Liverpool Is For Lovers

There’s some serious Beatlemania happening in our house right now. Dorian goes to sleep most nights by singing Beatles songs to himself at top volume only to wake up the next morning to sing some more. Sebastian has been cataloguing his favorite songs in list after list and has recently been working on an adventure story involving George Harrison titled "With a Little Help From My Friends." In addition to this, there are countless games of Beatles Rock Band, Let’s Pretend We’re the Beatles and the ever-popular Guess Which Beatles Song I’m Humming going on daily. The kids are junkies for the Loverly Lads from Liverpool and I can’t blame them, they are fantastic. This recent addiction has allowed me to re-evaluate their colossal awesomeness and I find myself stunned by their sustained creative output over such a short period of time.

We are not only celebrating the Beatles music but every aspect of the culture they created. We recently found a cheap paperback comic book history of the Beatles at the Montague Book Mill which features a lovely drawing of the Ku Klux Klan protesting John’s “Bigger than Jesus” comment and Sebastian asked if he could get a mop top haircut the other day. As you can see, we’ve gone completely bonkers and nothing we do can satiate the hunger. In an attempt to satisfy these junkies, we’ve been plowing through the Beatles movies and I’ve been amazed at just how different they all are. Yellow Submarine is an old favorite in the house and may be the first movie Sebastian ever watched in full. The psychedelic imagery and candy colored drawings really seem to appeal to infants. I covered Help! in a previous entry so that brings us to the last two official Beatles films which couldn’t be more opposite.

A Hard Day’s Night is a bonafide classic with gorgeous black and white photography and an energetic storyline capturing the kinetic energy of the band’s early stardom. Everywhere they go a near riot breaks out as young girls scream and cry and push each other to the ground in a desperate attempt to catch a glimpse of the nattily dressed lads. I love this film because it captures the Beatles at their sardonic best, snidely poking holes in the notions of celebrity, authority and propriety. After seeing this again I can see why they seemed like such a threat at the time. They look so squeaky clean in retrospect but their wonderful lack of respect for the old ways must have been quite a shock at the time.

First Elvis with his lascivious hips and then these long haired freaks with their lewd love songs and flippant remarks – no wonder the kids went crazy while the parents wrung their hands. This movie is incredible from the absurd hijinks to the stellar songs. Plus, it’s hilarious. John and Ringo are especially funny but top prize goes to the Paul’s cranky grandfather who has a wild anti-authoritarian streak of his own and is one of the toughest bastards in film history. I give this a 9.

Upon rewatching this masterpiece, I was struck by how you could already see the band fighting against the fame rigmarole and the constrictions of the road. I was also amazed by the harrowing scene where the grandfather tells Ringo to stop reading books and to get out there and live. Amidst all of the nonsense, there’s some prescient foreshadowing of the band’s career and some serious truth tucked into the proceedings.

On the flipside is the bizarre mindmelt called Magical Mystery Tour. It is angrier than Hard Day’s Night, sillier than Help! and more of a psychedelic nightmare than Yellow Submarine. It also nearly unwatchable. About 18 minutes into it, Dorian (Super Beatle Fan #2) asked “when will this be done?” Exactly.

I was hoping for a wonderful journey through the British country side and instead ended up with an incoherent waste of time and space. It's hard to imagine such junk coming from these unbelievably talented and creative people and if I didn't know better I would think they made this in an effort to kill off their fan base. Absolutely atrocious. It gets a 2.

Apparently Ringo directed this so I will put the blame squarely on him. As much as I love Ringo, this was one baby that should have been thrown out with the bathwater. The songs are incredible and I think this is their most underrated album but the jumbled mess of a movie does not do them justice. Another thing not helping it was the DVD copy we watched. Apparently digitally dubbed from a time worn 8th generation VHS copy, it looked horrible. All the colors were washed out and the film looked ready to come apart at the seams at any moment. With any other film I would have been outraged but with this piece of junk it was just par for the course.