Let it Be More Bullshit?

I’m a Beatles fanatic and I’ve spent my life not watching Let it Be because it was visually and aurally unwatchable and I always sensed it was total bullshit, framed to get rubbernecking eyeballs like reality tv watchers waiting for wine glasses to start flying & tables to start flipping. Why anybody would think we'd relish in watching four people we love with all our hearts fighting (allegedly, of course) is beyond me, but I am only one man, if that.

Meanwhile, Peter Jackson’s incomparable Get Back documentary (see Xmastime live-blogging HERE, HERE, and HERE!) finally proved my - and everybody else’s - suspicions that most of the "turmoil" in the original Let it Be was just marketing bullshit, and all 8 hours were nothing but absolute pure joy to experience. It immediately made the original Let it Be invalid, other than we thank Michael-Lindsay Hogg for filming everything and leaving so much original footage behind for Jackson to cull through.

So…now Disney+ is re-releasing Let it Be itself? Dafuck? Via an interview with Michael Lindsey-Hogg:

A lot of people remember “Let It Be” as a bad-vibes movie, probably in part because of that famous scene in which George and Paul bicker about George’s guitar part on “Two of Us.” Was that exchange another sign of the beginning of the end?

No one had ever seen the Beatles have a fight, but that wasn’t really a fight. Up to that point, no one had filmed, except in bits and pieces, the Beatles rehearsing. So that was new territory. That exchange between Paul and George, they never commented on, because it was the same kind of conversation that any artistic collaborators would have. As a director in the theater and in movies, I know that kind of conversation happens five times a week.

When “Get Back” came out, a lot of fans saw it as happy corrective to “Let It Be.” Is that accurate?

I would say most people who saw Peter’s picture as a corrective to mine haven’t seen mine, because no one was able to see it for 50 years. So unless they were children when they saw it in theaters, the only way most people would have seen it was on VHS or bootlegs, which changed the original aspect ratio and had dark and gloomy pictures and bad sound. That is part of the reason the movie was put in the closet for a long time.

Of course I’ll watch it. But it seems like a pathetic money grab; especially when there’s millions of people like me clamoring to watch the other 60 hours of footage Jackson went thru for Get Back, and would pay whatever they wanted for it, but instead we're getting something so universally acknowledged as shitty that Jackson was compelled to fix it with Get Back in the first place?

"But Xmastime", you say in the voice of Craig “Ironhead” Heyward from those soap commercials (RIP), “didn't you didn't you call bullshit on the whole OMG PAUL & GEORGE GOT INTO A BRUTAL FIGHT!!! nonsense years ago?"

Sigh. Yes I did, faithful readers, YES I did:

57:54 OH NO HERE IT IS - the legendary argument with Paul & George! It’s always been framed as Paul accusing George of being annoyed by Paul’s musical instruction and George snarkily telling Paul he’ll basically play whatever Paul wants him to play as long as it will shut him up; now with the fuller context presented it’s pretty much Paul saying “I feel like I’m annoying you” and George saying “you’re not annoying me”. END OF SCORCHED-EARTH FIGHT!

YES I did: