Across The Universe (Julie Taymor, 2007)

[Antoine Doinel]

I generally hate musicals. I hate Bono. But I have to say I really enjoyed that clip. I wish more Hollywood films were that unabashedly stylistic.

[Matt]

Ooooh, the trippy colors!

[tavernier]

I'd rather watch Magical Mystery Tour again.

[Barmy]

I'm saving my $11.00 for the director's cut of "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band".

[oldsheperd]

My movie musical is going to be set to the first two Nuggets boxsets. Now that is good rock and roll.

[Oedipax]

Ooooh, the trippy colors!

Beyond horrible. It looks like someone playing around with FCP's 3-way color corrector for the first time. Horrible artifacts abound - did they shoot this on DV? I do not exaggerate when I say it looks like it could be a Production 101 student film.

[Matt]

It looks like someone playing around with FCP's color corrector for the first time.

I was thinking Video Toaster on a Commodore Amiga, but that just shows my age more than anything else.

[Antoine Doinel]

Beyond horrible. It looks like someone playing around with FCP's 3-way color corrector for the first time. Horrible artifacts abound - did they shoot this on DV? I do not exaggerate when I say it looks like it could be a Production 101 student film.

I'm sure the less than stellar visual quality has less to do with the film and more to do with the NY Times shoddy media player.

[Oedipax]

I'm sure the less than stellar visual quality has less to do with the film and more to do with the NY Times shoddy media player.

Not at all. It's easy to spot the difference in a good quality source that has been badly compressed and a bad quality source that has been compressed well. It's more to do with weird fringing artifacts I'm seeing around the edges of the actors (like a really bad keying job on green screen footage), the harshness of the highlights (a DV giveaway), and the overall lackluster quality of the colors (similar to what you would get if you just cranked the saturation and pushed the correction knobs around willy-nilly). Psychedelic it ain't, just painfully amateurish looking. I mean the player might be compounding it, but I'd be shocked if the film looked great given this sample, it would have to be a night and day difference.

[Matt]

I'm sure it was shot on 35mm (by Bruno Delbonnel, who is no slouch), but I'm also sure it was all post-produced digitally, including the addition of numerous effects of questionable quality. If IMDb is to be trusted, there are a lot of digital effects in the film.

[toiletduck!]

Awww... shit, shit, shit.

I was looking forward to this tremendously. Work is preventing me from checking the clip out, but there's some opinions I trust very much here calling it out. I'll be shelling out my ten bucks anyway, but dammit, trepidation's a bitch.

-Toilet Dcuk

[Kirkinson]

Beyond horrible. It looks like someone playing around with FCP's 3-way color corrector for the first time. Horrible artifacts abound - did they shoot this on DV? I do not exaggerate when I say it looks like it could be a Production 101 student film.

I've been looking forward to this, so it hurts to have to say that yours is the exact same thought I had, right down to first-time fiddling with the FCP color corrector. I'll hold out some hope still, as we're seeing this clip totally out of context and there are many other images in the trailer that I think are rather stunning. But my optimism is pretty crushed.

EDIT: There are several more clips online, none of which look nearly as dreadful as the bus scene. Optimism is partially restored, though there are still several things I'm not so sure about. The musical scenes that aren't big set pieces (e.g.) remind me of Penny Woolcock's film of John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which was filmed as if it was a straight drama/thriller except that everyone was singing opera. That film never really reached a point where that dichotomy was comfortable; hopefully this won't be a problem with Across the Universe since so much of the film appears to be highly stylized, though that could create an entirely different sort of troublesome dichotomy. At the very least, I'm intrigued.

[kinjitsu]

You program music with an image and then people are desensitized. —Julie Taymor

Stephen Holden and Roger Ebert decidedly sensitized.

[tavernier]

John Simon, of all people, reviews it. (He dislikes it, of course.)

[rs98762001]

Thanks for that. I really miss reading Simon's take on movies. Not that I usually agreed with his opinion, but I don't think there was ever a critic so willfully acidic or hilarious. I'll never forget his line about Cybil Shepard looking like "Mussolini in drag" in Taxi Driver.

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Reviews like that one of Simon's convince me that he needs to post here. Anyway, I'm just stunned that he had good things to say about the movie.

[oldsheperd]

This is a little but off topic, but I always felt that the legend of John Lennon tends to forget that he left his wife and first kid kind of high and dry to run off with Yoko Ono. He definitely didn't treat Julian the way he treated Sean. I still like his music and message, but I prefer to see him warts and all.

[tavernier]

This is a little but off topic, but I always felt that the legend of John Lennon tends to forget that he left his wife and first kid kind of high and dry to run off with Yoko Ono. He definitely didn't treat Julian the way he treated Sean. I still like his music and message, but I prefer to see him warts and all.

The Broadway audience must agree with you, because when a Yoko-purified musical about his life, Lennon, opened a few years ago, it was panned and closed quickly.

[John Cope]

Armond White doesn't like it. Not that that's any real surprise. Still, as usual, he does make some valid observations that few others probably would, like this for instance:

Taymor's characters awaken from the proverbial deep sleep of the 1950s—another pop culture fallacy she hasn't thought through. (Did Little Richard, Rosa Parks or J.D. Salinger inspire no one?) Using her characters' star-crossed adventures, Taymor charts the social tumult of the Civil Rights movement, women's rights, student protests, gay rights, drugs and Vietnam—as if topicality was what made The Beatles matter.

On matters of "pop", Armond has a unique sensitivity which I trust.

[Svevan]

This movie just seems too literal - naming characters Lucy, Jude, and Prudence is so facile and predictable that reading the cast list on IMDB exposes the plot and key songs. The intersection between artful musicality and banal plotting is an easy-out that assumes the audience is dumb and quickly manipulated, but it's worked before.

[tavernier]

Those character names are the worst thing about the movie--you cringe every time you hear someone's name: especially when the lesbian Prudence introduces her new "friend" Rita. Oy.

I was waiting for someone named Rocky Raccoon or Bungalow Bill, but thankfully, Taymor didn't go that far.

[Magic Hate Ball]

Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite

I am going to see this alone because I am certain that the sheer embarassment of sitting next to somebody I know during this sequence will be mortifying. Why can't they just make a film adaptation of Love? The darkness of the theater is just perfect for Mr. Kite; I'm a sucker for surreal and scary circuses, and this is neither. What's worse is that not only is this song one of the most open to visual interpretation and they missed the mark completely, but it has Eddie Izzard ad-libbing like Mike Myers in Cat in the Hat.

I am disgruntled.

[domino harvey]

based on these clips, it's too bad Joe Roth couldn't cut this film down to zero minutes.

[toiletduck!]

I wasn't a big fan of Mr. Kite, but I Am The Walrus looked like a deliberate choice and worked just fine.

But the whole thing is (as somewhat expected) just a skeleton for a few amazing songpieces. All is right in the world as I'm watching Let It Be or Come Together or Happiness Is A Warm Gun or a handful of others, but as a whole, it's generally uninspiring.

I'd be curious to see what studio had in mind. The film could have used some big trimming in the song department, but only with heavy heavy work on the script, which was obviously functional and nothing else.

-Toilet Dcuk

[wattsup32]

Trainwreck. In every connotation. I will say that Taymor remains the most consistently stunning visual creator in the business. But, her story telling is poor at best. The only time she's pulled off a story was when it was written for her by Shakespeare (Titus). Still, I keep going to see her films and operas because the spectacle can't be beaten.

There were are too many "lead" characters with far too many associates for her to adequately explain any of them. So, in the end there are a good 6-8 I don't know well enough to care about and another 10-15 that I don't know at all.

It seemed like a failed endeavor from the outset. If you love the Beatles, then why would you want to see their songs turned into showtunes? If you don't like them, why would you go at all?