Across the Universe

Here’s a bit of heresy -- I liked this appropriation of a Sixties musical icon about as much as I’m Not There. Julie Taymor pours on the showbiz pizzazz and the Boomer nostalgia to transform 30 Beatles songs into a Hair-y chronicle of that defining era. I’m not so in love with the Beatles that I consider it a desecration, but was sufficiently imprinted with their work at an impressionable age that I can call up the words even when I don’t have any idea what they mean -- didn’t then, don’t now. So here the simple-minded transposition of lyric into action struck me as inevitable and yet revelatory. I got some of these songs in a way I never did before. And since all Beatles songs have been covered repeatedly, it didn’t bother me to hear them in other voices. Granted, the Sixties are presented as a series of comic book panels, but I’m invested and imbued enough to have a Pavlovian reaction to depiction of such scenes, unless they’re so badly done as to elicit revulsion. Certainly, plenty of critics were revolted by this psychedelic potpourri, but I bought into it for the duration (which, typically, should have been a quarter-hour less). Evan Rachel Wood is rather bland as the straight blond love interest, but maybe that was Waspishly appropriate. I didn’t care for her brother either, an Ivy League dropout turned Vietnam grunt, but I’d be just as put off if I met the character in the flesh. Luckily, Jim Sturgess is appealing, in a Jake Gyllenhaal manner, as the Liverpudlian shipworker who stows away to NYC and winds up in the East Village crash pad of a Janis Joplin-like singer and her Jimi Hendrix-like guitarist. But the story or characters hardly matter except as a pretext for kinetic visual pyrotechnics. I enjoyed it, but I can’t guarantee that you will. (2007, dvd, n.) *7-* (MC-56.)

On the other hand, Syndromes and a Century (2007, dvd, n.) was acclaimed by some, enough to come in at #4 on the annual Indiewire critics poll, but remained as opaque to me as its title. The Thai filmmaker, Apichatpong Weerasethakul (who helpfully goes by the name of “Joe”) is a darling of the international film festival set, but I can’t get into his work, which is carefully crafted but incomprehensible to me. He has a light and lovely touch, but I have no idea what he’s getting at, even with the clue that it has something to do with how his parents met, as two doctors, with the story told twice from opposing perspectives, once in a country hospital and once in a city. Or something like that. Buddhist or surrealist, it’s all beyond me.