BEFORE: OK, I promise that after tonight I'm getting off the Beatles, although those four lads are likely to pop up again in the countdown. Of course, as soon as I settled on the final order for my 50 films, I thought of one more concert film that I always wanted to watch, and never quite got around to, and I figure if I don't do it now, then when am I going to do it? But the problem with concert films is that they're all about THAT band, and in this case I'm thinking of a film with a band that has a few people in it that don't do a heck of a lot of interviews. Ah, screw it, it's the Talking Heads, and I've never seen "Stop Making Sense". But after I thought about it, I figured there was no possible way to work it in.
Only I just checked, and David Byrne is interviewed in two other films that are on the list - now, if they were next to each other, I could just slip "Stop Making Sense" right in there between them, only they're NOT next to each other. So that means I had to tear the list apart and put it back together a different way, shuffling some things around to see if I could keep those three films with Byrne in a row, because that would be the only way to work it in.
Success! I had to break some links up and find some new ones, but now the 50-documentary chain is a 51-documentary chain, and the linking is preserved. That's it, no more films added. But I'll be very upset at the end of the year now if I'm one film over and I can't end 2018 the way I want, which would lead to me to conclude that working in "Stop Making Sense" was a bad idea. I guess we'll see.
The Beatles carry over again from "How the Beatles Changed the World", but only in archive footage, but hey, that's OK. A few of their friends from the last film who were interview subjects were also interviewed for this one.
THE PLOT: A documentation of the influences that went on to help create the seminal album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".
AFTER: This is another film being scratched off my Netflix list, just like last night's film. I'm already making progress in getting that list down to a more reasonable level. (Plus I just finished watching "Stranger Things" season 2, and I know there's probably a season 3 coming, but I'm still taking it off my list for now, to give me that false sense of accomplishment...).
I thought this would be more of a behind-the-scenes, "making of" for the Sgt. Pepper album, but it's just not. There are a few stories that relate to the production of Sgt. Pepper's, like the fact that Lennon borrowed real service medals from Pete Best's family for their military-style costumes, and he was very nice about making sure that those medals were returned safely, but that story doesn't really relate to the making of the music. It's nice, but I was hoping for more of the nuts and bolts, the craft of songwriting or music production involved. Huh, the trivia section on IMDB is telling me that there's not a single note of Beatles music in this documentary. I suppose that explains it, it was made on the cheap and someone didn't want to pay for music rights.
The people interviewed, however, are friends, family and associates, like John Lennon's sister (I didn't know he had one...) and Freda Kelly, who worked at Apple Records (and there's a whole documentary about her, too, but I'm avoiding that one...) and a secretary from Apple Records who typed up lyrics for George Harrison, and helped him come up with the title of "Within You Without You". Umm, good job? So in a way, this film is a companion piece for "Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years" because it sort of picks up with the Beatles in 1966, right after they stopped touring, and were in the studio working on Sgt. Pepper's, and interviewers would ambush them and ask them what was coming next. People were so anxious for new material, as Sgt. Pepper's was taking so long, that "Strawberry Fields Forever" was released early - it was going to be part of the album, but then became just a single on its own, or a double A-side single with "Penny Lane".
Now, the bad thing about this double A-side single was that the Beatles then felt that the song couldn't be released on the upcoming album (it was released later on "Magical Mystery Tour") plus the sales for each single only counted as half - both singles got the same position on the charts after splitting the sales, so "Strawberry Fields Forever", which would have been a #1 hit if they had released it with a B-side, only got to #2 on the charts. (This is not to be confused with a single released with a b-side where both songs became hits, like "We Will Rock You" and "We Are the Champions" by Queen.)
Anyway, "Strawberry Fields Forever" was not only another groundbreaking psychedelic song, with the Lennon vocal eerily slowed down, it had one of the first music videos, with the Beatles running through a field, with the film footage also slowed down, run backwards, and such. True to form, it was the Beatles "being weird". People remember seeing Ringo jump up impossibly high into a tree, when in fact he was probably jumping down from the tree, as the footage was being run in reverse. I remember experimenting with this sort of thing with a Super-8 camera in film school, and I logically figured out that if I didn't get a camera with the reverse function, I could instead hold the camera upside-down, and then in the editing room I could just cut and flip a section of the film and that created the same reverse-motion effect.
But after three films, I've definitely hit the wall on Beatles information - some of the same stories from last night are repeated here, like the one about the Beatles going off on the retreat to India with the Maharishi, and Cynthia Lennon missing the train to Wales - yeah, I've heard that one before. And the flap over Lennon saying the Beatles were "bigger than Jesus" is explored again. Definitely time for me to move on, but I'll circle back to some of the Beatles again, definitely.
Also starring Tony Bramwell (carrying over from "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Bill Harry (ditto), Pete Best, Julia Baird, Andre Barreau, Jenny Boyd, Ray Connolly, Tony Crane, Hunter Davies, Steve Diggle, Neil Harrison, Freda Kelly, Billy Kinsley, Simon Napier-Bell, Philip Norman, Barbara O'Donnell, Andy Peebles, Steve Turner, and archive footage of Jane Asher, Pattie Boyd, Brian Epstein, George Martin, Yoko Ono, Maureen Starkey, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones (all carrying over from "How the Beatles Changed the World"), Syd Barrett, Barry Gibb, Maurice Gibb, Marianne Faithfull, Cilla Black, Cynthia Lennon, Julian Lennon, Keith Moon (last seen in "Quadrophenia"), Roger Waters, Twiggy, Englebert Humperdinck, Jimi Hendrix.
RATING: 5 out of 10 meditation sessions
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