Word: taymor
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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...
...star turns are less important here than the visual vibe that Taymor brings to the songs. Strip away the plot - which would be my solution to the wrangles over final cut - and Across the Universe has about an hour of creatively illustrated songs. You could almost start a cable channel based on this aesthetic. Just think: What if a channel like MTV had... music videos...