Get Back
This is the season that keeps on giving, at least to members of the Hawaii Film Critics Society.
Being an emeritus but still voting member of the tiny group that bestows its own year-end movie awards in the shadow of the Golden Globes and Oscars, there's rarely a day when there's not a big box at my door emblazoned with a red “N” in a white circle. The boxes contain not only screener DVDs, but sometimes huge coffee table books, or key chains, or sweatshirts “For Your Consideration.”
The honchos in the Netflix marketing department are probably too young to realize that at least one of the people receiving the swag was around in the early days of the modern entertainment industry, when payola was about as big as scandals got in that more naïve and trusting society.
But isn't that unethical? ask friends and family hearing about my freebie cache at this time of year.
Uh, yeah …
But then again, the Golden Globes, second only to the Oscars in awards prestige, are bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, membership less than 100, their careers built on freeloading. Payola or not, goodie bags are a time-honored tradition in the entertainment biz.
This week's most exciting enticement didn't come with any merchandise attached. Instead it was a link giving me 72-hour access to preview “The Beatles: Get Back,” before its Thanksgiving Day premiere on Disney+.
Directed by New Zealand Oscar winner Sir Peter Jackson, better known for his Hobbit and Lord of the Rings epics, this three-part music doc is edited down to eight hours from the more than 60 hours of footage shot in London in 1969. It chronicles the studio sessions that resulted in “Let It Be.” The twelfth album in their stratospheric career, “Let It Be” would prove to be the last for the band of archangels from Liverpool.
While movie studios are eager to give critics access to their award hopefuls, they are quite strict when it comes to piracy. Screeners come with disclaimers that they not be shared with anyone, much less, exhibited for profit. Getting to the “Get Back” site required going through two stages of security verification. And every image of the film I watched had my name embossed across the screen like a watermark.
This, it turns out, was better than payola. Here, over every amazing moment of John and Paul riffing, or Ringo pondering, or George doing who-knows-what, or Yoko hovering, being annoying; here with producer George Martin in the background, and Peter Jackson in the editing room bringing this 50-year-old footage back to life, my own name on the screen put me in their company. It had the subliminal effect of making the film I Me Mine!
There's a time warp to watching “Get Back” now, a half-century after the lads created the most seminal songs in the soundtrack many of us came of age to. Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Star look so young in the footage, still somehow innocent in their late 20s despite the international acclaim and immortality they had already achieved.
The recording sessions took place at the breaking point in their career. Whether it was the everpresence of Yoko, who had interrupted the brilliant collaborative process known as Lennon and McCartney, or George Harrison's resentment of his place in the ensemble, the stresses lurk just under the surface. While Paul soldiers on, displaying his own musical genius and light humor as he tries to hold the band together, Ringo is the only one who seems to have found contentment, his own talents understated, always there to ground the group from his drum set.
“Get Back” draws on footage shot by Michael Lindsay-Hogg for his 1969 music doc about the breakup that shared the album title “Let It Be.” Hogg, along with various other producers and tech directors are on screen like a supporting cast in the new film, sometimes feeling like Monty Python-style parodies of themselves.
Peter Sellers appears in one scene, but seems flummoxed trying to get on the bandmates' zany wavelength. Road manager Mal Evans provides unintentional comedy relief, staring at McCartney with the unwavering devotion of a German Shepard. He's in a state of bliss when he gets to join in on “Maxwell's Silver Hammer” by playing – what else? – a hammer on an anvil.
As opposed to the “Let It Be” takeaway – the band's dissolution – “Get Back” leaves a much cheerier taste in your mouth. While the pressures of their preternatural fame were more than any moral being could handle, we're also reminded of what first brought the Beatles together in as teenage schoolboys: deep affection for one another, a shared sense of whimsy, and a bemused delight at the genius they create together. “The Beatles,” would prove to be supernatural entity existing beyond any of their dreams or intentions, and they seem as bewildered and awestruck as their fans by the phenomenon.
Besides the appealing pictures of the artists, “Let It Be” is a rich musical feast. Songs that made the cut including “The Two of Us,” “Don't Let Me Down,” “The Long and Winding Road” and “Let It Be” itself, are surrounded by riffs and fragments of other songs as the boys try to fashion an album out of thin air, on a tight deadline set by studio time and other commitments.
Jackson's greatest achievement may be his film's illumination of the artistic process. For all the fans' and scholars' sponging of meaning out of every line whenever a new song or album came out, “Let It Be” shows that the Beatles' process was spontaneous, almost random serendipity. Chord changes and guitar riffs lead into the unknown as McCartney asks if any of his bandmates have “any words?”
The song “Get Back” started as a satire on Britain's anti-immigration sentiments at the time. Jojo got to Tucson, Arizona, because they needed some extra syllables in the line.
The film “Get Back” is an immersion more than an entertainment. My guess is the chance to spend all those hours in the studio with the lads will most appeal to audiences of a certain age – the ones who learned the words to the songs a half-century ago who now find ourselves overjoyed to get back to a place we once belonged.
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