[ halloween and the beatles ]

I'll quickly say that Halloween was kinda lame. Jesse & I didn't do anything, and we only got two trick-or-treaters. They were two very cute little trick-or-treaters, but there were only two of them. Now Jesse and I have enough candy to feed a small army for a month. Oy.

On Tuesday, we went to (finally) see Across the Universe. Which, if you haven't heard of it, is a musical set in the sixties, and all of the songs are Beatles songs. And it is AMAZING. Visually stunning, the songs are (of course) amazing because they're Beatles songs, but also amazing because of the way they are reworked, visually represented, and performed by the actors (Evan Rachel Wood, Joe Anderson, Jim Sturgess). The main characters are named after or from Beatles songs (Lucy, Max, Jude, Sadie, etc.). There are pop culture references to events and people from the time period: Ken Kesey & the Merry Pranksters, electric kool-aid, the violent Columbia University student protest, the Beatles' illegal rooftop concert in 1970, etc. Some of the characters are clear references to real people: Bono as Neal Cassady, Dana Fuchs' Sadie is clearly Janis Joplin, and Martin Luther McCoy's Jojo is obviously Jimi Hendrix. A lot of the dialogue in the film is taken from Beatles songs also: Prudence first enters the apartment through a window and Jude says "She came in through the bathroom window;" Sadie says that Max could be safe or he could have killed someone with a hammer, a reference to my personal favorite Beatles tune "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."

If you've made it through that giant rambling paragraph, or if you haven't, the gist is: I freaking LOVED it. I'm most impressed with the fact that almost all of the songs were actually recorded on set, so when you see the people singing, they are actually singing, not lip syncing to a pre-recorded song. Awesome!

In other movie news, after a slow couple of months, there is a whole slew of films coming out that I want to see: Rendition, American Gangster, Martian Child, Dan in Real Life, Michael Clayton, The Darjeeling Limited, Into the Wild, Gone Baby Gone, August Rush. There goes all my hard-earned money!



TIATF:

The courage I had to move across the country with Jesse. And the courage he had to move across the country with me. We're finally starting to explore more, get out more, and it's starting to feel more like home.


PS: Click on any and all links in this post for film trailers!