Once upon a time in high school Spanish class our teacher showed us two slides. The first was a painting Picasso had done that was nearly identical with Velázquez's Las Meninas. I love the original painting, and it's technically impressive to see one master artist duplicating another. But then came the next slide: Picasso painting Las Meninas in the cubist style:
My point? As impressive as it is to paint like Velázquez, it's more impressive to go somewhere new with it, and Picasso was way new. Watching Across the Universe was a lot like that first Picasso painting: technically brilliant but not really new. It is a very well done film, gorgeous to look at and wonderfully performed by mostly unknowns. But I found it pretty pointless. Picasso painted like Velázquez to learn from his style, not with the idea of presenting his copy to the world as a work of great art (and I guess he did 58 different versions of Las Meninas, so those above are only two). I'm not sure what I'm supposed to take away from overly literal interpretation of the Beatles songs. "For the Benefit of Mr. Kite" as a circus? Duh. Although Eddie Izzard is always cool. Bono and Joe Cocker are clearly having fun as well. But like I said, it was well done, just pointless.
Perhaps the real thing is that this very much a Beatles in the 60s film, and I was listening to the Beatles in the 80s. The Beatles to me aren't about Vietnam or psychedelic drugs or any of that. Also, as I referenced when talking about Walk Hard, this movie was far too reverent of the Beatles for my taste (and so are most Beatle covers, frankly. They sound like church music). The Beatles always had a great sense of humor, which this movie doesn't even touch on. But mostly, what with this and Mamma Mia (which I'll certainly see what it's out on DVD) - yes it's great music and all, but what I really want is something new.
Which brings me to what I did enjoy the hell out of: Dr. Horrible's Sing-along Blog. This was done on the cheap by Joss Whedon, his two brothers, one of their girlfriends, and a bunch of friends (geeks like me who can recognize Buffy writers will particularly enjoy act 3). It's nowhere near as visually slick as Across the Universe, it's not quite 45 minutes long, and it's only ever appeared on the internet. Still, one of my main gripes of Across the Universe is that not only was it obvious where the story was going, you could even predict with stunning accuracy which song was coming next. Dr. Horrible, like all Whedon endeavors, is comedy and tragedy all at once and you never know which you're going to get next, or where it will all end up. I certainly wasn't expecting the way it all ended here. But then the other cool aspect: you look back and it all seems rather inevitable. It had to end this way, didn't it? It's led to some great dinner time conversations here, as the boys have watched it half a dozen times already (although they've been told that "we do the weird stuff" will have to remain in the realm of things they will understand when they're older). And we have a CD of the songs in the car and all know all the words.
I would love, love, love to see a real musical in the theaters, the kind where it's all surprising and new and takes me on a ride that I can't see the end of. I was hoping after Moulin Rouge (which didn't have new music, but did use old music in new and surprising ways, my fave being the tango "Roxanne") that we'd have a musical resurgence, but alas, that never came to be. My fondest wish would be for a feature-length Dr. Horrible sequel (come on, the story totally doesn't end there).
Of course Joss may be busy...
(And fellow MST3K fans, TV's Frank has a cool blog entry about it over here. I didn't really touch on the larger significance of Dr. Horrible as artist-controlled, although that was the whole reason they got together and made this thing during the SAG strike. Well, read Frank; he's got it covered).
OK, technically not done with those things that needed doing, so I'm back at it.
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