Richard Lester
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Yesterday (2019)
Directed by Danny Boyle
influenced by A Hard Day's Night (1964), Help! (1965)
Music
Perhaps one day, we’ll get a Beatles movie worthy of standing up to the likes of A Hard Day’s Night or even Help!, but Yesterday is nearly as bad as all of its predecessors.
Most of the supposed joy of “Yesterday” is squeezed from the elbow-in-the-ribcage references to the Fab Four, both in song cues and visual references (like when Jack is chased by fans, a la “A Hard Day’s Night”).
Whether it be films they starred in ( A Hard Day’s Night), films about them ( Nowhere Boy) or films inspired by them ( Across The Universe), their influence is undeniable.
A survey of the greatest hits, it forgets what has made those hits so great despite cheeky references to Yellow Submarine and A Hard Day’s Night .
Beatles music is offered in every stripe of venue, from living rooms to small stages to recording studios big and small to a referential rooftop to the film's Wembly Arena climax, but not much has been done to make it fresh with the exception of the desperation and angry energy Patel gives to "Help!" (Nor, for that matter, is any effort made to analyze any difference in reception fifty years would make.)
), Jack in the recording studio performing an amped-up montage of tracks from “Meet the Beatles,” Jack turning “Help!” into a speedy punk anthem, Jack’s running attempt to piece together the lyrics of “Eleanor Rigby.”
Still, origins stories are all the rage these days and with a property like the Robin Hood legends, filmed literally dozens of times with actors such as Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn and Kevin Costner in the title role, doing things differently (as Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn did in “Robin and Marian”) is a justifiable way to go.
But that points out what’s missing from Scott’s version: the derring-do, the panache, the joy in yanking the beards of the oppressors that was conveyed by Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks and even Sean Connery in the autumnal “Robin and Marian.’’
“Robin Hood,” which opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival Tuesday night, is effectively a prequel to Robin’s better-known adventures, featuring a splendid Russell Crowe as the most mature Robin since Sean Connery in Richard Lester’s 1976 feature “Robin and Marian.”
If I want an old Robin Hood, I prefer Sean Connery with Audrey Hepburn in “Robin and Marian” any time!
The King dies, under castle walls, from an arrow to the neck—as did the real Lionheart, and as did Richard Harris, when he played the role in “Robin and Marian” (1976), although that movie stressed the parched futility of the scene, whereas Scott brings us boiling oil and heaving hordes.
I speak of "Robin and Marian" (1976), starring Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn , depicted in James Goldman's screenplay as uneasily reunited middle-age lovers striving for a graceful retreat from a ceaselessly cruel world.
Hercules (1997)
Directed by Ron Clements
influenced by A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966)
Themes
Kudos is also in order for how deftly the project's "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" comic tone has been combined with traditional Disney life lessons for little folks.
But its tone is the borscht-belt burlesque of "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum."
The Beatles' "A Hard Day's Night" remains out of reach, but "8 Mile" definitely matches well against semi-bio rocker vehicles from Elvis Presley's "Loving You" to Prince's "Purple Rain."
They chose to make "8 Mile," a movie that is for Eminem what "A Hard Day's Night" was for the Beatles: a movie that codifies a myth while turning it inside out and holding it up so we can see our reflection.
True, the great weapon unleashed in the final act, with all its towers spouting spurts of electrical energy, is a disappointment, reminiscent of that unveiled by villain Robert Vaughn in “Superman III” way back in 1983.
And as skillful and attractive as Vikander is (during one section her hairdo and wardrobe make her a near-dead ringer for Julie Christie in Petulia), her character also comes off as too serious and narrowly conceived for too long, putting a damper on the blend of legitimate threat and sophisticated hijinks that Ritchie is trying to achieve.
Trainspotting is a modern-day movie about the experiences of some unrepentant Scottish junkies, yet in its opening moments, Trainspotting spiritually resembles nothing so much as the Beatles' careening burst of adrenaline-charged “devil-may-care” in their introductory movies, A Hard Day's Night and Help!
It's a guttersnipe variation on the opening of "A Hard Day's Night," where the Beatles are pursued by their fans.
This movie, with its Coen Brothers/Martin Scorsese camera angles and its scintillating rock underscore by Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Lou Reed and others, is, in some ways, a direct descendant of both "A Clockwork Orange" and "A Hard Day's Night."
There was the alcoholic, gammy-legged David Farrar handling a particularly tricky one on a beach in Powell and Pressburger's The Small Back Room; Otto, the anti-Nazi German sapper, in Edgar Reitz's Heimat; the TV series Danger UXB; Richard Harris, the naval bomb disposal expert playing lethal games with Freddie Jones's vengeful bomber in Juggernaut; and more recently "Kip" Singh, the Indian military engineer disarming German bombs in Italy in The English Patient before being driven beyond endurance by our bomb in Hiroshima (a key incident in Michael Ondaatje's novel that didn't reach the screen).
But "Spidey 3" definitely suffers the waning of inspiration that so frequently infects the third installments of great series ("The Godfather III," "Superman III," "Return of the Jedi").
Superman III, X Men: The Last Stand, Batman Forever—three number threes in superhero franchises that paled in comparison to the films that preceded them.
"A Hard Day's Night" is one of the influences below the surface here, along with American love stories from "The Graduate" to "Garden State."
When Superman gave up his powers in Richard Lester’s wonderful “Superman II,” it was so he could love Lois Lane as a mortal.
The gravely splendid Spider-Man 2 (Columbia Pictures), again directed by Sam Raimi, dramatizes this schism as powerfully as any superhero picture since Superman II (1980): Its protagonist (Tobey Maguire) is so conflicted that neither side of him can properly function.
Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)
Directed by Guy Ritchie
influenced by Robin and Marian (1976)
His late father, esteemed actor Richard Harris, played Richard the Lionheart in Robin and Marian (1976) with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn.
To regain his standing, Gru plots to steal the moon—assuming the Bank of Evil will finance him (shades of Victor Spinetti in Help! (1965), who is “out to rule the world, if he can get a government grant”).
The notion of a superhero whose surly attitude and destructive tendencies have made him a pariah with the very people he has sworn to protect is admittedly not quite as original as the creators of “Hancock” would have you believe--the idea has been previously explored in works ranging from the very first “Underdog” episode to such box-office hits as “The Incredibles” and “Superman III” to the 1983 cult oddity “The Return of Captain Invincible” (a spoof in which alcoholic former superhero Alan Arkin is called back into service two decades after being labeled a Communist sympathizer in order to defeat megalomaniacal villain Christopher Lee--oh, did I mention that the film was also a musical?) with varying degrees of success.
The film's intimate psychological explorations of what it means to be invincible are probably its strongest aspects, as Logan, much like Kal-El in 1980's Superman II, loses his most important powers — the mutation, technically, that allows him to heal immediately from even the most gruesome injuries — and is thereby rendered something closer to human.
The setup, narrated by Teller, echoes Goodfellas kind of the way the Monkees echoed A Hard Day’s Night.
Indeed, the only time lately that I even came close to tears was at a screening for the students in my Columbia course on musicals of Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964), whose release I had celebrated in The Village Voice 41 years earlier by describing the phenomenon as “the Citizen Kane of jukebox movies”—a then-startling blurb that ended up being used in the board game Trivial Pursuit.
If the first was a modern superhero origin film a la Christopher Reeves’ Superman than the sequel plays out like Superman III — with a little good, some bad and the random silly moments.
The callbacks start with the first scenes set in 1984 – the manner of their presentation stirs memories of the title sequence from Superman III.
After a pretty killer opening sequence set at a local mall (a sequence that isn’t quite as silly as the Superman III opening sequence, but owes some of its style and humor to that) we learn Diana now works at a museum.
A zippy sequence that appears to take some cues from the off-kilter opening of “Superman III” (that’s the one with the flaming toys and an in-car near-drowning) finds things in Washington, D.C. to be going weird in very strange ways, only to be fixed by someone who can’t quite be seen.
This is more like on the level of The Fantastic Four (either the 2005 or 2015 versions; both are equally mediocre), 2003’s Daredevil (the one with Ben Affleck) or 1983’s Superman III (the one with Richard Pryor and where the Man of Steel fights his drunken doppelganger), meaning this latest comic book adventure isn’t without its moments but overall is still nothing short of a misbegotten waste of time.
If you're down with that, brush up on your German, French, Italian and hillbilly and head off to the spell-check-ignoring Inglourious Basterds, which should have been called How I Won the War, by Quentin Tarantino.