It's borrowed cool and it doesn't work.

Rating: 1/10 (9 February 2008)

Every time I saw a preview of this movie, I literally held my breath. That's how high my expectations were. After all, it's a movie about Beatles music. How could it go wrong?
Let me tell you how.
I had posted a short and scathing review after my first viewing of the film, but decided to give it another chance, based on the number of people who recommended it to me. Now, instead of having wasted two hours of my life on this tedious, pretentious montage, I've wasted four, and I think Julie owes me, anyone else who watched Across the Universe, and particularly the Beatles, an apology.
I have to admit I'm not a huge Julie Taymor fan, and although Frieda was interesting, it worked marginally only to the extent that it relied heavily on the visual imagery of not only Frieda Kahlo, but also Diego Rivera. Nevertheless, it did follow that, if Taymor could mine those subjects successfully, she might have success with the greatest popular musical catalog of all time.
She didn't.
What she did do is force together, almost randomly, and often brutally, fully thirty-three Beatles tunes into a steaming dung heap of self-indulgence and pretension. I've seen drunken karaoke singers do better, and actually, I like the plot at karaoke night better than the flimsy story used to string this mess together. The love story ostensibly supported by so mercilessly torturing these musical masterpieces is touching enough, except that neither of the romantic leads, nor any of the other characters in the movie for that matter, is in any way even remotely likable. They are just as self-indulgent and pretentious as one must presume Taymor to be, based on her preposterously bombastic directorial style.
What's worse, Taymor seems not to understand at all any of the zeitgeist of the sixties, although she did witness it firsthand, albeit from the insular vantage point of a privileged upbringing, which is patently obvious in how she casts her central characters as devoid of any obligation to do anything other than indulge themselves. Instead, she apparently views the most turbulent period in modern history as a string of sentimental clichés, and the people who populated that era as two dimensional cardboard cutouts with only a passing resemblance to actual, multi-faceted human beings. I love how easy it is to pretend to be a revolutionary when you're away at school on mommy and daddy's dime. Now that's real life.
The movie itself is absolutely devoid of structure or substance, oftentimes breaking into song almost for lack of anything better to do. The music, to be sure, is sublime, and almost any visual accompaniment would benefit from it, but it should be the other way around. The visuals and the story should add something to the soundtrack, not rely upon it utterly. Oh, and Julie darling, for the record, the Beatles don't need pretentious directors conceptualizing meaning in their music. The greatest songwriting team in history already has that covered, sweetie.
This movie is an absolute and complete mess. I kept expecting Simon Cowell to chime in from his perch center stage that the singers, other than the rare and magnificent appearances of the likes of Joe Cocker and Bono, who must not have had anything better to do, were "simply dreadful" as Mr. Cowell is so fond of saying. Indeed, most of the singers would not have lasted past the first round on American Idol, and some even used (over-used) pitch machines to ameliorate the tone of their voices. How lame is that?
As someone who remembers the Beatles not simply as nostalgia, but as something that was integral to my youth, as someone who reveres John Lennon and his contribution to music, peace and love, I have to imagine that none of the Beatles, particularly John, would be pleased with this silly, shallow and trivial music video. I also have to object to the comparison of this disaster to Moulin Rouge. It's like comparing hamburger to filet mignon. One is a ground up mess. The other is perfection. One is a postmodern masterpiece. One is derivative, flaccid and unredeemably bad. I think we know which is which here.
And what was with the Jimi Hendrix/Janis Joplin characters? Are we supposed to accept that as artistic license or character compositing? It was just silly, and, frankly, cheap, like the video clips of Walter Cronkite and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It's borrowed cool and it doesn't work. This movie has no cool of its own, and in the end, it was painfully, embarrassingly bad and should be a period at the end of the sentence that has been Ms. Taymor's run as a feature film director.