meadowlark

Directed by Julie Taymor. Written by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais. Starring Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood.

"Across the Universe" is a romance that emerges from Beatles songs like Venus from the sea. Young Jude (Sturgess), a shipyard worker in Liverpool, leaves his steady, Liverpudlean girl to look for the father he never knew. He ships out and jumps ship in America to find his father, a professor at Princeton.

Or so Jude imagines. Turns out his father is a janitor at Princeton. He had sired Jude while stationed in England during WWII. Time present is sometime in the mid-sixties. Dad now has a family and has no place for Jude in his life, but he does find a place for him to bunk in the building he maintains.

Some student pranksters hit golf balls from a rooftop, smashing through the window of a fraternity house. In the ensuing chase by frat boys, one of the pranksters, Max (Joe Anderson) is given shelter by Jude. Max has a sister, Lucy (Wood), whose boyfriend is shipped off to Vietnam early on.

Jude and Max become fast friends, and Jude spends Thanksgiving with Max's family, where he and Lucy meet. Max gets his draft notice, burns it, and drops out of Princeton. He and Jude head for New York, where they rent space in a loft run by an aspiring singer and Janice Joplin figure.

The film follows Jude, Lucy, and Max in an exploration of "the sixties", cross-cutting among scenes of football practice, with square-jawed young athletes and comely cheerleaders, to an urban uprising in Detroit, to scenes of campus protest and clashes with police, to battle scenes in Vietnam, featuring Max, who let himself be drafted, despite his attitudes toward the war and authority in general.

All of the venues come together (sorry, Beatles titles are in my head) in one way or another to form a maelstrom that swirls around the young lovers, drawing them in, bringing them together, hurling them apart, then casting them who knows where?

The main set piece features a psychedelic trip, a magical mystery tour on the Merry Pranksters' bus, made famous in Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". Dr. Robert (Bono) sings and commands the bus as a kind of Ken Kesey figure.

Along the way, they take in a show by Mr. Kite (Eddie Izzard). Words cannot do justice to the visual effects during this trip, and throughout the film for that matter, so I will not do them an injustice. The visuals, however, do complete justice to the Beatles' music and to that whole milieu. The drug-joke is that if you were there, you wouldn't remember. Not true. I was there, and I remember.

Taymor makes excellent use of the music, which outlines the plot. She gives some Beatles numbers a clever twist, as when "I Want You" comes from the Uncle Sam recruiting poster, and sometimes insightful, as when a lesbian cheerleader (yeah, yeah) sings "I Want to Hold Your Hand" from a distance to a stereotypical blonde cheerleader. As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review, the originally upbeat number is transformed into a ballad of longing and heartbreak.

"Across the Universe" is an unabashed musical, right from the opening shot. I recommend it to anyone who was there in those times. For those who were not, I recommend it for its fresh presentation of the Beatles' songs and for its visual delights. For those who abhor musicals, stay home.

The Earth's core is coming to a screeching halt. In three months we'll all be toast, because the things that keep Earth from being the cat in the microwave will be destroyed. Someone has to get down there and give that sucker a goose!

This is a fun, Jules Verne-ish, kind of movie, so never mind trying to pin down the technology. It is pulp science fiction, written with humor and heart.

Never mind that Dr. Ed 'Braz' Brazzelton (Delroy Lindo)---a genius whose research was stolen by his former colleague, the archly slimy genius and careerist, Dr. Conrad Zimsky (Stanley Tucci)--- has retreated to the desert where, with no apparent source of funds, he putters around building what appears to be a massive gattling-laser and develops materials with marvelous qualities found nowhere else on Earth.

Never mind that Zimsky's own pet project, Destini, the most powerful weapon of mass destruction ever conceived looks something like a giant sparkplug.

Never mind that billions are spent to build the core-boring ship (christened Virgil, after the poet who descended into Hell), a vessel that must withstand unimaginably high temperatures and pressures, and...when it gets stuck among giant crystals down there, the crew can get out in their thin little suits to work it free.

Never mind that these top flight scientists and engineers calculate distances in feet and miles.

Oh, and perhaps the oddest anomaly-when three of the crew have to choose which of them is to carry out a crucial, and perhaps fatal, task, they draw straws. Yep, three broom straws. You have to have experienced Virgil to appreciate the incongruity. Did the cleaning lady perhaps leave them behind while tidying up the ship?

Somewhere in the film critics' restroom, there must be scrawled on the wall: "For a fun time, go see The Core."

I was about 13 or 14 when the series began and about 17 or 18 when it ended. One of the best comedy series ever, and that's not just nostalgia talking.

Just look at that cast---Wally Cox, Tony Randall, Arthur O'Connell, Jack Warden, and the inimitable Marion Lorne. Randall and Cox played off each other perfectly, Randall as the worldly, man-to-man advisor to Cox's shy, soft spoken, science teacher.

Cox was perfect in every way for his role, and Randall played his self-consciously masculine character with a subtle irony that perfectly expressed both their relationship to one another as human beings and their relationship to the world as types. Consequently, the viewer could identify with them both and on both levels.

Great writing, and not a mean syllable in it.