Hey, everyone. ”Moriarty” here. I had a chance to see this on Monday night, but my wife wanted to see the screening of THE BRAVE ONE instead. I’m sure I’ll check this out this weekend. I can’t resist. My morbid curiosity is dying to see what it is that has so many people I trust breaking down in hysterical laughter every time they think about this one. It sounds like Julie Taymor has made a disaster, but a fascinating one. Check out what Capone has to say about it:
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. Brace yourself and all that you hold holy. How do you fuck up a movie with 30 Beatles songs featured in it? Okay, those of you who have seen SGT. PEPPERS LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND may already have some idea of the answer to my non-rhetorical question. You fuck it up with terrible covers of these songs (most taken from the band's more drug-fueled hippie era), pointless cameos, and a plot that seems to be a series of nonsensical scenes whose sole purpose is to set up the next song. If you think naming all of a film's major characters after names featured in Beatles songs is clever, maybe you'll like this drivel more than I did. If you think dropping in lines from Beatles songs into the dialog is clever, you're an idiot and you'll definitely like ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, a hugely disappointing film from a director I absolutely love, Julie Taymor (FRIDA; TITUS; and the stage production of THE LION KING). My love for Taymor's inventive visual style made me predisposed to like this film, and there are a few trippy sequences scattered throughout ACROSS THE UNIVERSE that are quite breathtaking. But one of my other biases rose up from the depth during this movie and dropped a poison pill into the proceedings from very early on. I hate hippies. Aside from being dirty, their ideas are vague and don't make for interesting movies most of the time. I'll present as my Exhibit A the film version of RENT, which I couldn't stand, not because the music was bad or because I didn't agree with the bohemian lifestyle the characters were leading. I couldn't stand RENT because the people didn't really stand for anything as much as they stood against something. I'm a firm believer that if you're going to complain about any social injustice, you should at least come armed with one or two solutions to the problem you are so passionate about. Okay, fine, I know that a list of solutions to the world's problems probably doesn't lend itself to a great musical, but those are my reasons; bite me if you don't agree. But I digress. ACROSS THE UNIVERSE is an unholy piece of shit, almost from the first frame. First off, don't be fooled by the claim that there are 30 Beatles songs in this film. My math may be off, but there are fragments of 15-20 songs contained here, with the remaining few songs performed more or less beginning to end. Here's an example of how brilliantly the songs are used in the film's "story" (courtesy of Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, who I'm told had a hand in writing THE COMMITMENTS, a film that had some idea of how to use music): there's a minor character named Prudence; she locks herself in a room and pouts because she's sad that a guy she has a crush on is flirting with another woman; her dozen or so roommates try to coax her our of the room singing a song. Can you guess which song? If you can't, you probably don't care about this movie at all, and I'm shocked you're still reading this. If you can, it doesn't get much better than this. The two-hour-plus plodding thing that resembles the circa-late-'60s plot revolves around a young Liverpool man named Jude (groan), who decides to leave his job in the shipyards to go to America and become an artist. Oh, and he also wants to find his American father who doesn't even know he exists. I guess his mom was a slut 20-some years ago. Anyway, he arrives at the prestigious university where his father works, meets him, and falls in with crowd of rich pranksters, including one named Maxwell (yes, there is a scene in which Max uses a silver hammer, although not to kill anyone; and the song is never used). Max brings Jude home for some holiday (Thanksgiving, I think), where he meets Max's lovely sister Lucy. At this homecoming, Max announces that he's dropping out of school and moving to Greenwich Village to be a hippie, a dirty, dirty hippie. Jude goes with him. Once in New York, the pair land up in a commune like apartment run by a very Janis Joplin-like singer named Sadie. If I told you that a guitar player who seems modeled after Jimi Hendrix also in a major player in this film, would you be surprised? Would you care? Hello? Lucy eventually follows her brother to New York, and is swept up in the antiwar movement just as Maxwell is drafted into the military. Lucy and Jude become lovers, and the whole gang of hopelessly good-looking, counterculture misfits have adventures ranging from signing record deals to hopping on wildly painted buses and traveling to the middle of nowhere and tripping out. I mentioned cameos; where do I begin? U2 singer Bono plays a hippie author named Dr. Robert (looking a lot like Dennis Hopper from EASY RIDER), who has written a book (and sings the song) "I Am the Walrus." Eddie Izzard shows up as a Timothy Leary-like guru Mr. Kite, encouraging all the young kids to take drugs. Izzard at least shows some enthusiasm for his one song, and the visuals during a psychedelic freak out sequence are the only thing in ACROSS THE UNIVERSE that reminded me why I'd loved Julie Taymor so much to this point. Also on hand is Joe Cocker (playing multiple sleazy characters), who does a bizarre rendition of "Come Together," which I guess passes muster if you lower your standards slightly (you really won't have any choice watching this film). The characters flail and change temperament to suit whatever the next song might be, with no real effort spent on developing fully realized human beings. Sequences showing Maxwell in Vietnam are laughable; the militant antiwar group to which Lucy belongs gets violent; and Jude's artwork is just plain bad. The entire film is bad, and worse, it's ill-conceived. Still worse, it feels like it was made by someone who has heard all of these songs exactly one time each. I made the argument to some people after I saw this film that it's really hard to mess up a Beatles song to the point of me not liking it; but ACROSS THE UNIVERSE proves that it's far too easy. Taymor and company had an interesting idea, and as a fan of any music, why wouldn't you want to use it in your movie? But not like this, not so carelessly. People in the world actually care about these songs, and seeing them flung around like this is akin to watching your kids get molested by a neighbor, and you can't do anything to stop it. In case you can't tell, let me state this clearly: ACROSS THE UNIVERSE is a horrifying mess. Capone
