BEFORE: I'm past the halfway point of the big Summer Rock Music Concert (and Documentary) series - 8 films to go before I can get back on narrative movies, and we're near the end of July, with still no definite word that theaters are going to open up in August. And even if they do, nobody's really sure if people will even want to go to the movies, not until there's a vaccine. Hollywood is definitely feeling the pain, since theaters have been closed for four months, and I hear that there are some films becoming hits on the drive-in circuit, but they're little sleeper hits, not exactly the big-budget movies I want to see. So while it feels like I've been using the pandemic to play a lot of catch-up, once theaters open up again then I think the whole industry is going to have to play catch-up on a larger level. There will be a rush to complete the films that were only half-finished when the shutdown happened, plus there's a stockpile of films that have had their release dates pushed back several times. Marvel's Phase IV is now set to be completed in the year 2035, I think.
But I can't change the release calendar myself, so I just have to be ready to adapt to whatever happens in the next month. I'm going to make it to the end of Movie Year 12 no matter what, and as best as I can determine, it's going to be another Perfect Year, no matter what. (Some people still seem unclear on the concept, it's a 300-long chain of movies, linked by actor or real person, that starts on New Year's and, with a bit of planning and luck, extends to Christmas).
Like with today's film, John Lennon (and several others, I assume) carries over from "John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky".
I'm going to call this the final film of July, for reasons explained below, so that means I get to print the format round-up for July's 31 movies:
12 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): Faster, In America, Blood Diamond, Seventh Son, Charlie's Angels (2019), Serenity (2019), Fool's Gold, The Gentlemen, The Lincoln Lawyer, Frailty, The Lookout, David Crosby: Remember My Name
2 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Sphere, The U.S. vs. John Lennon
6 watched on Netflix: Dolemite Is My Name, The Laundromat, Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, No Direction Home: Bob Dylan, Echo in the Canyon, John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky
2 watched on iTunes: Brick, The Last Waltz
5 watched on Amazon Prime: Supercon, 7500, Hot Rod, Down in the Flood: Bob Dylan, the Band & the Basement Tapes, Sound City
2 watched on Hulu: The Beach Bum, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band
1 watched on Disney+: Lady and the Tramp (2019),
1 watched on Tubi: Time Lapse
31 TOTAL
THE PLOT: A documentary on the life of John Lennon, with a focus on the time in his life when he transformed from a musician into an anti-war activist.
AFTER: I've decided to count this film as my movie for July 31, meaning I skipped a day - I'm going to be skipping several more days in August, because I'm really ahead of the count, ahead of where I need to be for the year. Some of this happened because of the pandemic, like many other people I've had more time on my hands over the last few months than I knew what to do with - so if it made sense to double up on movies to make my schedule align better with the calendar, or with current events, or just to put the right movie on a big hundred-movie mark, that's what I've done. Well, now it's time to pay the piper.
There are some Beatles anniversaries to celebrate today, according to "Today in Rock History", so that's encouraging me to move this one forward on the calendar - plus this will be my 31st movie in the month of July, which has 31 days. So this is just a little adjustment to get me back on track. According to my latest count I've now got 45 (or maybe 47) movies to watch in August and September, and that's 61 days. So I have to spread them out somehow, I can't watch a movie a day in August or I'll run out of slots. I've either got to take a week off in each month, or space the films out some other way. But that's a problem to solve down the road, as is how to spend my time on those nights off.
But for now, let's get to the rock anniversaries. On July 31, 1968, the Beatles laid down the tracks for "Hey Jude" on Day 1 of a two-day recording session. On the next day, a 36-piece orchestra was added. Also related to the documentaries watched recently - on July 31, 1980, John Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas was arrested on drug charges, and sentenced to 8 years in prison, which was later reduced to 30 days, plus community service. Coincidentally, on July 31, 1967, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger appealed their sentences on drug charges, having been arrested in the previous February, Keith got his conviction overturned and Mick had his three-month sentence reduced to a conditional discharge. That's funny, John Lennon talked in today's film about being arrested in the U.K. for drug possession, and I wonder if that happened at the same time as Mick and Keith.
And just last year, on July 31, 2019, Woodstock's 50th Annversary concert was officially cancelled, after the organizers couldn't pull the concert together, just two weeks before it was scheduled to begin. I sort of remember this, first there were all sorts of companies trying to sign acts for some kind of anniversary show, this one lost funding and THAT one said that the other one had no right to use the name "Woodstock", and all parties involved just couldn't come together to mark the occasion - at one point they were talking to acts like Santana, John Fogerty, John Sebastian, Canned Heat, David Crosby and The Zombies, but I guess it just wasn't meant to be. Peace and love go right out the window when there are several promoters competing to sign acts to host a concert to celebrate peace and love, I guess.
Speaking about all that, today's film is all about John Lennon transforming himself from a musician to an activist, and the fact that those two things aren't mutually exclusive. How did the man who sang that "All You Need Is Love" come to get involved with protest marches, just a few years later? Well, as he explained on one of the many talk shows he appeared on in the early 1970's, he was still a non-violent man, but he believed in peaceful protests, and felt that with the platform he'd been given, he simply had to speak out against the American involvement in Vietnam. History ultimately proved Lennon correct, the U.S. had no business to risk its own citizens' lives for a war that had little purpose, no clear goals and even less direction. Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, but plenty of people were saying that back then, too, only the government chose not to listen to reason. Sound familiar?
I can't help but wonder if it's more than coincidence that I'm watching films about protest marches, some for civil rights or against the administration, or both. It's very much like 2020 is a reflection of those times - however, back then it was a different time, and when a President got caught doing something terribly wrong, something that flew in the face of decency and fair play among the two parties, Nixon at least had the common decency to resign before he could be removed from office. God damn it, I never thought that in my lifetime I'd wish for a return to the politics of Nixon, but I'll champion his decision to step down and put the country before his own ego, his own individual needs. Are you listening, Orange Julius? Nixon knew his goose was cooked, that he was a dirty man who'd done a bad thing, and at least he was willing to admit it and give up the Presidency - so our current leader is either dumber than Nixon, or dirtier, or perhaps both.
But before I could move forward from yesterday's film on the production of "Imagine" in 1971, first I had to go back - this film starts with the Beatles on the top of the charts, only Lennon had made some comment in an interview about how the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, which may very well have been true, at least among the younger crowd. But the older religious folks didn't care for the comment, because it sounded like bragging, or that Lennon was placing the Beatles somehow higher than Jesus in prominence, only that wasn't really what he meant. Still, some people were burning their Beatles records, while others were still buying them, and possibly some people were buying the albums just to burn them, which was counter-productive. (Sorry, old Rutles joke.)
Lennon issued a retraction and tried to explain his earlier comments, but in many ways, the damage was done. Meanwhile rifts were forming between the various members of the Beatles, as discussed in yesterday's film, and all of the other Beatles were getting married for the first time, except for John, who was instead getting divorced from Cynthia, and had taken up with Yoko. While it's great that John found a creative partner to make art with (gee, I can't see how that would have made Paul mad) it didn't help when he brought her into the recording studio to make nonsensical sound compositions like "Revolution No. 9". Some fans started calling her the "Fifth Beatle", when we all know that the Fifth Beatle was really Eric Clapton. No, wait, Stuart Sutcliffe. Wait, George Martin. Pete Best? Wait, the walrus was Paul, according to "Glass Onion", even though John sang lead on "I Am the Walrus". George had two songs on each album, carry the Ringo and... now even I'm confused.
But I don't think Yoko broke up the Beatles, I think the Beatles were headed that way anyway, she only maybe sped up the process. I'm more upset that Yoko broke up John & Yoko years later, when John moved away to live with May Pang for a year, but this film, like yesterday's, also forgets to mention that little fact. "The U.S. vs. John Lennon" skips ahead from 1973, when Lennon got his green card, to the birth of son Sean in 1975, and then it's right on to his assassination in 1980, never mentioning the year he lived away from Yoko Ono. Sorry, did that not fit in with the narrative somebody wanted, where he was always a faithful husband and loving father? From July 1973 to December 1974, Lennon split his time between Yoko in New York and May Pang in Los Angeles, and what's weird is that John stopped taking calls form Yoko in December 1974, then he met with her in January 1975, when she claimed she'd found a cure for smoking. After an apparent hypnotherapy session, Lennon told May Pang that his separation from Yoko was over, and May said that he appeared brainwashed. It's all a bit odd.
But now I'm getting ahead of myself. This film really gets going after John & Yoko moved out of the Tittenhurst Park estate and into the Dakota in New York City, and Lennon started getting involved in activist causes, first was a concert/rally in Michigan for John Sinclair, a man who'd been incarcerated with a ten-year sentence for possession of two joints, and Lennon sang a song about his case - OK, that's really not on the same level as "Hurricane" Carter, but I guess it's a start. Bobby Seale also spoke at that rally, and before long, Lennon was on TV talk shows saying what nice people some of those Black Panthers are. This, plus the release of the song "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)", along with the anti-war billboards that John and Yoko financed, put Lennon on the radar of the Nixon administration, and J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI started a file. It also probably didn't help that right after the amendment was passed to lower the voting age to 18, Lennon began planning a series of concerts to try to reach all those new young voters.
Thus began a four-year attempt to have Lennon deported, with the Nixon administration using the flimsy excuse of his prior drug charges in the U.K., but come on already, all rock stars smoked pot back then, you'd be hard-pressed to find one who didn't - even the squarest Beatle, Paul, got arrested for pot while on tour in Japan, right? Plus the INS issues waivers all the time for artists and musicians who make great contributions to society, and if Lennon's music doesn't qualify him for that, then I don't know who would qualify. So it was a bunch of B.S., but it was B.S. that they had to fight in court, so John & Yoko hired a great immigration lawyer. Most people get to call themselves New Yorkers just by showing up there, but Lennon was denied permanent residency until 1976, plus he was probably on all sorts of FBI watch-lists, labeled as a radical or an anarchist or a "peace-nik". Well, they sort of got two out of three right, but Lennon's proposed Revolution was always meant to be a non-violent one, OK?
Despite everything that was wrong with Nixon, despite everyone knowing deep down that he was dirty and corrupt, he still won re-election in 1972. (Let's hope history doesn't repeat itself too much.) Bad news for America, and bad news for Lennon, who was depressed and turned to drinking after George McGovern lost. Hey, perhaps this had something to do with Lennon's 18-month "lost weekend" with May Pang...or maybe he was just tired of Yoko. Either way, there was no good news on the immigration front until Nixon stepped down as President in August 1974. You see, America, changing Presidents makes everything better! It solved John Lennon's problems, and it can solve yours, too!
I wish the film had just stopped in 1975, with the birth of Lennon's second child - I mean, we all know what happened in 1980, there's no need to deal with that in an exploitative manner. A simple graphic on the screen explaining Lennon's death would have been fine, playing the news of the day as reported by Walter Cronkite drives the point home, sure, but I think that's overkill, not necessary. I'm all for not sugar-coating things, but why mention Lennon's death and not, say, his affair? I guess a documentary is just as much about what's left out as it is about what's left in, but I think also a director can't have it both ways, if you're going to take the bad with the good you can't just include some of the bad parts. But I guess the affair doesn't fit in with the intended narrative, which is to portray Lennon as only a victim?
OK, it's now been a couple days since my last big Summer Music Concert, so I promise to get back to that tomorrow.
Also starring Yoko Ono, Tariq Ali, Elliot Mintz, Dan Richter (all carrying over from "John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky"), Stew Albert, Carl Bernstein, Chris Charlesworth, Noam Chomsky, Walter Cronkite (last heard in "The Irishman"), Mario Cuomo, Angela Davis, John Dean, Felix Dennis, David Fenton, Bob Gruen, Ron Kovic, Paul Krassner, G. Gordon Liddy, George McGovern, Geraldo Rivera, John C. Ryan, Bobby Seale, John Sinclair, Tom Smothers, M. Wesley Swearingen, Joe Treen, Gore Vidal, Jon Wiener, Leon Wildes
with archive footage of Dick Cavett, Mike Douglas, Gloria Emerson, George Harrison, Paul McCartney, Richard Nixon, Ringo Starr (all carrying over from "John & Yoko: Above Us Only Sky"), John Chancellor, Betty Ford, Gerald Ford (last seen in "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story"), H.R. Haldeman, Abbie Hoffman, J. Edgar Hoover, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Sean Lennon, Martin Luther King (last seen in "No Direction Home: Bob Dylan"), John Mitchell, Pat Nixon, Jerry Rubin, Bob Seger, Strom Thurmond, Stevie Wonder.
RATING: 5 out of 10 press conferences in bed
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