Monday, August 17, 2020

And in the End: 50 Years Later

Back in March, z lifetime ago, I posted:
Let It Be is an unwatchable film that has the unfortunate agenda of trying to make it look like The Beatles hated each other, so I’m eagerly looking forward to Peter Jackson’s upcoming movie:
Get Back also aims to elaborate on the original Let It Be movie, released in 1970 and taken from the same recording sessions. That film amounted to a cinéma vérité document of the Beatles’ fragmentation. Ringo Starr is said to be pleased with the new movie, recently telling a friend that he appreciated that it didn’t make it seem as if the band was fighting all the time during that period. “He said, ‘It was just not true,'” says a source.
Fantastic article titled Fifty Years Ago, The Beatles Went Through Rock’s Most Famous Breakup. Inside the Heartbreak, the Brotherhood, and Why the Music Still Matters:
The Let It Be film premiered in London on May 20th, 1970. None of the Beatles showed up or even sent any word they weren’t coming. A huge crowd gathered to see them in Piccadilly Circus, but instead got a strange grab bag of red-carpet VIPs: Beatles exes Cynthia Lennon and Jane Asher, A Hard Day’s Night director Richard Lester, a few Hare Krishnas, a few Rolling Stones. The Apple staffers all reported for duty but had no idea where their bosses were, looking around in vain for the band and feeling guilty about participating. 
The four Beatles never got together to watch the movie or listen to the album. The four Beatles never met face to face again. 
That’s ultimately the biggest of Beatles mysteries, which neither Get Back nor any other film will resolve: What is it that makes people around the world, from all generations and all cultures, still hear ourselves in this story, 50 years after the end? Jackson, who has spent his whole career working with giant-scale cultural myths, can’t explain away this one. “They’re only the icons they are because the music was so majestically good. I’m not a musicologist, that’s not where I come from. But all I would say is, no matter if it’s two tracks or four tracks or eight tracks, there’s a joy in the songs that they sang. In decades and decades to come, it will never be dulled. It will never be suppressed. That joy, that infectious joy, is part of the human psyche now.” 
After attempting to watch the absolute dreck that is Let it Be, I am chomping at the bit to see Get Back!
"Hahaha just kidding, we're not watching this shit."

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