Wonderful Music, Dazzling Graphics!

Rating: 8/10 (1 September 2013)

I have watched this movie three times over the past few years. I enjoyed it the first time I saw it. And it keeps getting better to me. With movies based on the work of superb musicians, it's awfully hard to do the songs as well as they did. The songs in this movie never make me feel like I'd rather listen to the Beatles. The production values are great, the voices are good, textured, emotional, talented. But the songs are never upstaged.
The graphics in the movie convey the full impact of the 60s mixture of free love, psychedelics, and civil unrest in some purely dazzling mixes of imagination and hard core replication of the bare gut feelings of the era, realities and emotions as spot on as any I've seen in any movie about that dreadful-wonderful moment in time. I did my share of drugs in the day, but I'd take this movie over many of those experiences. And that's High Praise, if you'll forgive the pun.
Some say the story line is too naive, too simplistic. Maybe to them. But it has never seemed so to me. I watch a lot of romance movies, a lot of musicals. Boy always meets girl and loses girl and wins girl's heart in the end. Some movies make it seem more believable than others, but you know, I'm not sure those were the ones I liked best. As long as our boy and girl end up together, the romance movie has done its job. I will not fault this movie for not doing its job.
The movie's depictions of the hard realities of the 60s was certainly not naive or simplistic in my mind. I lived those days, very much as they lived them in this movie. The romantic overlay onto those troubled events was a necessary device for fully utilizing the diversity of Beatles songs that spoke to our generation about life and love, joy and sorrow, despair and, always, hope.
If you want to hear something bad about this movie, look elsewhere. Unlike Anthony, I DO come to praise Caesar, not to bury him.
Samm