{"id":26307,"date":"2025-04-09T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-04-09T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=26307"},"modified":"2025-04-06T12:30:10","modified_gmt":"2025-04-06T19:30:10","slug":"weve-reached-peak-beatle-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/weve-reached-peak-beatle-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"We’ve Reached Peak Beatle Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If it hadn\u2019t already been announced, the proliferation of news items and social media discussion about Sam Mendes\u2019s Beatle-biopic quartet on April 1 would\u2019ve felt like a particularly strained April Fools gag. It was merely unfortunate timing, the announcement of key additional details<\/a> at the annual studio hype-fest CinemaCon, that caused us all to consider this ill-advised venture, in which Mendes will make not one, but four biographical dramas, each one focusing on a member of the Fab Four. \u201cPerhaps this is a chance to understand them a little more deeply,\u201d Mendes said of the effort, as if it were a question of volume \u2014 that we\u2019d finally manage to grasp the complexities and nuances of this musical group, were it not for the pressing shortage of motion pictures about them. In fact, quite the opposite is true: there are too damn many movies about the Beatles. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I should know \u2014 I\u2019m the target audience. I\u2019ve been a Beatles fan for forty-plus years now, since my Uncle Dave first dropped a needle on Meet the Beatles <\/em>for me when I was eight years old, and movies about the group have always been a vital piece of my fandom puzzle. The first movie we ever rented, the weekend my dad finally splurged on a VCR, was A Hard Day\u2019s Night<\/em>. The first R-rated movie I saw in the theater was the authorized documentary Imagine: John Lennon. <\/em>And one of the first movies I ever taped off television was The Compleat Beatles<\/em>, the feature-length 1982 film that was, at that time, seen as the definitive Beatles doc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That movie is hard to see these days \u2014 it never made it past VHS and laserdisc (you can usually find it on archive.org<\/a>) \u2014 because Paul McCartney bought it and buried it in the mid-1990s, when the group made their<\/em> definitive Beatles doc, the multi-part Beatles Anthology. <\/em>That speaks to the maximalism that has overtaken the Beatles movie as a subgenre; the succinct Compleat<\/em> was replaced by the sprawling Anthology<\/em>, the already-scarce Let It Be<\/em> was usurped by the multi-part Get Back<\/em>; and the seemingly-sufficient Imagine: John Lennon<\/em> has been complemented by an inexhaustible supply of John & Yoko documentaries, intent on documenting and preserving the decade between the Beatles\u2019 break-up and Lennon\u2019s death in something like real time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The most recent of them is One to One: John & Yoko, <\/em>from director Kevin McDonald, which plays theaters (including several IMAX venues) this weekend, and will eventually land on HBO\/Max. Its specific subject is the 18 or so months, beginning in late 1971, when the couple moved from London to New York City, where they lived in a modest Village loft apartment, watching TV, writing songs, and making occasional public appearances, culminating in the \u201cOne to One\u201d benefit \u2014 his only full-length post-Beatles concert. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The footage and audio of that performance are not new; it was unearthed and released, as a live album and concert video, in 1986. (Recycling and reappropriating are par for the course in Beatles cinema; aside from the aforementioned Get Back \/ Let It Be<\/em>, last year\u2019s Disney+ documentary Beatles \u201964<\/em> reused much of the Maysles Brothers footage that had been previously used in their own 1964 doc What’s Happening! The Beatles in the U.S.A.<\/em>, and which was previously re-edited for the 1991 video release The Beatles: The First U.S. Visit<\/em>.) And there have been so <\/em>many John & Yoko documentaries in recent years that pieces of One to One<\/em> feel like MCU-style (or, I guess, Medes Beatles biopics-style) crossovers: the entire NYC period was previously covered in the made-for-TV doc LennoNYC<\/em>; we see clips of their appearances on The Mike Douglas Show<\/em>, which were themselves the topic of last year\u2019s Daytime Revolution;<\/em> an audio appearance by assistant-turned-fling May Pang foreshadows the 2022 documentary The Lost Weekend: A Love Story<\/em>; and some time is spent on Lennon\u2019s fight to avoid deportation, itself the topic of the 2006 doc The U.S. vs. John Lennon.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

So what does One to One<\/em> offer that\u2019s new, then? Well, there is the (not inconsiderable) novelty of seeing a documentary in IMAX \u2014 specifically for the concert footage, which looks and sounds incredible, particularly when compared to the existing concert film. The proximity of the audience to the performers is often staggering, particularly the big IMAX close-ups as Lennon wails \u201cMother,\u201d one of his most personal songs. And McDonald juxtaposes, often effectively, those performances with contemporaneous archival footage:  Vietnam combat and aftermath to \u201cInstant Karma\u201d (along with Nixon dancing with his daughter at her wedding), \u201cCold Turkey\u201d with the contemptuous 1972 Republican convention in Miami, \u201cImagine\u201d to the gathering of disabled kids in Central Park on the day of the big concert. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the material surrounding that footage mostly just made this viewer wish it were a straight-up IMAX concert film. (I was reminded of how the rote, Ron Howard-directed, Hulu-funded 2016 documentary The Beatles: Eight Days a Week \u2013 The Touring Years<\/em><\/a> was only worth seeing in its limited theatrical engagements, where it was followed by a 30-minute mini-movie of The Beatles at Shea Stadium<\/em>.) Some of the archival footage is of passing interest, particularly when it takes the mood of the nation; the 1972 presidential campaign was underway, and it is obviously not that hard to draw the line from then to now, and from George Wallace to Donald Trump, and one cannot help but shudder at candidate Shirley Chisholm\u2019s prediction that \u201cThis constant malaise that\u2019s hanging over this country is going to eventually destroy all of us.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet too much of the running time is spent on MacDonald\u2019s recurring channel-surfing motif. The idea is that John and Yoko spent much of this time watching TV (\u201cIt\u2019s our window to the world,\u201d he explains), so the film clicks through what they might have seen, including, often, themselves. It functions as valuable context, sure \u2014 a reminder of the turbulent history brewing around them. But some of it also feels like padding; the picture runs 100 minutes but if feels longer, because it\u2019s so aimless. Not scattershot or random, mind you. It just doesn\u2019t particularly go anywhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can recognize that One to One<\/em> is well-made, well-researched, and impeccably assembled. But at a certain point, I found myself half-watching, because there\u2019s nothing left for me to learn on this particular subject. Early on, Lennon is heard explaining, \u201cI don\u2019t wanna recreate the past. I wanna be me<\/em> now.\u201d But who was <\/em>that? Later on, we see a throwaway moment of him eating cereal and mugging, and it\u2019s striking because it\u2019s a mood we\u2019ve rarely seen him in, and it\u2019s not a moment staged for the camera, but shared with the person behind it (Yoko, presumably). It stands out because, for once, it feels like he\u2019s not performing, but existing<\/em>. Yet because he became a worldwide celebrity at such a tender age (barely in his 20s), he spent most of his life performing, putting on an act for the camera, being what we expected John Lennon to be. That\u2019s the quality that makes him so hard to pin down as a cinematic subject \u2014 though God knows, that hasn\u2019t stopped scores of filmmakers from trying. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“One to One: John and Yoko” opens exclusively in IMAX on April 11. It will expand to other theaters in the weeks to follow, before its HBO and MAX premiere.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n