Across the Universe

... to have been able to see this film in the beautiful Elgin Theatre with Julie Taymor there to answer questions / talk about the film afterwards (at the Toronto International Film Festival).

Wow!!!

I was carried away, I was moved to tears, I stood up and cheered.

For those who commented about the singing - the actors sang all the songs themselves. What's more, though they did record the songs in studio first as part of the rehearsal process, most of the song performances used in the film were recorded live as they played out the scenes. Perhaps that's why - for me - the songs worked so well; it actually felt like the characters were just moved to sing. Amazing performances from - mainly - unknown actors.

And I felt the story had a strong narrative line, aided / supported by the songs. It used the background of history, not just as a painted backdrop, but to add meaning and depth to the characters and the story they were living. Made me wish I'd been there (born in '65, too young to remember the 60's); I'll have to content myself with living vicariously through Jude and Lucy and the others.

Add to everything else Julie Taymor's glorious visuals, and I was truly swept away. I saw 36 films at the festival, but this was head and shoulders my favourite.

I fell in love with this film, and look forward to sharing it with friends and family who didn't have the luck to see it as I did. It's a film that will, I'm sure, reward repeated viewings.

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.

The response to this movie is a clear evidence that people have a stupid low tolerance level for musicals. Across the Universe works amazingly, and surprisingly as a great musical, it has some of the most the daring, balls out attitudes towards the genre, that we have not seen since probably Fosse's revolution of the musical back in the 70s with Cabaret and All that Jazz. And even though most of what you hear people praising is the production values of the movie, like cinematography, production design, costume design, I think that Julie Taymor is underrated in a very unfair manner. The movie is fantastic, it was such a pleasing film experience.

Julie Taymor has always been a very visual director, since Titus, I praised her as a director with extremely rich visual ideas, and compared her to the likes of Baz Luhrmann, which is funny now, cause when the film started, I realize Julie Taymor had a very similar intention with Across the Universe, to that of Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge!, however, I'm of the opinion that Luhrmann was modestly effective, while Taymor hits the nail with absolute precision and perfection.

Even though I was a Musical Lover Freak, that I'll admit to, I had a hard time accepting Moulin Rouge!, I enjoyed it visually, as well as the performances, but I don't know, I was sort of a put off with the messy use of music, which really distracted me from the movie, which was supposed to take place in Pre WW1 Paris, but felt like some weird, annoying place, a musical version of a bad Three Stooges Episode, which I know sounds a little too tough on the film, but that's what I though. It was off putting seeing such a comedic portrayal of Toulouse Lautrec, pretending to co-write the score of The Sound of Music with a clumsy 21st Century version of Michael York, only in 1900s Paris.

I'm dwelling over Moulin Rouge! a little too much, I know, but it's just that people have complained in a similar way about this particular film. Beatles fans are put off by the almost exclusive use of Beatles songs in the soundtrack. I'm not a die hard Beatles fan, but I certainly like them, as pretty much most people, and I though that Julie Taymor's concept was amazing. Across the Universe is a Roseate Stone of the 60s, and because it is from the 60s, takes place in the 60s, and is all about the 60s, the Beatles soundtrack is a match made in heaven. The opening scene, is a perfect example of just how effective the use of the Beatles was, the comparison of late 50s, early 60s Americana Life Style, with a very industrial and rough Liverpool Life Style, from there on, the movie becomes a fantastic musical in all the classical sense, it's so classic that the film could be easily translated to Broadway.

People have said the most inane things like "the film has no plot"...no plot? Are you kidding me, the film not only has a wonderful array of characters that not only represent some of the most iconic figures of music in the 60s, but all of those characters are explored, developed, some to a larger extent than others, just like any movie, and on top of that, most of the characters are resonant in today's society with today's socio-political situation.

That is the other interesting element of the film, not only is it a good story, but it is also a politically conscious movie with extremely poignant images about the 60s and today. Not only does it have poignant images, but also, most of the songs have highly imaginative numbers, that are very technically proficient, in the classic sprawling Broadway musical tradition. And regarding the visual and special effects, I think Taymor was a bit gratuitous with the effects back in Frida, but here, they are all in service of the plot, even if some of the scenes seem like scenes that would go great with a little LSD, they are all used for the effect of creating that 60s feel and look in which the movie moves about with a delicious comedic overtone.

All of these praises go to the master behind the film, Julie Taymor, she deserves more credit than what she has been getting, the incredibly imaginative and exciting musical sequences are excellent. Who cares if it's music from the Beatles, the Beatles are pretty much the official soundtrack of the 60s, and it's not like the film is just a big bloated Beatles tribute, it's a tribute to the decade, and the whole music scene of the decade, aside from the numerous Beatles references, there are references to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Morrison.

I wanted to focus my review on Julie Taymor's work, but, the whole film is amazing, the cinematography, the production design , Albert Wolsky proves he is still champ of the musical genre. And the cast, aside from Evan Rachel Wood, most of them are young, fresh faces, which works wonders, since you are not ever wondering about who dubbed that song, you take all the stuff in, without having second thoughts or reservations.

I recommend you see the film, it's great, and if you have a beef about it using Beatles music, well, I only have one thing to say, DEAL WITH IT, it's not like the film is abusing the Beatles legacy, if anything, it's giving it a standing ovation, and it's fitting for the period, and the tone of the picture, so...that's pretty much it, just..."let it be, let it be, let it be".

I saw a sold-out opening night screening of "Across the Universe" last night with a group of my friends who had really been looking forward to it. Many of them were extremely disappointed, while in the critical world, Roger Ebert and the New York Times loved it. Because the film was so highly anticipated, and a number of people have asked me how I liked it, I'm writing this review in an attempt to express why the movie is so divisive. I'm not going to talk about plot, or describe any of the numbers. If you're interested in seeing the movie, they'll be more enjoyable if they're unexpected.

It's a bizarre and beautiful movie musical, almost a music video at times, that uses thirty- three of The Beatles' songs and director Julie Taymor's unique visual style to illustrate both a personal love story and the overall conflict in the sixties. The movie is incredibly original and ambitious, and therefore its failings are as dramatic as its successes. Both stem from the same source: Julie Taymor's self-indulgence. That's nothing new to her movies, "Frida" and "Titus" have the same problem, but in a movie stripped of traditional narrative, it's glaringly obvious. Some songs are impeccably chosen and staged with great creativity, but others are too obvious, or thematically forced so Taymor can cram in another song and stunning visual sequence.

For the first half of the movie, I was frequently divided. One innovative sequence would really pull me into the style, then a forced number or awkward staging would distance me again. When an obvious, recognizable number began, I was torn between a cynical impulse to roll my eyes and an almost exhilarated impulse to laugh and applaud.

"Across the Universe" is a mess. There's no denying that. It is poorly paced and badly structured, and at times its feather-light plot and contrived or obligatory numbers become tedious. But at one point, about halfway through, I decided just to go along for the ride. I delighted in every brash, bold choice, whether it worked or not. I let the poignant moments move me, whether or not I intellectually felt that they were contrived.

The Beatles' music had a huge effect on me; from the fateful day that my friend accidentally copied the first three tracks of "Revolver" onto my computer, a love affair was born. Their songs are inexorably tied to memories beautiful and horrible scattered all over my life, and as I grow older, I'm constantly discovering new, deeper resonances in their familiar refrains. Even when the context was vague or stretched, the film's reinterpreting and revealing new facets of these songs seemed to serve as a tribute to their breadth and greatness. Taymor's damning depiction of the horrors of war, and lyrical portrait of young, idealistic love are both painfully expressive and unique, and simply took my breath away. By the film's shamelessly corny close, I realized that I had just had a genuine cinematic experience. For all the movies that I watch, that's incredibly rare.

In his review in the New York Times, Stephen Holden writes, "I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you've tumbled." I could laughingly list this movie's flaws from now till next week, but I sort of fell in love with its sheer audacity. You might not. It's extremely naïve, and thematically simple, and you could find that endearing or irritating. You may love it, or you may hate it, but you're going to feel something. This movie will not change your life; don't expect it to. But if you let your criticism fade to the background, and abandon yourself to Taymor's passionate fervor, you may have a pretty amazing experience.