'm more than willing to throw down a couple of ducats here and there. If not, we're going to get into some dregs pretty fast.

[tomspanks 9039]

Here's something I was going to say over in the discussion we were having on my hard hitting, insightful review of this movie over on Letterboxd, but I thought I would bring it up here so everyone has a chance to weigh in.

 

Do you think the reason this movie is so divisive is because of how middling the non-Musical portion is? Everyone seems to love or hate it--there's not a lot of, "yeah, it was okay...". It seems to me, regardless of whether you're a Beatles fan going into this or not, this movie hinges completely on how you respond to the music and visuals. The fact that the rest of it is so forgettable just means that that nudge in either direction is going to make you go all out in one way or the other.

 

Was there that much non-Musical portion? It felt like wall-to-wall music.

 

We didn't talk about this yet, but Paco died, right? What are the chances that the bombing is front page news in Liverpool?

[Cameron H. 23786]

 

Was there that much non-Musical portion? It felt like wall-to-wall music.

 

It really did, didn't it?

 

We didn't talk about this yet, but Paco died, right? What are the chances that the bombing is front page news in Liverpool?

 

Totally. The picture on the front page is from a real incident that happened in 1970. The Weather Underground, the origination Paco's group stands in for, actually done blowed themselves up in this way.

 

From Wikipedia:

 

March 6 – WUO members Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, and Terry Robbins are killed in the Greenwich Village townhouse explosion,^[2][8] when a nailbomb they were constructing detonates. The bomb was intended to be planted at a non-commissioned officer's dance at Fort Dix, New Jersey

 

[taylor anne photo 11311]

Speaking of Paco - I didn't realize it until my rewatch that he is played by Logan Marshall-Green of Prometheus fame and was the star of my fave movie last year The Invitation.

[tomspanks 9039]

Fascinating.

 

Actor Dustin Hoffman and his wife Anne Byrne were living in the townhouse next door at the time of the explosion. He can be seen in the documentary The Weather Underground (2002), standing on the street during the aftermath of the explosion.

 

Another question. Max runs into Jude again while he's being chased by the other students whose windows Max broke. Max thanks Jude for hiding him and mentions that if he were to be caught, his punishment would involve his genitalia and shoe polish? What does this mean?

[Cakebug Tranch 6873]

Another question. Max runs into Jude again while he's being chased by the other students whose windows Max broke. Max thanks Jude for hiding him and mentions that if he were to be caught, his punishment would involve his genitalia and shoe polish? What does this mean?

 

The dreaded Princeton Steamer. It's an occupational hazard of an Ivy League education.

[Cameron H. 23786]

Fascinating.

 

 

 

Another question. Max runs into Jude again while he's being chased by the other students whose windows Max broke. Max thanks Jude for hiding him and mentions that if he were to be caught, his punishment would involve his genitalia and shoe polish? What does this mean?

 

Now THAT'S a good question...

[Cakebug Tranch 6873]

 

Now THAT'S a good question...

I bet this is another example of actors being told to riff because there's no script for that bit yet, just like the 'i won't have children because i'm an asshole' speech that Lucy gives.