Word: taymor
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...years ago, the Beatles and Bob Dylan, and a lot of other talented young folks, wrote and performed terrific songs that opened the minds of people my age, expanded the pop-music vocabulary and generally made listeners feel smarter, cooler, better. And now we have two ambitious movies - Julie Taymor's Across the Universe and Todd Haynes's I'm Not There, both of which played this week at the Toronto Film Festival - that are carpeted with the music of the Fab Four and the man from Hibbing, Minnesota...
...area that Across the Universe spans. In its plot and performances, the movie is ordinary at best; at times during the film, you'll be stranded in perplexity. But in the way it looks and sounds, it's a tonic to two senses. No surprise here, since Taymor has lavished her extravagant theatrical imagination on Broadway musicals (The Lion King), operas (The Magic Flute at the Metropolitan Opera) and movies (a gory, oneiric Titus - Shakespeare as a splatter film - and the more pedestrian Frida). And the arranger-producers of the 33 songs include T Bone Burnett, who turned...
...have the writers and Taymor injected much life into their characters. Jude loves Lucy, then gets jealous for spending too much time working in a radical students' group. Sadie, the lead singer in a band where JoJo plays guitar, gets steamed when he upstages her with a Hendrix riff. Prudence loves JoJo unrequitedly. Max is always in a snit. Often the characters aren't people at all so much as song cues ("Dear Prudence," "Hey Jude"). It's no wonder that Joe Roth, of the amusingly named Revolution Studios, got onto a tangle with Taymor by recutting the film...
...even those resistant to or unmoved by the story can appreciate Taymor's settings of the songs, and the arrangements by T-Bone Burnett and other studio masters. The movie speeds up the 2/4 "I've Just Seen a Face" (for a zestful scene in a bowling alley) and slows down the ballad "If I Fell" (which Wood does very nicely), but the songs are flexible enough to still sound great. To invoke the Detroit riots, a black boy sings "Let It Be," which, upon his death, is taken up by a gospel choir at his funeral. When Max goes...
...sound track to a '60s love story splashed on a canvas of social upheaval: race riots, student unrest and draft resistance. What did the four fab Englishmen have to do with all these American crises? We have no idea, and neither does the script. But director Julie Taymor is a picture magician, weaving the fine old songs into a psychedelic tapestry of animation and choreography...