On In Rainbows (and Lucy in the Sky with Cubic Zirconia)
Do not wake up early on the morning the download of the new Radiohead album becomes available, hoping to burn it to a CD while you shower so that you can hear it at the first possible moment. Do not skip bike-riding to work, partly for other reasons but partly so that you can listen to the new Radiohead album on the train. Radiohead does not deserve that kind of pressure.
I have come to terms with the idea that Radiohead (new frontiers of marketing notwithstanding) will no longer change my life (as much to do with my life already having changed as with Radiohead), but they can put out a pretty solid album of pretty solid music.
Julie Taymor should have been able to put out a pretty solid movie capturing whatever it is that is so amazing about the Beatles, but instead she produced a sometimes-beautiful but often schizophrenic, overly-nostalgic, and myopic view of a decade that, in the way it is portrayed, probably never really existed. The Vietnam, war, for example, is too glossy, as are the roles of those most effected by it too easily oversimplified or dismissed when the time is right; much the same can be said of the whole plot of the film. The Beatles' songs are shoehorned in (as well as awkward in-joke references to other songs, such as when Saydee asks how Prudence got in, and Jude says 'She came in through the bathroom window.', and strange references to the 60's in general, as when a 'Hendrix' and a 'Joplin' break into the music scene via Beatles songs and then inexplicably reenact some version of the Lennon/McCartney feud), and the songs themselves are often sung (or, in the case of a well-meaning, funny-but-in-the-wrong-context Eddie Izzard, spoken) by the wrong people at the wrong time.
The most effective part of the movie, pretty much the only part which moved me, was that music, and I was quick to rush home and listen to the original, incomparably superior versions.
But maybe that's a little harsh. But maybe not.
I have come to terms with the idea that Radiohead (new frontiers of marketing notwithstanding) will no longer change my life (as much to do with my life already having changed as with Radiohead), but they can put out a pretty solid album of pretty solid music.
Julie Taymor should have been able to put out a pretty solid movie capturing whatever it is that is so amazing about the Beatles, but instead she produced a sometimes-beautiful but often schizophrenic, overly-nostalgic, and myopic view of a decade that, in the way it is portrayed, probably never really existed. The Vietnam, war, for example, is too glossy, as are the roles of those most effected by it too easily oversimplified or dismissed when the time is right; much the same can be said of the whole plot of the film. The Beatles' songs are shoehorned in (as well as awkward in-joke references to other songs, such as when Saydee asks how Prudence got in, and Jude says 'She came in through the bathroom window.', and strange references to the 60's in general, as when a 'Hendrix' and a 'Joplin' break into the music scene via Beatles songs and then inexplicably reenact some version of the Lennon/McCartney feud), and the songs themselves are often sung (or, in the case of a well-meaning, funny-but-in-the-wrong-context Eddie Izzard, spoken) by the wrong people at the wrong time.
The most effective part of the movie, pretty much the only part which moved me, was that music, and I was quick to rush home and listen to the original, incomparably superior versions.
But maybe that's a little harsh. But maybe not.
posted by lee at 3:01 PM
3 Comments:
nope.
P.S. It's growing on me.
Not the Taymor Beatles thing (yeah, no, that still pretty much seems to have sucked), the other thing. As I knew might happen, the second listen was better than the first, and the third was better than the second. Hey, if these trends continue...
In any case, 'solid' may have been an understatement.
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