I’m talking to my boy Pete who is out in L.A., and he mentions this film ‘Across the Universe’ and asks me if I’ve seen it. I inform him I haven’t and he says I should see it because he heard it’s great. Now Pete is one of toughest, meanest, hardest sons of bitches I know. This is cat who one day decided to move out to Los Angeles, lived in the bushes for a couple of weeks and spent his spare time beating the hell of people who he stumbled upon abusing their girlfriends, thus earning him the nickname as ‘The Homeless Avenger’. He now makes his living bouncing thugged out drunks at various unsavory establishments in the area, so when he recommends a film, I figure it must be something worth seeing, even though admittedly he hadn’t seen it yet. After about twenty minutes into ‘Across the Universe’, and understanding that I had no idea what it was about before I started watching it, I’m thinking to myself that this movie is suspect. There sure is a lot of singing and dancing and prancing going around, and I’m not loving it. I call Pete to inform him that he’s now on my rather long list of people I plan to bitch slap the next time I see him because he’s forced me to watch this mess as I’m incapable of turning off a movie once it starts, you see. Anyway, I continue watching this movie and then Joe Cocker shows up singing ‘Come Together’ and the movie all of the sudden stopped being gay. Joe Cocker and Lameness are mutually exclusive, never able to exist in the same universe. But Joe went away and the suspect nature of this movie crept back up, released slightly by the brief appearance of multiple Salma Hayek clones – we love you so Salama, why don’t you ever call us back? But that reprieve was merely temporary as gayness then completely enveloped this film, never to let it go. Recognize that there are people who SWEAR by this movie, I just happen not to be one of them.

Julie Taymor directs this musical film chronicling the turbulent sixties, albeit with a sugary candy coating, framed around bastardized versions of the music of The Beatles.

Our film stars Jim Burgess as Jude, a young college aged British expatriate visiting America to find his father who knocked his mom up during World War II and along the way meets the wayward Max (Joe Anderson). While tracking his dad at Princeton University, Jude and Max become fast friends and Max takes the Brit home to meet his family where he makes the acquaintance of Max’s sister Lucy (Rachel Evan Wood) whose boyfriend Daniel (Spencer Liff) has enlisted to serve in Vietnam. Max and Jude then relocate to New York City where there’s a revolution of sorts taking place and they are soon joined by Lucy who is attempting to recover from the news of Daniel losing his life in the war.

In New York we meet an eclectic crew who all share a flat with our boys which includes Sadie (Dana Fuchs) the Joplin-esque songstress, Axe-man Jojo (Martin Luther) who came to New York via Detroit after tragic events resulting from the Detroit riots, and Prudence who is just the cutest little lesbian you’ll ever want to see struggling with letting the world know about her true desires. Relationships are formed, love is found, love is lost and it is all over shadowed by the war where Lucy is fighting with everything she has to bring attention since her brother is among the young men drafted to serve. Young lovers get separated by misunderstandings and oceans, and we hope and pray they can be reunited through the magic of the music of The Beatles.

Certainly I’m no Beatles anthologist as the Boys from Liverpool were hating each other about the time I was coming into the world, but it would be damn near impossible not to have some knowledge and appreciation of their music, no matter how old you are. Watching this film it was obvious that Julie Taymore, who I guess was around 12-years-old by the time the Beatles showed up on Ed Sullivan back in ‘64, handled this project of hers with loving care and the utmost respect for the music she was paying homage too. I just didn’t care for it, and lot of my feeling of it is based on the presentation of music. I found many of the renditions of the songs annoying, with the exception of Joe Cocker singing ‘Come Together’ which was a rousing cover, but when Jim Sturgess started howling ‘Something’, which just happens to be my favorite Beatles song, it just felt wrong. It was just being performed all wrong. Shirley Bassey covering ‘Something’? That was majestic, this was tragic. Hell, I didn’t even know I cared this much about the music of The Beatles until I saw ‘Across the Universe’.

The film itself was felt too long and meandering. There was so much music and so many musical numbers that the characters largely received sketchy treatment, and I realize that the emotion for the characters was designed to emanate from the music sets but it just didn’t transfer to me. The performances by the actors were all uniformly excellent however, as the cast executed their roles with loads of energy and passion. Dana Fuchs in particular as the care-free but hard edged Sadie was particularly outstanding as her characters relationship with Jojo, the emotionally charged guitar player, seemed to have more depth and hold more interest than the principle relationship between Lucy and Jude, but then hearing ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ wouldn’t have meant much of anything if we had focused on those other two characters.

It’s not that like I don’t care for musicals since I thought ‘Sweeny Todd’ was one of the best movies of this past year, though admittedly The Barber was slitting dudes throats while belting out show tunes, and ‘Chicago’ is an all-time favorite, I just didn’t like this particular musical. At least they didn’t screw up ‘Taxman’.