BEFORE: Wow, five films in five days, that hasn't happened for me since June, when I decided I needed to slow things down a bit and space out my films better, so I wouldn't have a big empty space in September. But I had a long Labor Day weekend, and I'm between part-time gigs so I've got nothing BUT time. And I just got train tickets to go visit my parents this weekend, so that means less access to movies, so I'll just put the non-movie days this week at the end. Counting the days until October 1, and spacing out my remaining September films, as long as I watch 5 films this week, 5 films each week after that, and then 3 films in the last week of the month, I should be fine, and hit October 1 right on the button.
If you look back at March of last year, I had four films with Kate McKinnon right in a row - "Bombshell", "Leap!", "Ferdinand" and "The Spy Who Dumped Me". Well, it was originally going to be 5 films, including "Yesterday", but I was one film over the limit to reach the next milestone, which I think was Hitler's birthday on April 20, so something had to be cut. I held this one back, because I noticed it connected to several Christmas films, and I thought I might need it to get a holiday chain going - it turned out that I didn't, but it stayed Christmas-film adjacent for another year at least, finally I discovered that I needed it to link between "Black Widow" and the start of this year's horror chain, so it's been repurposed again - see, I will get to every movie eventually, I just can't get to them all at once. And it's nice that when I drop a movie, it's not forever, I'll then go out of my way to try to work it in somewhere, and since I already know I have a path to Christmas 2021, this film can stand on its own, and not just serve as a link between two Christmas movies.
Lamorne Morris carries over from "Bloodpool", I mean "Deadshot", I mean "Bloodsport", no wait, it's "Bloodshot", isn't it?
THE PLOT: After a power outage, a struggling musician realizes he's the only person on Earth who can remember the Beatles, and he's woken up in an alternate timeline where they never existed.
AFTER: Jeez, I endured a power outage last Thursday after Hurricane Ida came to NYC - 14 hours or so, my whole block was out - and at the end of that, there weren't any of my favorite bands that had disappeared. But then again, how would I know? Maybe I lost three bands in all the confusion, and I forgot to remember them, or I forgot that I forgot them. Exactly WHAT happens in this film, beyond the power outage, it's tough to say, because the movie's premise is so good that they don't get all caught up in semantics, the power just goes OUT, all over the world, for 12 seconds, and then nobody remembers the Beatles. Umm, and a few other things, but no spoilers here, part of the fun is learning what else might be missing in the new reality.
The Beatles are one of the few bands you could use to tell a story like this, because their music is the most universal. I mean, you could do this with Mozart or Cole Porter but who the hell still listens to classical or jazz any more? Listening to those genres is like speaking Latin, sure, you can still do it, but who the hell are you going to talk TO? Maybe no music ever goes fully away, I mean, some people still ride horses even though we have cars, bikes and skateboards. Maybe you could do this with the Rolling Stones, but we might not even have had the Stones if the Beatles hadn't come first. Elvis, sure, in some circles this story might still work if nobody remembered Elvis, but given the time frame, that might be pushing it.
Most likely this is a parallel timeline sort of deal, but where is the juncture point? Is this a world where Paul McCartney was never born, like one of his parents died during the war, or is he still alive somewhere on that world, doing something else? Maybe he just never met John Lennon at that garden party, and they both just stayed in mediocre bands and hung it up after a while. There's still rock music in this alternate world, because again, that sort of thing did go back to Elvis and Chuck Berry and Bill Haley and Buddy Holly, and other acts that all predated the Fab Four. There are a few other bands that don't exist in this alt-reality, but again, that's one of the gags so I'll refrain.
But I'm wondering if this whole film was sort of reverse-engineered as a new way to use the very famous Beatles songs that are generally so overplayed that you just can't use them in movies the same way any more, not without calling attention to them, and that's a problem. They'd be too distracting, unless you build a whole movie plot around them, like "Across the Universe" did. Some poor screenwriter needs to bend the plot over sideways and backwards just to have a character named "Prudence" who won't "come out and play", and that's another whole issue. Plus they're also so overpriced - the royalty fees are so high that very few films, other than the big blockbusters, can even afford them? And the big blockbusters are the ones that don't want them, so therefore they had to come up with another way to re-purpose all these songs, and so that's where we find ourselves.
It was a bit of a cheat, though, to have the main character looking up things on Google, to prove that some things don't exist in the world, because they produce no results on that famous search engine. It may serve the plot effectively, but it's still a cop out - it's show, don't tell.
The loss of Beatles music is one that we, the audience, can perhaps genuinely FEEL, because their music got covered by so many other acts, and was so influential that we'd all miss something, even if you don't care for the originals perhaps you'd miss the cover versions, like Joe Cocker's "With a Little Help from My Friends", or Otis Redding's "Day Tripper" or Earth Wind & Fire's "Got to Get You Into My Life". My collection runs quite deep, I'd probably free up half the space on my computer if Beatles songs suddenly disappeared, I'm talking about 10cc's version of "Across the Universe", Styx's "I Am the Walrus" and Toad the Wet Sprocket's cover of "Hey Bulldog". (Big Country's "Eleanor Rigby", The Hooters' "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", Stone Temple Pilots' "Revolution", Pat Benatar's "Helter Skelter", really, I could go on and on...)
And while the loss of Beatles music is portrayed throughout the film as a BAD thing, I'm going to put this out there - maybe not entirely. Just think, a world without the Bee Gees starring in the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" movie... (I love it, but most people despise it.). Or no "Caveman" movie, starring Ringo Starr, or "Shanghai Surprise", produced by George Harrison. No Yoko Ono music rising to prominence, with the help of John Lennon. No Linda McCartney singing back-up in the band Wings. See, I knew I could put a positive spin on this.
Jack Malik's musical career in this new reality starts to take off after he's able to remember the lyrics and the chords to the early Beatles songs, when nobody else can. He starts out with a 5-track demo, including "She Loves You", "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" and of course, "Yesterday". After gaining some attention with those tracks, he performs "In My Life" on a talk show, which brings him to the attention of Ed Sheeran, who's still a famous pop star in this reality, one of the few who survived not being influenced by the Beatles, somehow. Ed invites Jack to be his opening act on the next leg of his European tour, and before playing a concert in Moscow, Jack pretends to "write" "Back in the U.S.S.R." for the occasion, and it's a big success with the fans.
But here's where the story plays a little fast and loose with the rules of alternate realities, because even in the alternate 2019, it's been 30 years since the Soviet Union broke up, and nobody would even call it the U.S.S.R. any more. This gets pointed out by one character, but the anomaly is waived aside, as if it has almost no meaning. No, this is a problem, because the fans probably won't cheer for a song they don't understand.
The whole thing doesn't really make much sense, but then, it doesn't really have to. Still, some of the songs that the Beatles wrote were SO personal - "Penny Lane" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" were songs about growing up in Liverpool, and Jack Malik didn't do that. Making a quick visit to those places of note doesn't really justify him being able to sell them to an audience, in my opinion. Jesus, there were only a few hundred other songs to choose from, why couldn't he just release "Nowhere Man" or "I'm Looking Through You" - but hey, I'm a "Rubber Soul" man at heart, I'd just record that whole album start to finish. "Drive My Car", that's got universal appeal, everybody knows how to drive a car, or knows somebody who can.
Jack's meteoric rise to the top of the charts, standing on the backs of the non-existent Beatles, comes at a cost, though - touring, moving to L.A., getting rich by being packaged and marketed by the record label, and he misses his old friend/manager Ellie, who he had a crush on for years but never made a move on. Once famous, he seems to have a better shot, only she doesn't want to be anything but a schoolteacher, and she doesn't see herself dating the big rock star. This kind of doesn't make sense, because before the accident she was trying to make him famous, right? If that path had continued and she had been successful, what was she going to do then, split up with him just because of success? Then it turns out her love is conditional after all, forcing him to choose between fame and the woman he's realized that he cares for, and that's not cool, it's emotional blackmail. And wonky storytelling at best.
Jack lives in constant fear that the alt-reality Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr might track him down and expose him as a fraud, but that doesn't happen. There is one bit at the end, though, where he meets a few people who also remember the before-times (one woman looks a lot like Jane Asher, I thought they were going to say she was a former Beatle groupie or something, but no) and this leads to an experience where Jack finds at least one small way that this Beatle-less world was better, and it's a rather tender moment. No spoilers.
The original idea for this screenplay came from Jack Barth, a screenwriter who wondered that if he'd be able to pitch "Star Wars" if it suddenly didn't exist, and he was the only one who remembered it. That's a tough conundrum, in both cases, "Star Wars" and the Beatles came along at specific times, when the world needed them, even if the world didn't know it. I don't think you could catch lightning in a bottle twice, or a second time even if nobody remembered the first, because movies and songs reflect the zeitgeist of the unique times they were created, and you couldn't even write a song like "Getting Better" these days, because it has the line about how "I used to be cruel to my woman, I beat her and kept her apart from the things that she loved." Yeah, that's not gonna fly with modern audiences.
It's a cute idea, but I still have questions - I want to know where the historical divergent point is, and why Saturday Night Live is on Thursdays in the alternate reality. Am I the only one? This may not be actual time-travel, like it could be a dream or even Jack in the afterlife, but still they seem to have borrowed some plot points from "Hot Tub Time Machine".
Also starring Himesh Patel (last seen in "Tenet"), Lily James (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Kate McKinnon (last seen in "The Spy Who Dumped Me"), Ed Sheeran (last not-seen in "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker"), Joel Fry (last seen in "Paddington 2"), Sanjeev Bhaskar (ditto), Meera Syal (ditto), Harry Michell, Sophia Di Martino, Ellise Chappell, Justin Edwards (last seen in "The Duchess"), Sarah Lancashire (last seen in "The Dresser" (2015)), Alexander Arnold (last seen in "Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool"), Michael Kiwanuka, Vincent Franklin (last seen in "Bright Star"), Karma Sood, Gus Brown (last seen in "Judy"), Karl Theobald (last seen in "Mortdecai"), Dominic Coleman (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Javone Prince, Camilla Rutherford (last seen in "Phantom Thread"), Jaimie Kollmer, Camille Chen, David Lautman, with cameos from James Corden (last heard in "Smallfoot") and (redacted) (last seen in "Angela's Ashes").
RATING: 6 out of 10 private jets
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