A Hard Day's Night (1964)
Directed by Richard Lester
Capturing John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in their electrifying element, 'A Hard Day's Night' is a wildly irreverent journey through this pastiche of a day in the life of The Beatles during 1964. The band have to use all their guile and wit to avoid the pursuing fans and press to reach their scheduled television performance, in spite of Paul's troublemaking grandfather and Ringo's arrest.
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What critics compared A Hard Day's Night to
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 .
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.
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."
"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."
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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.
There’s a “running through London” sequence that is a rival of A Hard Day’s Night.
But it is worth remembering that over a decade ago director Peyton Reed was unsuccessfully trying to sell Fox on a 1960’s set Fantastic Four comedy, modeled on A Hard Day’s Night.
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A spoof along the lines of the first Casino Royale that succeeded far better--Bond by way of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, "The Bionic Woman," A Hard Day's Night, and Alfie.
Think "North by Northwest," "A Hard Day's Night," "From Russia With Love" and "Some Like It Hot," to name a few.