I say this because it’s hard for me to believe that the Beatles pastiche Across the Universe was made by anyone with any firsthand memory of the 1960s—certainly not by anyone whose adolescence coincided with the Beatles’ heyday. Despite a few flashes of wit and production pizzazz, this overwrought and underthought musical plays like an endless loop of clichés regurgitated from movies about the 1960s made in the 1970s and 1980s. (Milos Foreman’s adaptation of Hair was about the best of them, and Taymor clearly knows that one pretty well).
Alternately banal and bathetic, Across the Universe actually had me thinking that maybe Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the 1978 movie with Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees, not the album) wasn’t as bad as I remembered.
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