It’s hard to know what to say about this, because there’s rumors of a lot of studio interference in the editing, blah blah blah. Still, I don’t know how anyone but Julie Taymor could have botched most of these scenes, since the details themselves take so much of the blame. A Beatles tribute movie could have been pretty welcome, but she takes it the most annoying route possible, jabbing in a thousand cutesy references to song titles and lyrics, which all bash into each other in search of a coherant plot, coming up totally empty-handed. When less than a minute into the movie, an old man casually drops the line “When I’m 64″ into conversation, I knew I was in for it, and it only gets worse from there. In fact, the first 20 minutes or so are more just weak than terrible, and manage to find good, interesting way to work the songs into real plot scenarios, but by the time Bono shows up as a character named Dr. Robert with a philosophy book called I Am the Walrus, things have gotten way too fucking stupid. It’s obviously kind of a mixed bag, though, with Taymor adding a lot of lovely shots and half-decent ideas into the mix (although most of the good bits are thrown in the trailer, Garden State style). Even the songs themselves are hard to lump into bad or good, with about half of the compositions being interesting new takes and the other half being horribly ill-informed trainwrecks. She may have even ruined a few songs for me, because I don’t think I’ll ever hear “Dear Prudence” without thinking of an underdeveloped Asian lesbian, or “Sexy Sadie” without thinking of an overacted walking chiche of a female rockstar. I could take the bad ideas with the good and still have a reasonably good time, but there are aspects of this movie that go beyond just being a silly musical and move into being dangerously stupid. The oversimplification of the rights movement through the eyes of a thinly veiled Hendrix ripoff named Jojo is borderline racist, and the rushed, brainless, nuance-free explorations of war, love, drugs, art, music, death, etc. would give future historians the idea that hippies, cops, and everyone in between are completely fucking retarded. When Jude defies all odds to stand solo on a rooftop to sing to his long-lost lover before all the other main characters slip away from the fuzz to join in for a world-changing rooftop concert… well, bad acting and insultingly narrow-minded and ridiculous screenwriting have reached a new apex. The only points I give this movie go to its scattered moments of visual inspiration, and the ambition Taymor showed (but royally squelched) in making something different and important.
