All work, no fun

Rating: 2/10 (8 December 2005)

First things first: A Hard Day's Night is astonishingly overrated as is, in my humble opinion, the band's music - not their actual impact on pop culture and stardom, mind you. This starchy marketing gadget is trying very hard to be a comedy, yet it is not remotely funny, unless Hallmark greeting cards make you roll in the aisles. Richard Lester's cutesy story would be half redeemed if it had some kind of historic, i.e. documentary value but since it chose to be an intelligence-defiant fictionalised account, it tells mainly of the inexistent acting skills of all involved and the inanity that comes with unrestrained business opportunism. After all, history shows that similarly shameful efforts done in subsequent decades, to name but ABBA: The Movie (1974) and the oft-discussed Can't Stop the Music (1980), have all failed in their ambition. But while these still had some unwitting qualities (the former for showing 1970s Australia and giving a fair account of the hype that surrounded the Swedes, the latter, a scatty exposition of the Village People get-together, for leaving turkey fans with arguably the best worst movie of all times), the Beatles plot is plain boring and, to some extent, an arrogant monument in self-indulgence. Come to think of it, A Hard Day's Night is maybe closer to another career spin-off, namely Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991), in that it is a crass experiment in public masturbation. It is therefore no wonder that Lester went on to direct such capital works as Superman II and III, and was still licking McCartney's boots when the 1990s and Visa-sponsored tours came around. Many have argued that the image is a great black-and-white grain, but I would retorque that such assertions are tantamount to celluloid fetishism. Face it: it's the sort of statement that invariably comes up when all bridges have been burned. In Bed with the Beatles, in any case, is all work, no fun.