US cultural imperialism at it's most insidious

Rating: 3/10 (25 September 2007)

The movie is a hotchpotch of stylistic borrowings, narrative misfires and, it must be said, some arresting visual delights but (and it's a big but...), in setting the movie against a background of of US anti-Vietnam war radicalism and drug culture, Taymor's movie paradoxically contrives to present a version of the 60s in which the Beatles didn't exist! As though the entire Beatles oeuvre had somehow emerged spontaneously from the American 60s youth experience! In so doing, the film makers, including the British screenwriters, Clement and LaFrenais, have unwittingly created a piece of American cultural imperialism no less insidious than the US military imperialism they seek, in part, to depict. Ironic, eh!