Adam Brucker

…you must be warned.

Across The Universe: Julie Taymor (2007)

This is a movie that I was excited to see and should have loved. 45 minutes in I finally got up and turned it off - something I rarely, if ever, do. Don’t make the same mistake I did!

If you’re going to manage to somehow screw up the music of The Beatles, undertaking a superficial tour of the 1960’s using heavy-handed, spoon-fed, pseudo-psychedelia with lousy production values and terrible lip syncing is a great way to do it. This would have been a bad high-school musical production, let alone a feature film.

I turned it off, not when “Prudence” came in through the bathroom window, but when “Jude” felt compelled to tell us that she did, in fact, “come in through the bathroom window.” As if the unfunny inside jokes like this peppered throughout the movie weren’t bad enough, the film didn’t trust its audience enough to even get them.

The scene that started playing as I reached for the remote opened with some US soldiers carrying a small version of the Statue of Liberty over their heads to the tune of “She’s So Heavy.” I wonder if they got “Mean Mr. Mustard” to explain that powerful bit of social commentary? I’ll guess I’ll never know.

Go see “Love” in Las Vegas for a much better take on this exact material and rent “Moulin Rouge!” for an example of the musical / movie mash-up genre done right.