Quarterly Cinema Scan - Volume XXXI

In 2016 Ron Howard, a former childhood actor who is now one of Hollywood's most admired directors, made a documentary titled The Beatles: Eight Days A Week -- The Touring Years.  Although volumes have been written about the Beatles phenomenon, there have not been many films, especially full length feature films, on the subject.  It is hard for many baby boomers to relate to the younger generation just how crazy things got musically and even culturally during the so-called British Invasion, which started in 1964.  Thank you, Ron Howard.  You have made our task much easier.

Howard's documentary starts in England in late 1963.  The Beatles were fast becoming the number one music group in the UK, if not in the entirety of Europe.  Yet in the United States, the band was unknown.  On December 17, 1963, Washington, DC radio station WWDC became the first outlet in our country to play a Beatles tune, I Want To Hold Your Hand.  But it wasn't until the famous Ed Sullivan Show on February 9, 1964 that American teens were introduced to the mop tops.

Howard has assembled an amazing collection of interviews with all of the Beatles, including modern day dialogues with the two surviving members, Paul and Ringo.  There are press conferences, concert footage and television broadcasts, as well as perspectives from historians, music critics, and  contemporary musicians.  Howard also includes reflections of a handful of celebrities like Sigourney Weaver and Whoopi Goldberg on how the Beatles impacted their lives.  The concert footage is excellent, considering it was recorded over fifty years ago.  The movie's viewers definitely get a true sense of what it was like to be present among the screaming fans.

Being a linear guy, I appreciate the construction of this documentary.  Scenes proceed in chronological order, from the Liverpool days to the famous Apple Corps rooftop concert on January 30, 1969, the last time the lads played together in public.  But as you'd guess from the film's title, the emphasis is on the period from the Sullivan show to the Candlestick Park concert on August 29, 1966.  As most Beatlemaniacs know, that was their final gig on their last-ever tour.

There has been much written on how the Beatles formed as a group and what led to their 1970 breakup.  Howard's documentary focuses on a less-examined question:  Why did the Beatles, at the pinnacle of their popularity, cease touring after Candlestick?  There is no one reason; in fact there are several, some obvious and some more nuanced.  The Howard film shows us not merely "the what and when" but "the why" as well. It also examines how the voluntary cessation of touring affected their subsequent artistry as song writers, musicians and arrangers.

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Here are the movies I watched on the tube during the first quarter of 2018. 

1. The Beatles: Eight Days A Week -- The Touring Years (2016 documentary covering roughly the period starting with the early '60's Cavern Club/Hamburg days to the 1969 Apple Records rooftop concert in London.) A

2. The Firm (1993 drama; new Harvard Law School grad Tom Cruise accepts an offer from a Memphis law firm, after which his wife Jeanne Tripplehorn's suspicions about the firm's partners, including Gene Hackman, become reality.)  A

3. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009 comedy; Kevin James, a hapless mall security guard, risks his life to save his crush, Jayma Mays, when bad guys take over a huge suburban mall.) C

4. A River Runs Through It (1992 biopic; two brothers, Craig Sheffer and Brad Pitt, grow up with a love for fly fishing in Montana, but as adults choose disparate paths.)  B+

5. Roman J. Israel, Esq. (2017 drama; Denzel Washington is an idealistic, introverted criminal defense lawyer in LA who, following his senior partner's death, reluctantly accepts an offer from a silk stocking mega-firm headed by Colin Farrell.)  B

6. Splendor In The Grass (1961 drama; Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty are small town Kansas teenagers who seem perfectly suited for each other, but things start to fall apart when Beatty's eagerness to take things to the next level sexually do not mesh with Wood's strict upbringing and fragile mental state.) C+

7. The Usual Suspects (1995 drama; US Customs Agent Chazz Palminteri grills con man Kevin Spacey about a ship explosion which occurred after a former dirty cop, Gabriel Byrne, had led a small group of ex-cons on board.) B+

8. The Year of Living Dangerously (1982 drama; during the initial stages of Indonesia's civil war in 1965, Australian reporter Mel Gibson relies heavily on local photographer Linda Hunt, and romances English foreign service insider Sigourney Weaver.) B+