As Beatles fans know, 1967 was the greatest year for the greatest pop band ever known. They released one era-defining album, "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," and liberally sprinkled a number of amazingly high-quality singles through the rest of the year, including "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane", "Hello Goodbye", and "All You Need Is Love."
They wanted to show they had something left in the tank after all that, though; even after the sudden death of their manager. So they decided to end the year with an hour-long comedy-and-music television special on Boxing Day. The problem was that all their success, combined with copious amounts of psychotropic substances, went right to their moptopped heads.
Who had the brilliant idea of using handheld cameras that jangle annoyingly throughout the movie? Who thought of creating a rambling section where four or five great magicians stare at road maps and jabber at each other unintelligibly? Who came up with the notion of having an apparently clueless group of actors who never worked with each other before improv all their lines like a Second City troupe?
It's only just over 50 minutes long, and little more than a succession of music performance clips with interconnected bits of material, designed as a pleasant lark. But the connecting bits, intended to be surreal, are merely stupid. Surrealism, like any important form of art, requires discipline to work effectively. "Strawberry Fields Forever" sounds like a directionless dream, but anyone who has listened to John Lennon's dry runs on tape realizes how much work and focus went into making it. The Beatles themselves seemed to forget this. Being great musicmakers didn't make them great at everything else, as they should have been told (and would have, had Brian Epstein not swallowed those fatal pills.)
The movie starts badly, and just gets worse and worse. Ringo and his Aunt Jessie, arguing constantly and with obviously no script, board a bus occupied by a cross-section of Londoners and circus midgets, which drives through the British countryside. "Already the magic was beginning to work," intones narrator John Lennon, though there is little evidence of anything other than headache-producing blue-screen effects and an assortment of nonsensical activities that start out tiresome and quickly turn obnoxious.
People who like this movie (like Paul McCartney) seldom try to defend these sections as inspired. Instead, they say they help to create a loose storyline that accommodates video performances of some timeless music. But these are underbaked. "Fool On The Hill" features a placid Paul staring inertly at the camera amid a rosette French skyscape, apparently expecting us to just bask in his beauty. George Harrison drags himself through "Blue Jay Way" amateurishly playing a keyboard chalkpainted into a rock. "Your Mother Should Know" is the best sequence, opening with the Fabs marching down a flight of stairs in sync and in tails, but no one bothered to figure out what was supposed to happen after they got down, and it shows.
Paul and others defend this movie as the only chance we would ever get to see the band perform "I Am The Walrus," but any 12-year-old's imagination can do a better job than seeing John in a shower cap attempting to mime this great song while a line of police bobbies bob up and down.
Defenders also talk about this movie breaking barriers and giving vent to surrealist notions that would see their expression in Monty Python's Flying Circus. Except the Beatles did this sort of thing before, most notably in "Help," only in 1965 they managed to be funny and coherent as they put out a trippy fantasia with the help of a proper director, script, cast, and crew.
I wonder what the Beatles would have managed to pull off had they taken their desire to create and channeled it to music alone, or put themselves in the hands of the pros if they had to make a movie. Instead, we have this sloppy, cretinous excuse for entertainment, and the one bum note in an otherwise stellar career.
They wanted to show they had something left in the tank after all that, though; even after the sudden death of their manager. So they decided to end the year with an hour-long comedy-and-music television special on Boxing Day. The problem was that all their success, combined with copious amounts of psychotropic substances, went right to their moptopped heads.
Who had the brilliant idea of using handheld cameras that jangle annoyingly throughout the movie? Who thought of creating a rambling section where four or five great magicians stare at road maps and jabber at each other unintelligibly? Who came up with the notion of having an apparently clueless group of actors who never worked with each other before improv all their lines like a Second City troupe?
It's only just over 50 minutes long, and little more than a succession of music performance clips with interconnected bits of material, designed as a pleasant lark. But the connecting bits, intended to be surreal, are merely stupid. Surrealism, like any important form of art, requires discipline to work effectively. "Strawberry Fields Forever" sounds like a directionless dream, but anyone who has listened to John Lennon's dry runs on tape realizes how much work and focus went into making it. The Beatles themselves seemed to forget this. Being great musicmakers didn't make them great at everything else, as they should have been told (and would have, had Brian Epstein not swallowed those fatal pills.)
The movie starts badly, and just gets worse and worse. Ringo and his Aunt Jessie, arguing constantly and with obviously no script, board a bus occupied by a cross-section of Londoners and circus midgets, which drives through the British countryside. "Already the magic was beginning to work," intones narrator John Lennon, though there is little evidence of anything other than headache-producing blue-screen effects and an assortment of nonsensical activities that start out tiresome and quickly turn obnoxious.
People who like this movie (like Paul McCartney) seldom try to defend these sections as inspired. Instead, they say they help to create a loose storyline that accommodates video performances of some timeless music. But these are underbaked. "Fool On The Hill" features a placid Paul staring inertly at the camera amid a rosette French skyscape, apparently expecting us to just bask in his beauty. George Harrison drags himself through "Blue Jay Way" amateurishly playing a keyboard chalkpainted into a rock. "Your Mother Should Know" is the best sequence, opening with the Fabs marching down a flight of stairs in sync and in tails, but no one bothered to figure out what was supposed to happen after they got down, and it shows.
Paul and others defend this movie as the only chance we would ever get to see the band perform "I Am The Walrus," but any 12-year-old's imagination can do a better job than seeing John in a shower cap attempting to mime this great song while a line of police bobbies bob up and down.
Defenders also talk about this movie breaking barriers and giving vent to surrealist notions that would see their expression in Monty Python's Flying Circus. Except the Beatles did this sort of thing before, most notably in "Help," only in 1965 they managed to be funny and coherent as they put out a trippy fantasia with the help of a proper director, script, cast, and crew.
I wonder what the Beatles would have managed to pull off had they taken their desire to create and channeled it to music alone, or put themselves in the hands of the pros if they had to make a movie. Instead, we have this sloppy, cretinous excuse for entertainment, and the one bum note in an otherwise stellar career.