I love movies. I love the Beatles. I also love judging things. So naturally, I wrote a review for my high school’s lit magazine. Clearly, it’s been a couple years. But I want to push myself through this blog and write more! This is posted proof/motivation that I need to start doing exercises again. Ew, I sound like an athletic person or something.
Across the Universe, Julie Taymor’s lovechild, fuses together classic Beatles music with a kaleidoscopic modern interpretation. This mélange of love and avant-garde way of living has produced a contagious, neurotic obsession. Across the Universe has spawned a new breed of “Beatlemaniacs.”
It’s your typical “adolescents on the brink of adulthood story”—strung along through Beatle’s songs. Taymor and her cast, however, lift the bleak plotline into delicious, harmonizing gloom. Beyond the acting, insular viewers will trip over the plethora of pigmentation vying for their partiality.
Along with a virtually unheard of cast, Evan Rachel Wood’s character is named after a Beatle’s lyric. Everything in the movie, even the lines that are not songs are drenched in the Beatle’s chronicles.
The stand-outs, by far, are Jim Sturgess (Jude) and Joe Anderson (Max). Jude from Liverpool, Max from America, the two befriend each other instantly, bonding through teeing off on the roof of their school buildings and getting high while swooning a poster of Brijitte Bardot. They soon pick up Lucy, Max’s sister, who Jude literally falls for, and move to New York, where they pick up a few more eccentric revolutionaries. The “All you need is love,” idealistic plot-line unfolds and clashes with the veracity of the Vietnam War.
The most poignant and derisive part of the movie, besides ten “Selma Hayeks” dressed in nurse garb obviously lip-singing, is when Jude and Max, combating their own ways through the war, express how futile the fighting is. Jude: through splattered strawberries crucified in a row on a white canvas; Max: through permanent blood on his hands from his dead comrades.
With the exception of Salma Hayek, the lip-singing in the movie is perfected, and comes across as unusually natural. In a cinematic era of actors mouthing the wrong lyrics, Taymor outsmarts the rest by re-recording all of the songs on set, live.
The movie does have its share of flaws, though. Almost all the celebrity cameos resonate a hackneyed, worthless sound in the speakers. That is, except Mr. Bono, (Dr. Robert to his acid-whipped cult following in the film.) With his “mutt-n-chops” facial hair aboard a magic acerbic bus, he proclaims his transcendental “I am you, as you are me,” philosophy. It makes sense.
It’s hard to feel apathetic about Taymor’s painting of a wild, nostalgic America in Vietnam War crooning Beatle’s melodies. No one else could’ve pulled it off quite like she has. When viewers leave the theater, they will not be weighed down with the imperfections in the revolution, but will be feverish with thoughts of strawberry fields. Forever, the Beatles transcend time.
The Original Kate Porter 
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