A Beautiful Silent Movie

Rating: 6/10 (23 August 2008)

If you are not a fan of musicals, this is not the film that will change your heart. The singing and the faces of the actors is just so thoroughly "stage-y", it's hard for me to put it any other way. It is close, but not so bad, to how I feel about how inauthentic kids are in shows like "Barney." Mix in choreographed scenes of football, fighting, army enlistment and even bowling may also cause a twinge for some, like me, who are skeptical of musicals.
Of course, going in you sort of expect these things will happen. It's just that after "Frida" and "Titus" (which by the way I think is her current and still reigning magnum opus to date), I was really looking forward to Julie Taymor's new film. But by the time this was released, I knew I could wait for video. Alas.
That being said, this is a fantastic film from a point of view of set design. I'm kidding with the subject of this post, but not by much. And some of the dancing at times was interesting (the flippy-floppy salesmen, the careening doctor before Nurse Hayek is injected into the film). I also enjoyed the Butoh-like scenes of Vietnamese women, the Bread and Puppet Theater escapades, and them thar' Blue Meanies. But even the background shots of stores in pseudo-Greenwhich Village...and Jude's sketches in the apartment, deep kudos to Don Nace whom I believe did much if not all of that work. The psychedelic effects do a mild overdose, in fitting with the period.
As for the "cleverness" of the songs worked into a story. I don't want to pooh-pooh it, but my loose impression is that it would not be so hard to do. It was interesting how open some of the Beatles' lyrics are, and yet they do have enough spot-on love songs to rely upon as a staple in this film. It's not like Taymor is constructing a film out of the lyrics of Jon Anderson from Yes. Anyways, while I'm not a phoney Beatlemaniac, most of the renditions here were far from innovative, and far too close the the Muzak-ified trauma encountered in elevators and grocery stores through-out the 80s (till whenever they stopped that horrible mind-control experiment).
Ultimately I didn't find this film so polarizing, just a solid 6 in my book. One small stage step for the fans of "true" theater, despite others citing Bono here, I think Eddy Izzard danced rings around the former Mr Hewson. Izzard's high-flying Mr. Kite was worth watching in the bonus takes on the DVD, he takes the inauthenticity of a musical and outlandishly expands upon it, while it appears riffing the lyrics off the top of his costumed hat.
6/10 Thurston Hunger