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Friday, October 12, 2007
Across the Universe
Director: Julie Taymor
Grade: D+
Though I can't say that I had highly anticipated this movie, I will say that it had been on my radar for quite a while and was very interested to see it. I had expected it to get a bigger commercial push, and when their were rumors that director Julie Taymor (Frida, the Broadway version of The Lion King) had asked to have her name removed from the project after the studio reshot a large chunk of the movie, red flags went up. Nonetheless, I talked myself into it.
What a colossal trainwreck! Even for a musical, the plot was the weakest of any movie I've seen in recent memory (and I saw Music and Lyrics!). Scenes are sloppily thrown together and characters are seriously underdevolped. The energy of the musical numbers doesn't always match the mood of the scenes. And it just keeps getting more and more bizzare. One moment our leads are at a hip, NYC music industry party, and the next they are kidnapped by Bono on the magical, mystery bus and left at Eddie Izzard's house. Even the attempted poignant statements failed to work, like the "Strawberry Fields Forever" number following Max (Joe Anderson) during his time in Vietnam.
There were numbers that did work for me. The most enjoyable was the Princeton frat brothers night on the town set to "I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends". But mostly we found ourselves laughing at the absurdity of it all: the masked men dressed like Fidel Castro who prepare Max for the army after he is drafted, Bono's cameo singing "I Am the Walrus", Sadie's guitar player morphing into Jimmi Hendrix (I leaned over to Sarah and said, "if he lights his guitar on fire, I'm leaving").
Of course the music is good. But you already know that. So maybe you're better spending your money on the soundtrack than a ticket to the movie.
Director: Julie Taymor
Grade: D+
Though I can't say that I had highly anticipated this movie, I will say that it had been on my radar for quite a while and was very interested to see it. I had expected it to get a bigger commercial push, and when their were rumors that director Julie Taymor (Frida, the Broadway version of The Lion King) had asked to have her name removed from the project after the studio reshot a large chunk of the movie, red flags went up. Nonetheless, I talked myself into it.
What a colossal trainwreck! Even for a musical, the plot was the weakest of any movie I've seen in recent memory (and I saw Music and Lyrics!). Scenes are sloppily thrown together and characters are seriously underdevolped. The energy of the musical numbers doesn't always match the mood of the scenes. And it just keeps getting more and more bizzare. One moment our leads are at a hip, NYC music industry party, and the next they are kidnapped by Bono on the magical, mystery bus and left at Eddie Izzard's house. Even the attempted poignant statements failed to work, like the "Strawberry Fields Forever" number following Max (Joe Anderson) during his time in Vietnam.
There were numbers that did work for me. The most enjoyable was the Princeton frat brothers night on the town set to "I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends". But mostly we found ourselves laughing at the absurdity of it all: the masked men dressed like Fidel Castro who prepare Max for the army after he is drafted, Bono's cameo singing "I Am the Walrus", Sadie's guitar player morphing into Jimmi Hendrix (I leaned over to Sarah and said, "if he lights his guitar on fire, I'm leaving").
Of course the music is good. But you already know that. So maybe you're better spending your money on the soundtrack than a ticket to the movie.
Comments:
Nice! you've cut your time between posts to less than a month! Now, let's work on getting that down to one per week!
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