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Post by Dr Winston on Aug 11, 2008 17:19:57 GMT 1
Across the Universe - A Review Julie Taymor Made the Most Spectacular Film of the Year: Gorgeous widescreen cinematography vast enough to encapsulate an era, the sacred pop of the fab four, and a surprising amount of restraint made Across the Universe one of the most expansive and unabashedly spectacular yet overlooked and divisive films of the year. Taken out of context, someone coaxing a girl named Prudence (who came in through the bathroom window, no less) out of hiding to the tune of "Dear Prudence" could be seen as arrogant and cloying, and a clangy kitchen-sink of symbolism could bring to mind the excesses of Tommy. But in a hyper-reality that takes itself deadly serious in order to stay hyper-engaging, the viewer learns to trust and understand that Julie Taymor has done the impossible: crafted a jaw-hanger of a clever musical that teeters on the electric precipice but never collapses into self-consciousness. Taymor's motivated use of song to develop not just the plot but the savage swingin' sixties is masterful. A slowed down "If I Fell" sung live and bare-bones by Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) features an inspired pairing of slow motion and cello. Shortly thereafter, the girls at her boarding school help her with an amped-up bare feet-wiggling "It Won't Be Long" as she awaits the subject of the preceding song, boyfriend Daniel (Spencer Liff). Taymor extracts every meaning, perspective, and possibility from well-chosen songs to express and expand on every mood, creating an amalgam far mightier than the sum of its parts. Sir Paul and Yoko were both delighted with what Julie Taymor did with the music. Taymor at once imparts how the Beatles captured and were changed by the era, a magnificent tug-of-war that adds tension, helping to imbue Across the Universe with additional richness, depth, meaning, and dazzling verve. In narrative film, friendship can be illustrated by a handshake, a knowing wink, or a full-on "A Little Help from My Friends." The tune propels the transformative growth of rollicking college buddies throughout a single performance; beginning with the Beatles' version and, when the bonding becomes too intense, when things get too hyper to handle, blistering out to Joe Cocker's primal rendering. The film constantly plays to genre strength, underscoring the magnificent power of a musical and boiling down a full film's worth of development to one sequence. The viewer has little time to breathe before the coasting magnificence of "I've Just Seen a Face" fills the most spectacular bowling alley this side of The Big Lebowski. This is economical filmmaking in a study of contrasts, where the preceding bucolic locales stand in stark relief to a following scene of race-rioting inner-city strife as "Let it Be" emanates from a small boy cringing behind a car . . . and then explodes into a gospel chorus filling out his funeral. The plot is simple in order to direct focus onto not just the era but also the showcase performances, set-pieces, choreography, and razzle dazzle that is Across the Universe. Plot = boy meets girl story + moves to city, experiences the sixties, so the viewer can feel what it was really like in the grandest terms possible. According to the DVD's extras, 75 percent of the singing in all 33 songs was live. The wonderful documentary, The US vs. John Lennon, states literally what Across the Universe delivers metaphorically — Lennon was truly feared by the U.S. administration, and Nixon tried to deport him for his ability to subvert war efforts by leading a peace movement. Warning: this production may change how you think about your favorite Beatles song forever! US DVD UK DVD
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EuanB
Mature Lennon
Posts: 278
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Post by EuanB on Sept 13, 2008 23:35:27 GMT 1
This is the ultimate film portrait of the life and work of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. This powerful independent retrospective draws on rare footage of John in performance with the Beatles and in his solo career, which is reviewed and reassessed by those who knew and worked with him .We also hear the sometimes contradictory views of John himself.
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Post by mojo on Sept 14, 2008 9:04:26 GMT 1
This is the ultimate film portrait of the life and work of one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. This powerful independent retrospective draws on rare footage of John in performance with the Beatles and in his solo career, which is reviewed and reassessed by those who knew and worked with him .We also hear the sometimes contradictory views of John himself. Hi euan. Where did you get this from?
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EuanB
Mature Lennon
Posts: 278
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Post by EuanB on Sept 14, 2008 10:44:32 GMT 1
I got mine in HMV
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Post by restlesswind on Sept 27, 2008 19:46:21 GMT 1
John Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman - The Sunday Times review.
A compulsive biography that uncovers the conflicts that made John Lennon a mess of insecurities Robert Sandall
Unlike most rock stars — unlike most people — the life of John Lennon would probably have been a compulsive read whatever he’d achieved as an adult. From the moment he entered the world in 1940 during a German bombing raid on Liverpool, to the point at which he left it 40 years later, shot dead on his New York doorstep by a schizophrenic fan, Lennon was a lifelong stranger to normality.
Emotionally, he was a mess of insecurities. The son of a working-class merchant seaman with showbiz aspirations and a flighty middle-class woman in permanent denial of her genteel background, Lennon fervently believed that he had been, as a child, “never really wanted”. Scarred by a bizarre scene when his soon-to-be-absent father ordered him, at the age of six, to choose which of his separated parents he wanted to stay with, he ended up with neither following the intervention of his mother’s older sister, a strict and childless former nurse, aunt Mimi. Mimi’s motivation for taking John off to live with her and uncle George in the polite Liverpool suburb of Woolton was not maternal or conventionally affectionate: it was driven by her class-bound disapproval of what she regarded as the proletarian habits of John’s mum Julia, a free-spirited fan of pubs, banjo-playing and extramarital relationships.
Lennon’s affinity for his errant mother, whom he visited on a regular basis, extended way beyond her taste for popular music. In the course of his conversations with Lennon’s inner circle, Philip Norman heard several reports of an incident when John was 14 in which he accidentally touched his mother’s breast one afternoon while lying next to her on a bed. “I was wondering if I should do anything else,” Lennon later told a journalist from the Daily Express. “I always think I should have done it. Presumably she would have allowed it.”
Feelings of intimacy were, for this extra- ordinarily unlucky man, often a prelude to bereavement. When Lennon was 17, Julia was run over and killed by a speeding off- duty policeman, a tragedy that left him, he said, “in a blind rage for two years”. He had barely recovered from that when the Beatles’ first bassist Stu Sutcliffe — whom Lennon worshipped with a quasi-sexual intensity and to whom he wrote letters similar in length and tone, he claimed, to the ones he later sent Yoko — died sudd- enly of a brain haemorrhage. (Norman discounts the possibility that this was provoked by an earlier, drunken attack on Sutcliffe in which Lennon-allegedly kicked him in the head.)
The fatal drugs overdose that did for his surrogate father figure, Brian Epstein, in 1967 hit him much harder than it did the rest of the Beatles. For one thing, Lennon blamed himself “for introducing Brian to pills”.
More to the point, he was devastated to lose the cultivated, sensitive soul he had once holidayed alone with in Spain and who, despite all the cruel jibes about Epstein’s being “a faggot and a Jew”, deeply touched the middle-class sensibility implanted by Mimi. When Epstein first checked into a London rehab centre to try to deal with his problem, Lennon sent him a huge floral bouquet with the message, “You know I love you . . . I really mean that. John.”
The loss of Epstein was a disaster which presaged the end of Lennon’s first marriage to the long-suffering Cynthia, as well as his creative relationship with the Beatles. It seems to have coincided with, if not contributed to, the falling-out with Paul McCartney, another close buddy for whom Lennon, Norman suggests, might have harboured some sexual feelings. He quotes Yoko remembering people in the Apple office referring to McCartney as “John’s princess”. But rather than outing his subject, in the stridently accusatory style of his previous biographer Albert Goldman, Norman is more wisely tuned to Lennon’s wayward intellectual curiosity. He attributes his gay moments to a commitment to “the principle that bohemians should try everything” and concludes that, where McCartney was concerned, Lennon had been “deterred by Paul’s immovable heterosexuality”.
Norman has written about Lennon twice before but he has uncovered much new mat-erial in his research for this impressive and highly readable book. One intriguing nugget concerns the revelation that the unidentified girl Lennon sings about “having” in Norwegian Wood was the German wife of the Beatles’ photographer Robert Freeman, with whom Lennon had a clandestine affair while the couple were living in the flat beneath his and Cynthia’s in South Kensington.
The fact that Norman has had the blessing and full co-operation of Yoko Ono means that he is not short of new things to say about the relationship which, according to popular writ, broke up the world’s favourite pop group. He argues convincingly that, far from being an opportunistic schemer, the high-born, wealthy Yoko was reluctant to take up with the Beatle she regarded as her social and artistic inferior, and whose crude sexual foreplay — employing the Beatles’ roadies to cart her off to a bed in a flat near the Abbey Road studio — she initially rejected.
The most interesting part of Lennon’s complicated life on which Norman sheds fresh light is the troubled relationship with his seaman father, Alfred. Usually seen as an absconding rascal, Alf emerges here as a stoic victim of the caprices of his serially unfaithful wife and volatile son. He tried to hang on to John, offering to take him to New Zealand after Julia walked out on their marriage; and when he finally re-established contact with his Beatle son, he seems not to have expected anything much in the way of help, despite being broke and virtually jobless. Like just about everybody else in John’s family and life, Alf was, in his way, a remarkable man. At 54, he successfully romanced a 19-year-old girl, whom he married and had two sons with. Shortly after this, in what was to be their final meeting, John unleashed the fury he had long nurtured for his hapless dad and threatened to have him killed. The statement a terrified Alf filed with a solicitor in the event of this threat being carried out is one of the most moving and scary pieces of Lennon’s sprawling legacy. It is greatly to Norman’s credit as a biographer that he does justice to all of it in a book whose 854 pages simply fly by.
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Post by Dr Winston on Oct 20, 2008 16:16:15 GMT 1
The Beatles London: The Ultimate Guide Where did John, Paul and George try to post Ringo into a letterbox? Which railway stations were locations in 'A Hard Day's Night? Where was 'I Am The Walrus' filmed? They may have been born in Liverpool, but London was the Beatles home from home, the place where they really grew into their roles as international musical and cultural icons. Subsequently, all over the city, there are sites which represent a significant shared moment in the history of the band, and that of London. The Beatles London is a celebration of those places, both a guide book and a treasure trove of Beatles' nuggets. This unique and fascinating book details how London and the Beatles were, and always be, connected together at the time of a great social and cultural shift. Originally published in 1994, this new edition has been full updated and reformatted, and includes a section on 'Beatles walks' to take across the capital.
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Post by Dr Winston on Nov 8, 2008 9:10:47 GMT 1
John Lennon: The Definitive BiographyJohn Lennon: The Life by Philip Norman Phillip Norman wrote one of the first and still one of the best Beatles histories ("Shout!," 1981). ReviewFor more than a quarter century, Philip Norman's internationally bestselling Shout! has been unchallenged as the definitive biography of the Beatles. Now, at last, Norman turns his formidable talent to the Beatle for whom belonging to the world's most beloved pop group was never enough. Drawing on previously untapped sources, and with unprecedented access to all the major characters, here is the comprehensive and most revealing portrait of John Lennon that is ever likely to be published. This masterly biography takes a fresh and penetrating look at every aspect of Lennon's much-chronicled life, including the songs that have turned him, posthumously, into a near-secular saint. In three years of research, Norman has turned up an extraordinary amount of new information about even the best-known episodes of Lennon folklore - his upbringing by his strict Aunt Mimi; his allegedly wasted school and student days; the evolution of his peerless creative partnership with Paul McCartney; his Beatle-busting love affair with a Japanese performance artist; his forays into painting and literature; his experiments with Transcendental Meditation, primal scream therapy, and drugs. The book's numerous key informants and interviewees include Sir Paul McCartney, Sir George Martin, Sean Lennon - whose moving reminiscence reveals his father as never before, and Yoko Ono, who speaks with sometimes shocking candor about the inner workings of her marriage to John. Honest and unflinching, as John himself would wish, Norman gives us the whole man in all his endless contradictions, tough and cynical, hilariously funny but also naive, vulnerable and insecure, and reveals how the mother who gave him away as a toddler haunted his mind and his music for the rest of his days. US John Lennon: The LifeUK John Lennon: The Life
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Post by Dr Winston on Nov 20, 2008 0:06:32 GMT 1
The Beatles Monopoly Game
The world's most legendary rock-n-roll band teams up with the world's most popular board game to bring you the ultimate Beatles experience. The Beatles Collector's Edition of MONOPOLY celebrates the music that revolutionized rock-n-roll in the 20th century. This completely customized game features Apple and Abbey Road Studios along with every album released by the Beatles allowing fans to create their own private music anthology. Enjoy and sing along to the timeless music that has transcended generations as you collect the White Album, Revolver, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and more. Six collectible tokens symbolize unforgettable songs: Hammer (Maxwell's Silver Hammer), Strawberry (Strawberry Fields Forever), Walrus (I Am The Walrus), Sun (Here Comes The Sun), Raccoon (Rocky Raccoon) and Octopus (Octopus's Garden). Come Together! Ages: 8+ 2-6 Players
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Post by Dr Winston on Nov 21, 2008 16:59:32 GMT 1
Classic Albums: John Lennon / Plastic Ono Band A Review by Glen BoydJohn Lennon's first solo album Plastic Ono Band was recorded during a difficult period described by many of those who were there as a time when John was "finding himself." He had just left the Beatles, and was searching to find his own identity — both personally and musically — removed from the madness that often surrounded the biggest band in the world at the time. When viewed in hindsight, the songs on Plastic Ono Band obviously have long since born that out. Stripped to a core unit of just Lennon, bassist Klaus Voorman, Ringo Starr on drums, and occasionally keyboardist Billy Preston (most notably on the song "God"), the simplicity of the music and arrangements confounded many of the former Beatle's fans. They of course had become used to the progressively more elaborate music that had begun with Rubber Soul and continued right on up through Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road, and the rest of the Beatles' landmark recordings of the time. John also shocked those same fans with the words "I don't believe in Beatles" found on one of Plastic Ono Band's key tracks, the song "God." Ah yes, the lyrics. With Plastic Ono Band, on songs like "God" and "Mother," Lennon seemed to be a man intent on standing quite literally naked before the world, and baring his soul for all the rest of us to see. "He was always a very courageous guy," Ringo notes in one of several revealing interviews on this DVD about the making of that album. "He would just put it out there. But sometimes there were severe consequences." Part of Eagle Rock's fabulous series on the making of Classic Albums, this DVD is not only a fascinating look at the making of that album — it also provides a rare look into the lives of John and Yoko themselves at the time it was made. Unlike so many documentaries such as this — that rely on informative, but often dry and boring interviews with the studio tech wizards who twiddled the knobs — there is also lots of rare footage here of the Lennons themselves. It's just great stuff. One of the more interesting titbits one learns here concerns the process of how John and Yoko recorded both of their solo albums at the same time. The result was the now famous identical covers of both records. But it is also revealed here that at one point they wanted to title John's album "Primal," and Yoko's "Scream." The idea here was to demonstrate their togetherness — both musically and of course, as a couple — but also an acknowledgment of Arthur Janov's primal scream therapy, which was a heavy influence on the personal themes of John's record. As things ended up, they simply called both albums Plastic Ono Band. But as for Yoko's album, the title "Scream" certainly would have served as truth in advertising. Ringo describes the sessions for Yoko's record as a situation where the small band just jammed, while Yoko would "do her crazy singing." Ringo then adds "Peace & Love, Yoko" with a humorous grin. It is also revealed here that although Phil Spector was given a producer's credit on John's record, "I don't remember Phil producing anything," as Ringo reveals. The small band would record the simple, stripped down arrangements by day, while John remixed the tracks at night. On this DVD, the whole story unfolds through some amazing footage, as well as interviews with Ringo, Yoko, Klaus Voorman, and the engineers who mastered the record. In the segments with the engineers, many of the original demos for the record are also played. In one such segment, Lennon's famous scream on "Mother" is separated out from the backing music tracks. "I don't know how the guy could even talk after that," the engineer remarks. There are also some pretty great extras here, including original live performances of "Mother," "Well Well Well," and "Instant Karma." Eagle Rock, as always, has done a great job with this revealing and fascinating documentary.
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Post by Dr Winston on Nov 30, 2008 20:17:28 GMT 1
Electric Arguments The Fireman and Youth Paul McCartneyPaul McCartney's 2008 album with producer Youth. Each track written, recorded and sung in the space of one day with Paul McCartney, playing all instruments. The album's opener is classic rock and an instant attention grabber. A heavy guitar riff with loud drums and souring vocals, it's like nothing The Fireman have ever done before. The Fireman are back after a ten-year break. Electric Arguments is their third and brand new studio album and it's not the album people might expect from the mysterious duo. US Electric ArgumentsUK Electric Arguments
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Post by Dr Winston on Dec 3, 2008 12:47:46 GMT 1
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Post by Dr Winston on Dec 25, 2008 20:47:44 GMT 1
For now, Norman's 'Lennon' biography best in last 20 years A Review from www.observer-reporter.comAs of Monday, that's how many years it's been since John Lennon was murdered. Think about it - that's the whole stretch of time from "Love Me Do" to "Double Fantasy," with an additional decade on top of that. But even as the former Beatle recedes deeper into history, the fascination with his life and work continues unabated. Just this week, a book hit the shelves suggesting that Lennon's death was prophesied in the Beatles' lyrics. You can put it next to the volumes that purport to contain conversations with him from beyond the grave and suggest that Beatlemania was a clever plot hatched by Queen Elizabeth II and the Trilateral Commission. A far more essential addition to the Lennon library, however, is Philip Norman's "John Lennon: The Life," a hefty biography published at the end of October by HarperCollins. This is the first major biography of Lennon in 20 years and, for now at least, is the best. Even though it sheds little new light on Lennon's tenure in the Beatles and as a solo artist - is there really anything earth-shattering that can be uncovered at this point? - it offers the best glimpse yet of Lennon's childhood and teenage years, and is takes a clear-eyed, balanced look at his virtues and vices. Norman has previously tackled biographies of Elton John, Buddy Holly and the Rolling Stones, but he's probably best-known for "Shout!", his acclaimed 1981 Beatles biography. Norman's sympathies were clearly with Lennon in that volume, and that's little changed this time around. Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, withdrew her support from "John Lennon: The Life," though, after reading the manuscript. She claimed that Norman was "mean to John," but that's a puzzling assertion. The Lennon we see here is neither the one-dimensional, drug-addled monster portrayed in the slash-and-burn "Lives of John Lennon" by Dormont native Albert Goldman, nor the good-humored peacenik spouting utopian sentiments that Ono has served up in recent years. What we get is somewhere in the middle. Norman's Lennon is extraordinarily creative and extraordinarily capricious, kind, cruel, funny, jealous, loving and possessive. In other words, a flesh-and-blood human being. The story of Lennon's childhood has been told repeatedly, but Norman cuts through much of the mythology and misinformation that's grown up around it. He wasn't exactly abandoned by his merchant seaman father, as Lennon himself claimed later in his life, nor was he exactly abandoned by his mother. Rather, his no-nonsense aunt, Mimi Smith, apparently threatened to contact a social service agency and have Lennon taken away from his mother after she became pregnant by a Welsh soldier toward the end of World War II. Smith was childless, according to Norman, because she never consummated her own marriage, and raised him starting around age 6. Though his childhood was relatively secure and financially untroubled by post-war standards, Norman detects a lack of nurturing and tenderness in Lennon's early days, which set the stage for the insecurities that dogged him throughout his life. Buttressed by wealth and fame, Lennon spent much of his 40 years searching for an all-encompassing answer to the quandaries of his existence, moving from drugs to meditation to primal scream therapy to radical politics to domesticity. Had he lived, it's hard to imagine Lennon ever settling permanently into contentment. Norman's recounting of the frenzied days of the Beatles has a little bit of a paint-by-the-numbers feel. You get the impression that he's a little impatient with it, particularly after telling portions of the story previously in "Shout!" And Lennon's eventful solo years take up only about 140 of the book's 851 pages. Norman gets most of his facts right, though a few minor errors do turn up. For example, he states that "The Ed Sullivan Show" aired on NBC-TV, when it was a mainstay of the CBS schedule, and he consistently misspells the last name of Jon Wiener, a University of California-Irvine history professor who has extensively researched the efforts of the U.S. government to deport Lennon in the 1970s. In one interview or another since he killed Lennon, Mark Chapman has stated that he couldn't see Lennon as a human being when he squeezed the trigger. He was just a guy on an album sleeve. If Chapman ever reads it, "John Lennon: The Life" should give him some idea of just who that human being was. US John Lennon: The LifeUK John Lennon: The Life
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EuanB
Mature Lennon
Posts: 278
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Post by EuanB on Feb 5, 2009 12:05:06 GMT 1
The Beatles in Scotland It is difficult to imagine that there remains anything new to say about The Beatles, but lifelong Beatles fan Ken McNab reveals for the first time, in intimate detail, the pivotal part Scotland played in the genesis of the group and the extraordinary connections that were fostered north of the border before, during and after their meteoric rise to unprecedented fame. McNab follows The Beatles as rough and ready unknowns on their first tour of Scotland in 1960 and again, in 1964, as all-conquering heroes. He also discovers that the momentous decision to break up the band was made in Scotland. The personal association to Scotland is highlighted too with details on the McCartneys' lives in Mull of Kintyre and Lennon's childhood holidays in Durness. With these new and previously unheard stories, The Beatles in Scotland will appeal to any Beatles fan. It's a fantastic celebration and a uniquely Scottish magical mystery tour. This book contains eyewitness accounts and previously unheard anecdotes from the band's Scottish tours. You will discover the truth about McCartney's Kintyre drug busts and Lennon's Highland car crash. McNab pays tribute to theScots who helped create the myth of the Fab Four including legendary photographer Harry Benson. Thanks to that book I found the Lennon bench up town
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Post by mojo on Feb 5, 2009 21:40:34 GMT 1
John had a lot of connection with Scotland. I read about his summer holidays there as a boy. I don't think Julia went with him, but his uncle took him there.
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EuanB
Mature Lennon
Posts: 278
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Post by EuanB on Feb 6, 2009 1:52:57 GMT 1
Yeah he had a aunt & uncle who lived in Murrayfield
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