The Beatles: Get back

 The thing I keep coming back to is that I can’t believe this exists. I have a hard time judging anything Jackson does here because it almost doesn’t matter; It’s The Beatles for crying out loud, The Beatles. What a treasure trove; Perhaps the most intimate and thorough document of the creative process of truly extraordinary artists ever captured. It’s hard to think of a way this footage could be presented that isn’t compelling; then again, Michael Lindsey-Hogg’s infamous whiff of a film somehow proves otherwise.

 Mostly the credit lies in what Jackson doesn’t do; no talking heads, very little context outside of the first 10 minutes, leaving in as much raw footage as possible to complicate interpersonal relationships and deepen the personalities of the band. I rolled my eyes when it was announced that the film would be elongated to almost eight hours and presented in three parts, classic Jackson bloat, but it turns out the length is the films greatest strength. Sitting through the writers block, the bickering, the goofing around, the cups of tea and slices of toast, the endless, endless rehearsals where raw ideas are sharpened and enriched and meticulously tinkered with, that’s the magic. It would be interesting to watch almost any artist get this sort of treatment; with The Beatles, it’s transcendent.

The length also allows the bands four members to materialise as fully dimensional people, and I’ve noticed that audience reactions to John, Paul, George and Ringo tend to say more about the viewers mindset and preferences than anything fully supported by the film. Theories about The Beatles breakup are as old as the band itself, usually focusing on one element, rift or individual. The genius of Get Back is in the way it humanises and complicates, because its never just one thing, a single, simple disagreement or as Paul puts it “Yoko sitting on an amp”. Joyous, collaborative creation and frustrating, long building resentment are shown in their full and overwhelming completeness.

Even with all this, the film would still be tough to get through if it weren’t for the music, and again I come back to the simple fact that it’s The Beatles, its eight hours of The Beatles, the music is just extraordinary to listen to. ‘Let it Be’ and ‘Get Back’ and ‘Don’t Let me Down’ are great songs, they’re all great songs, this is irrefutable truth. The Beatles were great and are great and I had a great time hanging out with them in this film.          

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Uncut Gems review

Uncut Gems made my top ten of 2019 list which was a little surprising as I didn’t like it anywhere near as much as I had been led to believe I would. It’s a testament to the films greatness then that I still do think of it as great, the best example yet of Josh and Benny Safdie’s take on the slimy, sketchy, pulse raising underbelly of New York. The film thrusts us into the sparkling hurricane of a life of Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler), a diamond district adrenaline addict who gets his fix by making a series of increasingly ludicrous and high stakes bets, hedges and parlays. To be honest that might not be the exact right terminology, but the movie isn’t really concerned with the technicalities either, hand waving the jargon and giving Howard a clear sequence of tasks to complete no matter how convoluted the specifics.       This is the movies great trick, to create a sense of whirling, fast paced chaos whilst never letting the audience lose sight of what need...
Read more

Little Women review

Greta Gerwig has been on the promotional trail in the last few weeks talking about her second solo feature, an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s landmark 1868 novel Little Women. I would encourage listening to as many of her interviews as possible, the longer the better, as they provide the best insight as to how and why her sophomore effort is as magnificent as it is. Interviews with filmmakers are often not as interesting or insightful as you want them to be, with many giving vague or over rehearsed answers to questions they’ve heard hundreds of times before; this is not the case with Gerwig. She has been passionate, generous and articulate in describing her relationship with the novel and the various choices she made in adapting it. She can provide in depth reasoning for every narrative and filmmaking decision, displaying an intelligence that makes her ascension as one of Hollywood’s top talents seem retroactively inevitable and totally deserved. The film she has made refl...
Read more

The Northman

  Everything about The Northman is supersized: the muscles, the action, the budget, and for filmmaker Robert Eggers, the stakes. The Norse epic represents a significant step up onto the worlds stage for a director previously responsible for niche little indie genre flicks, decent hits in and of themselves, but free of the expectations a near $100 million budget will bring. The last ten years have seen many indie breakouts like Eggers suddenly catapulted to box office juggernaut status off the back of just one or two films (Colin Trevorrow, Taika Waititi, Etc) and almost all have lost their creative soul in the process, delivering branded content (TM) studio noted to unintelligible blandness. The supersized risk of The Northman lies in how much it feels like an Eggers film, only bigger. An Eggers film, for those uninitiated, means a semi-mythic period piece dripping with exhaustively researched historical detail, down to the tiniest, grimiest piece of fastidious production desig...
Read more