Across the Universe

I saw "Across the Universe" last night - the movie about the Beatles, the sixties, the Vietnam war, the Iraq war, and, well, love. It was wonderfully directed, with many of the songs ending up looking better than 99% of music videos these days. But... somehow... it was only OK. Some of the songs ended up feeling like set pieces, unconnected with any plot that was going on. The plot was much like early Beatles songs, boy meets girl, they fall in love, break apart, come back together. The main problem I had was that the movie was too infected with the ghosts of the 60's (Janis and Jimi were there, along with John, Paul, George and Ringo) to ever really come off as a new piece of work or a new statement about that time. While beautiful (and some of the songs really were covered amazingly - Joe Cocker doing"Come Together" was awesome, and the rendition of "I wanna hold your hand" was great), it was all somewhat of a rehash of everything we've ever seen about the sixties.

But it really was beautiful.