Galaxy Quest

This was written at the time of the film's release in theaters and a cursory glance at it a couple weeks ago (in between regularly scheduled programs) revealed just as much enjoyment and admiration as the first time I watched it. "Never give up. Never surrender."

Galaxy Quest (Dean Parisot, 1999) Up until J.J. Abrams' re-boot, this 1999 release was probably the best "Star Trek" film that Paramount Studios never made.

 

Unfortunately, it wasn't "Star Trek" but a spoof of the phenomenon that Paramount inherited from the originating production house Desilu (and apparently didn't know what to do with—at the the time of Galaxy Quest's release, they were in between producing the Next Generation movies Insurrection and Nemesis, which effectively killed the series). 

 

Still, this film is an affectionate send-up with a fine cast doing good comedic...and dramatic...work, and manages to pull off something of a miracle, making one one embrace the cliches of the original while at the same time making delicious fun of them. And given the ubiquity of "Star Trek", fans still recognized the show, backwards, forwards and behind-the-scenes, even when it was in the disguise of another Intellectual Property.

At a sci-fi convention, the cast of a long-cancelled television series "Galaxy Quest" is going through the motions of meeting their fans, even though the show has been off the air for years, and the actors are having a difficult time finding other work due to "type-casting." They squabble, each remembering personal quirks and on-set peccadilloes, either jostling for the limelight or just "doing the gig," and by happenstance, find themselves portraying their characters in a real outer-space adventure, persuaded by desperately seeking aliens who have caught transmissions of the show as it zipped through space at light-speed, and not only liked what they saw...they bought it hook, line, and beridium sphere.

It's a fun conceit, combining the background stories of actors with the characters they're playing put into a situation where their attributes as actors inform their actions in a real-life approximation of the roles they play. It stands to reason that the traits they embody to play the roles would come to the fore when reality sets in—it implies, of course, that they could do all this without "handlers," make-up assistants, or even (ya know...) decent writers and directors. It's fun to imagine.  

And the writers of the film have the "Star Trek" types down: the blow-hard lead actor (Tim Allen) who looks after himself until the chips are down; the second-in-command alien character—a fan-favorite—portrayed by an actor (Alan Rickman) who aspires to more prestigious roles and makes efforts to distance himself from his most popular one—until the role's inherent dignity and importance occurs to him; the actress (Sigourney Weaver, paralleling both Lt. Uhura and her "Ripley" character in Alien) trying to rise above the inherent sexism of her role, opening "hailing frequencies"; and the "also-ran's" (Tony Shalhoub and Sam Rockwell) who are stuck in their careers, forever typecast and unable to move on, bitterly watching their co-stars take better advantage.

There's also a tip of the hat to the faithful fans who start out as convention geeks, then play a pivotal role in the survival of the crew and their mission—and they don't even have to do it with a write-in campaign to the network.

Fiction becomes fact becomes fiction becomes fact; Galaxy Quest is an inter-dimensional trek on a Universe that's folded in on itself, through all the frontiers influenced by TOS and its progeny that explored new frontiers on a journey that seems on-going. It's also one of the best examples of a rare film genre that usually comes off as lame, childish, or patronizing—the science fiction comedy.

Avatar: The Way of Water

It's All About...Family

or 

Fleeing Na'vi Dad
 

I was one of the few inhabitants of this planet that was unimpressed with James Cameron's Avatar—the most popular movie of all time (based on inflated movie receipts, truth be told). I felt it was Cameron at his worst—recycling shop-worn ideas under a veneer of technology and engineering—while also being a fun watch (if you didn't take it too damned seriously).

 

The sequel (first sequel) Avatar: The Way of Water was released at Christmas, and I was in no hurry to see it. I wanted to avoid big crowds, I wasn't "enthused" because I was underwhelmed (while being simultaneously over-stimulated) by the first and expected "more of the same." I also knew that it would be around in theaters for awhile, maybe even held in 3-D (where most movie-chains drop the refinements down to "Standard version" after a week). But, mostly I waited because James Cameron was in no hurry to release it, so why should I be in a hurry to see it. I mean, what's the rush? It wasn't going anywhere.

I did go see it, finally, in XD and 3-D. You might as well go the full yard. And, I found that to be a wise decision, as it brought up many aspects to the film, which I wouldn't even have noticed had I seen it "flat" and "standard." In fact, what is a tad revolutionary in the film and—to me, anyway—makes it worth seeing are the technical aspects of the film, which have achieved a new threshold in presentation of-screen.

 

It's certainly not the story, which can be Cameron's Achilles Heel. Concept, sure. But, what he does with it, not so much. His movies look good on paper, like an architect's sketch, but the blue-prints fleshing it out may reveal some flaws where hard reality conflicts with imagination.

A:TWOW begins with Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), now permanently on his surrogate-planet, Pandora, living with his mate Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña, who clearly knows how to eke out a subtle, effective performance from motion capture) and their kids, Notoyam (Jamie Flatters), Lo'ak (Britain Dalton), and Tuk (Trinity Jo-Li Bliss), as well as adopted kids Kiri (Sigourney Weaver), the child of Dr. Grace Augustine's avatar, produced by immaculate conception of something, and "Spider" (Jack Champion), the son of Col. Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang), both of whom died in the original film.

Well, they're baaa-ack. Dr. Grace as a hologramatic image and spiritual Obi-Wan, and Quaritch as a hologramatic image and his own avatar (something, as I recall, that the original Col. Miles was dead-set against...oh, well...blue-prints). Quaritch's avatar is given one of those too-lame-to-be-inspirational Quaritch pep-talks about how he needs to man-up and take down Jake Sully because...well, he has to. Jake beat him last time fair and square, by having his wife shoot him, but...ya know...there was a conspiracy and rigged voting machines and Quaritch has no life but a huge ego and...blue-prints. There IS no reason for him to revenge himself against Sully, even if one doesn't include the fact the original character is dead and his avatar is only vengeful-by-proxy...and he's told to do it.

As specious as all this seems, it's enough to send Jake and family packing to another part of Pandora as refugees and depend on the kindness of the Metkayina tribe who live on Pandora's eastern seaboard and have a society based mostly on water and the denizens therein.* They must fight discrimination from the Metkayina ("they'll take our jobs!" and, more legitimately, "they'll lead the Earthers right to us!"). Along the way, Jake's kids want to sit at the BIG kid's table, and complicate matters. 

Not that there's much to contemplate. Earthers are bad. Pandorans are good. Earthers-gone-Native are good. Sometimes, parents just don't understand. At some point, Belle from The Little Mermaid should show up and do an "I know, right?"

"Jake! This is where we first met!"

 

But, as simple as it is, it's a three hour movie and Cameron fills the spaces with a lot of his Greatest Hits: two equally matched fighters slugging it out in an industrial setting (pick a Terminator, any Terminator), learning how to manage your breathing underwater (The Abyss) and finally, having to get out from under-deck of a sinking boat (Titanic). Things look different in Metkayina—the folks are greenish around their gills—but it doesn't matter where Cameron goes, there he is. It's very familiar.

Except when it's not. Kudos to the design team to make the Metkayina look like a different culture (I think, by now, movie-goers are hep to accepting and even embracing that concept). But, the real eye-opener is how good the CGI (mostly from New Zealand's WETA) has gotten. Performances are sharper and subtle (as I said, Saldana shines at this), and they even manage to make a Sigourney Weaver character look "right"—I remember there were audible grunts of disappointment at the appearance of her avatar in the last one as the CGI looked "uncanny-valleyish."

Look at the subtlety of expression in Saldana's character.

She is clearly giving Sully the "Dad's being a little heavy-handed" look

 

The CGI characters are so good and so realized that when a real-life human being shares the screen with them, they look flat and slightly less real (the human actors do have the disadvantage of being subject to gravity) than their pixelated counterparts. Maybe it's the effects of 3-D capture, or the differences between reflected lighting and computerized grading, but this is particularly true in the character of Spider, who often gets lost in the wash of images and is bound by the limits of movement bound by the laws of physics. Now, that will be an interesting challenge for Cameron and other film-makers in the future.

There are still issues with close objects "fritzing" as they move across the screen, so maybe objects should be less enfolded in the scenery.** Where the 3-D really, really works are in shots of floating screens and in the underwater shots that dominate the second hour of the film. Cameron went to the trouble of filming his motion-captured actors in a studio water-tank swimming about and there's something about the heavy influence of water and the languid way things move in it that feels particularly realistic with CGI rendering and 3-D projection, far more effectively than with the open-air scenes. It's a particularly effect feat of magical image-making that is incredibly credible and remarkable.

Now, if they could apply the same ingenuity to the scripting as they apply to the technology, that would be something. Maybe like losing the Quaritch character and its lunatic revenge story-line, would allow Cameron to concentrate on something worth the effort, both on his and our parts.

 

* Jake never once thinks that his leaving may not deter Quadritch from laying waste to the Omaticaya, anyway. Because he was so subtle and nuanced in his approach LAST time?

** There is a caveat to this: some of the "Ridley-Scott-fluff" that Cameron inserts into the frame doesn't always "work" but his insects were good enough to provoke the kid in the seat in front of me to reach out to try and grab them. That's a good (if amusing) testament.

Vantage Point (2008)

Vantage Point (Pete Travis, 2008) An American news crew sits in their van in Salamanca, Spain, technically coordinating coverage of a Presidential visit. No sooner does POTUS (William Hurt) take the podium when two shots ring out, sending him flying, to the horror of the news-people, the Secret Service, the crowded throng and the millions who are (probably not) watching at home. For a split-second, there is reaction all around, and then the confusion starts: where did the shots come from, who's that running guy, get the president to the hospital, foot-chase. At the end of it, a lot of people are dead, and the ramifications are huge, while the news channels try to play catch up...and one suspects never will.

   

This one's just plain crazy. The same 15 minutes, played out, rewound, clock started again, and POV switched. Technically, it's a daunting challenge, with all the shots of things that have gone before shifted into the background, and having to match what went before in the same time-frame that it did before, although one later incident seems to be fudged a little longer to allow some exposition in one segment (all the better to build suspense). The director, Pete Travis, mostly known for his British television work) does one thing that always drives me nuts in pot-boiler novels—he takes you to one pop-eye inducing moment...and then...stops and goes back. Next chapter. We'll get back to that...

That would make it "a relentless page-turner" if it had a spine, but you're stuck watching the movie, wondering, "Yeah, but what about..." Annoying. But, not enough to make you hit the "Eject" button.

Source Code did this a little better this year, and had the decency to make all the populace in it more than innocent by-standers.  Most of the characters are there to serve a function in the plot, rather then being motivated, save for Dennis Quaid's Secret Service agent, who has just come back to active duty after taking a bullet for this President six months earlier. The speculation is that he might be a little gun-shy (if so, he wouldn't be put on active duty, now would he?) 

This is the problem with the film. Good concept (even if it is Akira Kurosawa's), but the deeper we go into the movie and the more we find out about this 15 minutes, the situation becomes less and less likely, and more and more contrived. It has the kinetic feel of an episode of "24" compressed and spread out over a ninety minute running time. And, it isn't even "The Rashomon Effect," where (when it's done well) the differing perspectives are colored by the person telling the story. Here, facts are facts—it just happens from different angles, how the person feels about it doesn't enter into things. In that regard, Vantage Point is just a standard detective thriller, more about information dissemination in an electronic 24 hour news cycle, rather than saying anything about the human condition—besides the obvious jumping to conclusions. The film begins and ends in that van and the broadcast of events, making the point that there's a photon-filter between truth and knowledge. At the end, the news audience does not know, and may never know exactly what went down. But, given what we already know about the efficacy of reporting "while it happens," the endless speculation and rumor-airing and other apocrypha and opinion that's offered as journalism, it is a bit of a hollow exercise, a "gimmick" movie without that much to offer.

Is it a good movie? I don't know.

WALL•E

Written at the time of the film's release...

Spare-partacus
or
"All creatures tread across the rubble of ruined civilizations. The trick is to keep moving. No animal ever goes about dispensing shallow compassion."                                             Rita Mae Brown

After what I felt was a genre and craft high-point with the 2006 Ratatouille comes the last of the original Pixar concepts (devised on a napkin at a lunch just before the completion of Toy Story between John Lasseter, Peter Doctor, Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft, which included story ideas for A Bug's Life, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and this film) directed by Stanton, whose Finding Nemo was, itself, the craft high-point for its time. By now, the work of the Pixar pixilators is so assured that, really, all they have to do is show that they can do variations of tone, and they do that with Wall•E, the little trash-compactor that could.

This charming film starts out on a barren, blasted planet Earth, devoid of all life, save for one cockroach and a mobile trash-compactor, whose sole preoccupation for the last 700 years (when humans vacated the planet on elephantine space-cruise-liners) is to pick up the trash, scrunch it into cubes, then make big piles of said cubes, like rusting ancient Aztec ruins, dwarfing their man-made counter-parts, city skyscrapers. Wall•E is apparently the only Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth-Class) left, stripping others of his type for parts, and he works his dutiful existence scrunching by day, and collecting odd bits of human jetsam, and perpetually watching an old copy of Hello Dolly!, and yearning for companionship, before backing-up onto his rotating work-bench, and rocking himself to sleep-mode.

It is a melancholy vision of Hell, not unlike the empty, echoing, New York of I Am Legend, but with pelting dust-storms and no signs of life, not even encroaching vegetation. One watches a fast scene of Wall•E giving chase in a rubble-strewn long-shot and can't help marveling how far the artistry has come from Toy Story. Not only do things look photo-realistic, but there's also a fine atmospheric haze over the scene, giving it life and depth.

The film is also rich in satire, with the future Earth a global economy dominated by the BnL (Buy n' Large) Stores, which have control of everything. The human populations are adrift in ocean-liner-type space barges, that might be called "The Lard Boat" as the human passengers have become infantile all-consuming non-producing blobs in floating lounge-chairs while television screens perpetually float six inches in front of their faces.

It is funny, touching, and definitely dark in its view of the future, and Wall•E finds himself the cog in the wheel for a robot and human revolution against mechanical Masters eager to maintain the Status Quo.

Two quibbles, nothing alarming enough to distract from any enjoyment of the film, but still things to ponder: Ben Burtt provides the voice of Wall•E as well as the sounds of all the other things in the film as sound designer and mixer, and he does the same thing here that he's done with the recent re-mixed "Star Wars" films, which is prioritize mixing the sound effects over the music, thereby drowning out Thomas Newman's quirky, enjoyable pastiche score--let him sound-design and mix his work, sure, but keep out of the final mix; and, one wishes that Pixar had the scrap to end the film on a minor chord, rather than it's crowd-and-kid-pleasing major one. If they had left the fate of one of the characters ambiguous, Pixar would have had their own version of Chaplin's bittersweet ending for City Lights.

These are small quibbles, and certainly don't detract from the mammoth effort and resulting entertainment that keeps coming out of "Pixar," which is becoming the only real sure-bet in Hollywood.

A Monster Calls

When the Bough Breaks
or 
That's Ent-ertainment!

Seeing a lot of depressing films can really put the zap on your head. Makes you not want to write about them. Makes you not want to see anything for awhile. But you have to resist that urge.

Because you might miss something brilliant.

Something like A Monster Calls.

A Monster Calls didn't do any "business," really. It had that icky "The BFG" feeling, the kind that keeps away audiences, even family audiences, because it seems it might be too frightening or nightmarish to families who don't think twice about taking their kids to The Avengers or some lumpen play-doh-pixel animation that won't inspire sleepless nights—for kids or their parents (Hey, Hollywood, Mom and Dad gotta sleep!) That stuff is safe, like sugar-water; it keeps them bouncing on the seat-springs for 90 minutes and when the rush is over and done with, then it's safe to put 'em in bed, with their revenge-fantasies and sermon-stories cavorting like empty calories in their heads.  And in the morning, they burst like bubbles, because there's nothing challenging there. At least, nothing like real life.

Who needs that, after all? For that, you can stay home.

Conor O'Malley (Lewis McDougall) is having a nightmare—the one "with the darkness the wind and the screaming." In it, he is in a blasted landscape, a graveyard that has opened up, more grave than yard now, and he is desperately clinging to something hanging over the edge. A look into the pit and he sees his mother (Felicity Jones...of Rogue One) desperately grasping his arm, trying to keep from falling into the abyss. But, he can't prevent it; he's just 12, somewhere as the narration tells us "too young to be an adult; too old to be a kid."

Conor wakes up from his night-mare and goes to his day-one. He makes breakfast—cold cereal—gets dressed, takes one look in at his mother and trudges to school where he sits in the back of the class, dead-eyed, rather be drawing, and notices the askance glare of the bigger bully who will beat him between classes. He's getting it from all sides: his father is absent, living in the U.S. with his new family, but who talks about visits when all Conor wants to do is escape; his grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) is coming to visit and she's a brittle, stern woman who has issues of her own, Conor's struggles not being among them, with talk of living with her in her antiseptic memory-steeped brownstone; because Conor's Mum has cancer and the treatments are making her sick and weak...and not making her better—it's time for a more aggressive treatment in hospice.

Conor retreats but he can't go far. Sleep brings the nightmares and his drawings are disturbing things that one night manifests to life in the form of a an animated yew tree (voiced by Liam Neeson)—the one that sits in the graveyard of the local church—that uproots with a burning fire inside it and invades his room at precisely 12:07 am with an ominous warning; he will tell him three true tales and once those stories are complete, Conor must reciprocate with one of his own—and if the story is not true, the monster will eat him.

Pretty simple story, with Grimm elements of the macabre, but A Monster Calls is anything but simple. When the stories begin, the film warps and woofs and spatters into bizarrely wondrous illustrations that morph into surrealism and suggestivism to tell their fairy-tale stories of kingdoms and wizards and differing points of view, but each of them have an edge that defy fairy-tale logic and mannerisms, don't hew to myth but to behavior and the complexities of psyche, paths that confuse and confound Conor, shaking him down to his his own core-beliefs of childhood, uprooting his own naivete and the expected behavior of youngster-hood.

Dad comes to visit, but he can't stay long, and before you know it, he's just a memory, leaving the situation of his ex-wife and son behind to return to life in the U.S. Mum moves to the hospital, and Conor to his grandmother's, where he is a stranger and a bit of a burden, an outsider but not a center of concern. The only one who seems to notice him and pay attention to him is the Monster, who tells Conor that, rather than the Monster coming to him, maybe it is Conor who summoned his presence to him.

A Monster Calls is an anti-fairy-tale, which does not comfort; it is a kid's movie not for kid's and that they won't understand—maybe be fascinated with the graphics and the out-sized emotions, but it ultimately will run against the grain of a child's expectations of easy solutions and happily-ever-after. But, it is also a film that is so much made up of the anxieties of a child's world that is much too large for them to be comfortable in, even if they grow five times their size. The embedded stories are not safe and, though they toy with issues of good and evil like a fable, the palette gets all mixed-up and smeared with the light and the dark. The images (created by the FX-house glassworks Barcelona) are beautifully painted nightmares (they also did the Tree-Monster FX although a bit more photo-realistically) that shift along with the attitudes inhabiting its characters.

Kids don't know id's, even while they are acting out on them all the time. They wear their hearts on their sleeves, even if they don't know exactly why they are feeling what they are feeling. Children don't know the secrets of adults (most times because one of those secrets is that they're being protected from them by their parents)...that time is short, life is hard, and that eventually yesterday's outnumber tomorrow's. Kids don't need to know that time is the ultimate bully and it will beat you up and it won't wait for recess to do it.

Life is hard. That's the reality of it, but a child is sheltered from the more harsh realities of life. A child barely knows life that they should know anything about death. Nor that, at the moment of their birth they're carrying an hourglass and time is running out for the first second. Children shouldn't know that stuff. They're fed stories that conclude "...and they lived happily ever after," when there are actually no guarantees on the "happily" and a definite negative on "they lived...ever after." The curse of original sin (from the biblical stories) may not be from the tree of knowledge, but born of the knowledge of death. Death thus becomes childhood's end even as it is for another. Life is cruel that way.

No, not cruel; Life is merely indifferent. And as I've said about indifference here before, it is the opposite of love.

As I said, maybe not for children—they can't comprehend the future. But, for adults, with memories of the past, it is amazing. And if those memories involve loss, there will be tears...over the painful dichotomies of life...and death...and how both can be embraced. A Monster Calls is that special.

Right down to its anti-fairy tale roots.

Eight Days a Week: The Beatles—The Touring Years

Now You Know How Many Holes it Takes to Fill the Albert Hall
or
Beatle-mine-ia

You would think that Apple Corps had mined every last shekel that could be squeezed from The Beatles product—I have always thought that Paul McCartney would eventually release a CD of just his guitar-parts called "All my Bass" (which, actually, might be kind of interesting, as his work I've always found surprisingly soulful). 

The one aspect that hasn't been picked to the bone was the work they did as concert performers, a proposition that is daunting as their tours, once they got out of the UK-Hamburg-Sweden "struggling-artists" circuit, were sparse (they were one-night shows), contractually controlled, and brief (their concerts lasted a fleeting 30 minutes at most, but less if they were tired, scared, or the conditions were impossible, the definition of which was impossibly high*). That may sound like a larkish breeze, but the logistics were usually slopped together, the crowds were hysterically riot-level wherever they went, and they basically played without hearing themselves as the crowd levels crushed the limits of their primitive equipment on stage.**

"Larkish breeze?" The Beatles were in the eye of their own self-made hurricane. Hence, the ironic limits-busting title of the documentary. 

But, records of those concerts are rare, except for television appearances, and the odd promotional film that provided mere tastes of the experience. What there is bear the limits of audio equipment that couldn't filter the constant "white noise" made by the concert-goers and the limitations of film to deal with a continuous 30 minute experience.*** And there are legal issues...The Beatles were also in an economic hurricane, anybody who could get a piece of The Beatles to sell would do so at the drop of a...well, anything The Beatles dropped (I think I still have a piece of the room carpet from the Edgewater Inn where The Beatles stayed when they played Seattle in 1964...at least they said it was. It was treated like a talisman in my house). So, Eight Days a Week is the product of a plea from Apple for material from concert-goers for footage from whatever primitive recording equipment the audience had in their possession (ironically, Apple (not that one, the phone company) has just filed a patent for technology that will prevent you from doing precisely that at current concerts). It must have been a struggle because director Ron Howard has been working on this thing since 2012.

Howard has two things in mind in this: to show the footage in the best possible way, but also tell the story of the transition from The Beatles being boys who liked to play music to artists who became disenchanted when the music became disappointingly irrelevant to the effort they were putting out...and the risks they were taking to achieve it. Popularity killed the tours, and The Beatles, for whom the music was paramount, realized it was the least important element in the craziness of the concerts. After the particularly hectic and controversial 1966 tour, in which it seemed that everybody had a grudge against them, they would retreat to the studio to make music, away from the madness of the crowds, working in isolation from their fans, and frequently each other, until even that arrangement no longer satisfied them. Howard uses his fetish for graphics to tell the story of The Beatles concerts in conjunction with album sales to make the point that they achieved their highest goals once they stopped touring.

The results are ingenious. They—the editors of the thing—desperately try to make individual songs visually coherent: they start with a newsreel that has good sound and color and looks very good and they've colorized the first "official" US concert in Washington D.C. and then the results go steadily down-hill as the film progresses with grabbed 16mm and 8mm footage, snippets cobbled together with just a snatch of lip-movement that might match a song-lyric. The music, which is always a problem with Beatles footage, has been heroically over-processed by George Martin's son, Giles, to try to maximize the music while not distorting it TOO much. 

They've also tried mightily hard to not simply re-hash and re-purpose footage already familiar from "The Beatles Anthology" series, which is still the best record of The Beatles phenomenon extant. There will be things that look familiar...the Washington DC concert, the newsreel footage—they trot out the first Sullivan show, of course—and folks seeing it in a theater will see the four's part of the Shea Stadium concert again, with one of my favorite Beatles moments—after trying vainly to be heard over 65,000 fans (and Lennon tries, he really TRIES, during "I Feel Fine,") they give up on the last number "I'm Down" and just go a little crazy, Lennon especially. They start laughing, trying to keep it together, but NO-body can hear. They're almost done and safe...what does it matter? I love that moment, but it's like a rosetta stone for the beginning of the end. They had created this hysteria far beyond appreciation and it defeated the purpose of actually being there. "How can you laugh?" How could you not?

But beyond providing that timeline, Howard really does not bring much to the party other than that perspective. The interviews are fairly perfunctory, although the ones of McCartney and Starr seem a bit more personal than before. There is a rather useless interview with a "composer" explaining the importance of The Beatles to song-writing output (comparing to Schumann and Bach...for how much they wrote, completely unnecessary), Eddie Izzard comments on the Beatles irreverent press conferences (yawn), Sigourney Weaver is there for a few seconds because they found a few seconds of footage of her at the first Hollywood Bowl concert. Whoop Goldberg's interviews are animated and touching and they bring up a point known to few—The Beatles had a "rider" in their concerts that the venues couldn't be segregated. Now, that's impressive and shows the positive influence of the group. It would be ridiculous for The Beatles, who were so influenced and awed by America's black artists to play before segregated crowds and they had the clout...and the potential to cause riots...that even the deepest Southern venues gave in.

The Beatles at the Seattle Coliseum-my sister is in there somewhere.

The best interview—and really the best part of the film besides the concert footage—is the interview with Philadelphia newscaster Larry Kane. He traveled with The Beatles during their tours in 1964 and '65 and his recollections and, more importantly, his archive of material make up a good...make that a great...swath of the film's middle section. The man is as straight as they come and sober as a judge and his dispassionate stories about breakneck deadlines, life on the road, riots, fear, and the four's closeness and empathy make for an intimate glimpse without getting fannish about it. He was inside the eye of the hurricane but not generating it and his observations of what might seem to some the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse reveals that they were, instead, the door-men for a shift in the culture that went far beyond the music and the men who generated it. And they opened that door wide...for generations to come.

* One of their roadies says in the film that during the August 21, 1966 St. Louis concert held during a driving rain-storm, he had instructions to "pull the plug" if he saw one of The Beatles "go down" from electrocution. What he doesn't say in the film is that he watched the concert warily as sparks flew every time McCartney's electric bass got too close to his microphone (which happened frequently).

** One of the better laughs the movie gets is when somebody mentions that, for the Shea Stadium concert in New York, Vox made brand, new powerful amplifiers for the group...a whopping 100 watts. Ringo mentions that he could only tell where he was in a song by watching the asses of Lennon and McCartney.

*** The Shea Stadium film leaves out two of the songs, each at the 10 minute mark, so the cameramen could reload their gear and there was not enough "coverage" to match the rest of the film.