jürgen fauth’s muckworld

A cheerleader confesses her lust for another girl with “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” while football players tackle each other in slow motion all around her. Bono is the walrus. A platoon of soldiers schleps Miss Liberty through the jungle to the tune of “She’s So Heavy,” and Eddie Izzard, surrounded by over-sized Blue Meanie puppets, becomes ringmaster Mr. Kite: this is Julie Taymor’s Beatles phantasmagoria, Across the Universe.

In the fashion of a Broadway jukebox musical, Taymor marries a familiar songbook to an even more familiar plot, lifted wholesale from Hair. Jude (Jim Sturgess), Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood), Max (Joe Anderson), Sadie (Dana Fuchs), and JoJo (Martin Luther McCoy) hit all the familiar stations of the Sixites: they drop out of college, they drop acid, fall in love, protest the war, hang out in the Village, burn their draft cards but are sent to Vietnam anyway, etc. etc. Whenever a Beatles tune can be shoehorned into the scene, they burst into song.

Some of the covers, many of them slowed down to ballads, are quite lovely, and in some of the more far-out setpieces, Taymor’s visual imagination thrills. But for every inspired moment, there are three flat-out embarrassing ones. The set-ups for the songs are so labored that you can’t ignore how arbitrary the entire project is. Oh my god, what’s wrong with our new friend Prudence? She locked herself in the bathroom and she won’t come out? Let’s sing a song for her! And what exactly is the point of setting “Strawberry Fields Forever” to images of the Vietnam War? Are you really dragging the assassination of Martin Luther King into this just so you can cue “While My Guitar Gently Weeps?”

The attention to Sixties detail and passing nods to cultural touchstones can be enjoyable (you have to be quick to see the striped shirt on Cowboy Neal or the mural on Leary’s house), but everything about Across the Universe feels canned and pre-digested. It’s candy-colored cute-weird without the threat, urgency, or madness of the truly weird-weird. It’s the counterculture domesticated, history defanged, and set to a catchy soundtrack. Yes, Across the Universe is slightly demented, but it’s not nearly demented enough.

Across the Universe. Julie Taymor, 2007. **

• Rotten Tomatoes: 52%
• The trailer:

I was faced with a choice at a difficult age
Would I write a book? Or should I take to the stage?
But in the back of my head I heard distant feet
Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat

I’ve had the Pet Shop Boys in the Jukebox for a while now, and it can’t be denied: I perk up considerably every time they come on (read: vogues around the apartment.) For smart, slick synth pop, look nowhere else. Even the ancient hits I’d grown sick of by 1988 (”Being Boring”) now sound like priceless pop baubles.

AMG says:
Postmodern ironists cloaked behind a veil of buoyantly melodic and lushly romantic synth-pop confections, the Pet Shop Boys’ cheeky, smart and utterly danceable music established them among the most commercially and critically successful groups of their era. Always remaining one step ahead of their contemporaries, the British duo navigated the constantly shifting landscape of modern dance-pop with rare grace and intelligence, moving easily from disco to house to techno with their own distinctive image remaining completely intact; satiric and irreverent — yet somehow strangely affecting — the Pet Shop Boys transcended the seeming disposability of their craft, offering wry and thoughtful cultural commentary communicated by the Morse code of au courant synth washes and drum-machine rhythms.