Aaron Olk

Can we please be honest enough not to pretend this wasn't anything other than a vanity project run amok? I've seen more entertaining infomercials. This was a boring, dreary monument to ego.

A movie about a comic book about the writer, who went on TV to talk about the comic book. An amazing story about an amazing man, with amazing acting.

Making me hate a movie with 20 Beatles songs, with a Beatles backdrop, was no easy task, but Danny Boyle managed it. This movie fails on so many levels, and in so many ways, that it managed to make me like The Beatles less than I did before seeing it. Underneath it’s candy corn rom-con packaging lies a fetid corpse of a grotesque. Let’s start with the lead; he’s completely unlikeable, uncharismatic, and, worst of all, dull. I felt no investment in him at all, nor sensed much humanity. I’m supposed to believe that a beautiful, caring woman would put her life on hold for THIS? That’s far more suspension of disbelief than everyone forgetting about the Beatles. Let’s now discuss how inane, and low grade offensive, this type of love story is; a poorly developed female character functions only as male salvation. It’s “cute” that she’d throw her life away for this pud, and we’re supposed to think it’s sweet when he eventually comes around? Rubbish. When he does come around, it’s on his terms...and he publicly shoves his salvation into her with an audience to see his “growth”. Unrequited love is BS - hanging around someone who treats you poorly isn’t something to romanticize. The big scene where he meets John Lennon? And John Lennon teaches him about love? The real Lennon cuts a far less romantic character...his treatment of his first wife, alleged abuse, cutting his kids from the will... The Achilles choice also should have been explored, and it wasn’t. Would he prefer fame, or simplicity? Did he have the option? The cost of fame motif was counter balanced in an interesting way with the joy the art can bring the world, but it was a motif inadequately explored. The sacrifice not only of your happiness, but those around you...for fame...should have been explored more fully, as well as the way we enable, if not demand, our celebrities exist in a state of arrested development. The way the music was presented - as if you could just toss random Beatles songs together and have it make sense - was also annoying. You’re talking about the evolution of one of the most talented, important bands to ever exist - you need to see the songs as presented thematically together, and how they evolved. Just throwing them out randomly didn’t work...and it lacked the context of seeing why these songs mattered. The way in which England embraced cw/blues and didn’t demand it be homogenized. How race played a role. Seeing how they further developed buddy holly, and chuck berry...and then embraced Dylan’s song writing. None of that came through even a little bit. Most of all, it was just boring, and filled with characters I felt no stake in.