Get Back Up On the Roof … Nostalgia Time Again
Reviews and Comments by Ken Burke
I invite you to join me on a regular basis to see how my responses to current cinematic offerings compare to the critical establishment, which I’ll refer to as either the CCAL (Collective Critics at Large) if they’re supportive or the OCCU (Often Cranky Critics Universe) when they go negative. However, due to COVID concerns I’m mostly addressing streaming options with limited visits to theaters, where I don’t think I’ve missed much anyway, but better options are on the horizon. (Note: Anything in bold blue below [some may look near purple] is a link to something more in the review.)
My reviews’ premise: “You can’t please everyone, so you got to please yourself.”
(from "Garden Party" by Rick Nelson and the Stone Canyon Band, 1972 album of the song’s name)
Here’s the trailer:
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(No Spoiler warnings this time because everything in this film is extremely [maybe sadly too] well-known.) I’ll start by admitting there are a couple of new releases in my local theaters I’d consider to see now rather than wait for their streaming appearances (along with another one I can easily hold off for a long time), but, sorry, Challengers (Luca Guadagnino; starring Zendaya and a couple of guys I don’t know anything about; 88% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes) and The Fall Guy (David Leitch; staring Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt; RT 82%), there’s a new COVID variant sneaking around my San Francisco Bay area so I’m being more vigilant about protecting my 76-year-old body—I think I’ll also protect my aesthetic sensibilities while I’m at it, so, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes (Wes Ball; RT 81%), despite your huge box-office hauls after just 1 week of $56.6 million domestically (U.S.-Canada), $129 million worldwide, I’ll likely be long-gone in some other cinematic direction when you've entered the streaming realm (I think I've had enough simian warfare for now).
Yet, still being in streaming mode this week, what I really wanted to review came out just about this time 54 years ago, making it difficult to adhere to my intentions of not going back past the current year unless it’s for a re-release of some classic (as I’ve done a very few times; consult the Summary of Two Guys Film Reviews considerably farther down in this posting in the Related Links section).
But, then, any re-release—even one below my 4½-5 stars ratings—could be considered viable if I embrace a useful rationalization (and who doesn’t do that?), so here I am with comments on this documentary about roughly a month in the lives of The Beatles in January, 1969. As I had been a loyal fan from the time I first heard “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on the radio in 1964, of course I saw this movie upon first release, yet it then disappeared from availability (unless you stumble onto an old VHS in a thrift store somewhere), a victim of technical shortcomings in its production processes (shot in 16mm, blown up to 35mm for distribution so the image quality wasn’t that great, plus it’s in the old 4x3 format rather than what we’re used to in widescreen) and the sadness that accompanied seeing this world-renowned band at the close of their storied-career—or at least it seemed that way at the time given the May 1970 appearance of this movie, which we’d have to understand later wasn’t accurate because after the famous rooftop "concert" (more of a public rehearsal, really, when you see it in full context in Peter Jackson’s 8-hour documentary, The Beatles: Get Back [2021; as with this new version of Let It Be, available to subscribers to Disney+ streaming, edited—and greatly enhanced technically—from the same 56 hours of footage shot under Lindsay-Hogg’s direction back in 1969; this new Let It Be even begins with a short conversation between Jackson and Lindsay-Hogg; also, the latter man talks here about his long-ago movie in redemptive terms]).
After what we’d see in … Get Back, The Beatles then went on to complete the now-highly-praised Abbey Road album, the release of which in September, 1969 coincided with John Lennon leaving the group, a shock kept quiet so as not to interfere with the record’s sales; by April 1970 Paul McCartney publically quit as well, so with the miserable knowledge that what we’d see in this movie and hear in its accompanying Let It Be album would be the last we’d likely experience of the Fab Four together, it was impossible for me not to attend these final releases from the group (although there’d be individual albums from each of them, around that time or later, some of which featured a few guest appearances from some of the others, followed years later after Lennon’s death with the massive Anthology [1995-’96, 2000] project and the production of 3 Lennon songs on tape provided to the others resulting in the final Beatles’ songs: “Free As a Bird,” Real Love,” “Now And Then”). If you’ve seen …Get Back you know that Jackson's lengthy cut provides enriched context for the relatively-brief capturing of this now-important month in the ongoing-evolution of The Beatles that we see in Let It Be. (I’ve listed Jackson as unofficial co-director of the renovated Let It Be as his team used the same enhancing-technology he had done previously to greatly improve the audiovisual quality of this re-release, a statement I’ll have to make based on other sources because there’s no way I can remember how it looked/sounded in 1970 and, more importantly, despite my sorrow in knowing when I saw it that this great group's time was at an end, I was still mesmerized to see my musical heroes on the big screen, so I likely wasn’t very critical of filmic quality in what I witnessed).
One crucial element from … Get Back not included in Let It Be is how George Harrison became disgusted with the situation the band put themselves in (mostly due to McCartney’s insistence) that they’d have roughly a month to isolate themselves on a vast soundstage in the Twickenham Film Studios where they could be filmed in the process of writing/finalizing new songs for a planned live performance to also be filmed, put into context with the rehearsal footage, eventually resulting in a documentary—in some ways this all happened but not as planned in the negotiations to get George back: no concert was to happen (the ensuing rooftop event was near-spontaneous), the songwriting process was to be moved to their more-intimate Apple Studio basement, and the filming seemingly came to an end after the rooftop event. Although we do see some friction between Paul and George at one point, yet generally in Let It Be there’s a decent sense of cooperative-harmony in this group.
Yoko’s there but isn't a distraction—she and John even sweetly dance around while George plays “I Me Mine”; too, in one scene Linda McCartney and little daughter Heather also visit the sessions—and there’s certainly some exuberance as the group, at times with keyboardist Billy Preston (asked by George to join them after the useful move to Apple), just messes around with tunes like “Bésame Mucho,” “You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll, “Kansas City,” and “Lawdy Miss Clawdy.” Truncated versions of tunes that ultimately made it onto the album (which John [I guess he still had clout at Apple even if he wasn’t in the band anymore] and George turned over to producer Phil Spector to “enhance” resulted in added instrumentation/vocal backgrounds that incensed Paul so much he finally replied in 2003 with his version of the album, Let It Be… Naked, that stripped all of that out) include “Across the Universe” and “For You Blue”; incomplete versions of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” “Oh! Darling,” and “Octopus’s Garden” end up a few months later on Abbey Road.
Complete studio songs in this movie are “Two of Us,” “Let It Be,” and “The Long and Winding Road.” What probably, for Beatlemaniacs like me and younger viewers who know little of this 1960s cultural phenomenon, is the most important part of Let It Be is the unauthorized rooftop “concert” which, in its full form in … Get Back runs about 40 min. because 2 of the 5 songs get 2 or 3 takes as the band’s still rehearsing as much as performing (especially in cold, rainy conditions) so in Let It Be we get the rooftop takes of “Get Back,” “Don’t Let Me Down” (which Spector left off of the album, McCartney restored it to … Naked), “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909,” and “Dig a Pony” (these versions of “… Feeling,” “… 909,” “… Pony” made it onto the album), with this “concert” version running about 20 min. as the crowds in the street below and on neighboring rooftops gathered to witness an unexpected miracle (The Beatles hadn’t played live since the final stop of their U.S. tour in San Francisco on August 29, 1966), until the police shut them down during a repeat of “Get Back” for disturbing the peace, which ends Let It Be as John says “I’d like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves, and I hope we’ve passed the audition.” Well, now that I’ve provided all of the background info that any sane person could want (but if you’re as insane as I am about The Beatles you could also explore this site, or this one, or even this one), the crucial question is why does all of this cinema vérité of a band broken up decades ago deserve a 4 stars-rating? Is it just nostalgia?
Admittedly, if this were a doc about the remaining Quarrymen from Liverpool (minus Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison), I’d have had marginal interest in it, might not have even watched it all the way through; however, that’s not the case as Let It Be is about the ex-Quarrymen (plus Ringo Starr) who became a global sensation, continue to be my favorite band even after all the intervening decades. Besides, documentaries are not often lauded for their innovative visuals, soundtracks, and editing structures (except, in my opinion, something like Woodstock [Michael Wadleigh, 1970] about the famous 1969 music festival) but more so for the content of what they’re exploring about a person (or persons), an event, or an era, so the content here does make a big difference in terms of being part of an invaluable record (so to speak) of 4 fabulously-famous musicians as we witness their creative process along with their final live performance as a group (along with help from Preston), so for me this is a crucial cluster of celluloid—and one that gets to the essence of Jackson’s mammoth … Get Back without requiring a full day of your time to watch it—conclusively earning my big 4 stars.
On another personal note, it’s both still exhilarating and now melancholy to watch Let It Be because I still “have memories longer than the road that stretches out of here” of the month of this film’s release because it coincided with my BFA graduation at the U. of Texas at Austin, a time when I was like Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) in being “just a little worried about my future,” because my degree in Art Education didn’t seem like it would lead to a career (my semester of practice teaching showed me I could get along well with high-school students but probably not the other faculty), my love-life was deteriorating (got worse 5 years later with a divorce from my first marriage), my decision to continue on into grad school in another field (Radio-TV-Film) wasn’t clear about what that might lead to (ultimately, a Ph.D. in Communication, many decades of college teaching, and this blog—along with a successful second marriage—all of which have proven to be right choices), and watching this doc when it first came out with the knowledge that The Beatles were to be no more once that rooftop event was done left me feeling lost for a bit although life went on as spring warmed into summer (which, in Texas, meant walking around all day in your personal pool of sweat). Consequently, all these years later it’s ultimately enjoyable to see Let It Be again for the first time since 1970, a negotiated-joy that I hope can be shared not only by folks as old as me but also those young enough to barely know why it mattered so much to us oldies when John and George died (at least I’ve been able to attend Paul & Ringo [separately] a couple of times live).
The CCAL, with lots of critics younger than me based on photos I see in Rotten Tomatoes, seems to be in agreement with the RT positive reviews at 80% (49 total, most from 2024 but a few as far back as 2002, based on a re-release in home media of the original version of Let It Be), the Metacritic average score at 72% (only 13 reviews, though; 5 from 2024, a couple from 1970, the oldest from Variety, 12/31/1969 [? Did they somehow get a look at it months before it was released in the U.S. and U.K.?]). While I could give you the whole rooftop "concert" (starts with “Get Back,” then just let it play through 4 more, 2 repeats, ends on truncated “Get Back” as the cops arrive) as my wrap-it-up Musical Metaphor, but that gets a bit tedious, especially because it’s all just audio, so to highlight the long collaborations of Paul and John (amply-enhanced by George and Ringo) I’ll just offer you this take, from the film, of “I’ve Got a Feeling” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiove5D_ZU4 (where you get the extra added attraction of subtitles in Portuguese; if you really want to enhance your bi-linguality but can’t keep up with the images you can also go here where it’s all written out for you, so you can be assured you’ll know how to say “wet dream” properly next time you’re in Brazil), or if you don’t want the additional verbiage, here’s another version, seemingly from Jackson's … Get Back, based on the editing. You know, for such a short film this has turned into quite a long review, so, like John, I hope I’ve also passed the audition; if so, I’ll see you again soon.
SHORT TAKES
Related Links Which You Might Find Interesting:
Some options for your consideration: (1) 2024 festival films you need to know about (includes the next item here); (2) Francis Ford Coppola's controversial Megalopolis to premiere at Cannes Film Festival; (3) Motion Picture Academy launches $500 million global outreach initiative.
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