But you’re a black sheep and a wrong one, and you fucked up repeatedly so ya gotta do the time, man. Really. No skating. It’ll build character. You’ll be a better, tougher person at the end of your sentence. It’s a growth opportunity.
HEcomment: I think PresidentBiden pardoned his bad-seed son Hunter out of resignation and despair.
Joe’sinnerdialogue: “Obviously I’m reversing myself but my reputation is in the toilet anyway. Future generations will be taught to despise me as I’m the obstinateoldcoot who surrendered our nation to MAGA fascism because I wouldn’t collapse my ill-conceived campaign for a second term until it was way too late.
“You might be horrified by the return of Donald Trump but I’m the deluded scumbag who blew open the border and ushered in his second term so what difference does it make? History hates me now and will certainly hate me going forward.
“At the end of the day I’m defaulting to an age-old sentiment when it comes to broken-down fathers and weak sons: ‘Theheartwantswhatitwants.’”
I’m sorry but Martin Scorsese and Dave Tedeschi’s Beatles ‘64 (Apple +, now streaming) is decent at best and shortfally at worst. It never quite rides the whirlwind.
The 106-minute doc tries to convey or suggest the spiritual-emotional endorphin highs that were surging through the fans in February ‘64, and it achieves that here and there, yes, but mostly it feels likes a spotty, half-assed, catch-as-catch-can affair. A catchy quote or an energy surge every now and then, but then it peters out. A bit lazy.
I own a mid ’90s DVD of the original Maysles tour doc, and we’ve all seen various snippets before, of course. So I wanted more, better, extra…something new that would get me going.
I wanted a gleaming, straight-from-the-lab, totally grain-free enhancement of the 60-year-old footage, but what I saw looked merely acceptable…nothing to jump up and down about. I wanted a stronger music track with heightened thrompy bass lines….nope. I wanted footage from the Saturday rehearsal session at the Ed Sullivan Show…nope.
No mention of the bizarre fact that the Beatles’ sets (in February ’64 they played inside a boxing stadium in Washington D.C. and at Carnegie Hall) were only about 20 or 25 minutes or so.
I wanted to hear about what surely went on between the lads and those few girls who were shrewd or persistent enough to penetrate security and meet them…stuff that nobody reported about back then, but c’mon…are you telling me nothing happened?
I have a vague recollection of a rogue photo taken during the August ’64 tour. I can’t find any evidence of it, but I recall the photo having appeared in Confidential or some like-minded scandal sheet. It was a flashbulb shot of a laughing, seemingly drunken John Lennon prowling around on his hands and knees and playing horsey to some floozy in black underwear…riding him like a stallion, riding crop in hand. You can accuse me of imagining this and maybe I did, but an inner voice says otherwise. **
Being especially receptive to the delicacy of Sutton these days, my heart went out to all those excited, screaming, jumping-up-and-down girls in their mid teens who surrounded the Plaza hotel (Beatles bunker) like General Santa Anna’s troops surrounded the Alamo. I wouldn’t have wanted them to be riding Lennon or anyone else. I just wanted them to get home safely.
You know what would have been far more interesting? An in-depth doc about the Beatles August ’65 tour (8.15.65 to 8.31.64), which happened right smack in the middle of their drug-experimentation heyday. This doc could’ve included the fellas hanging with Bob Dylan at the Warwick, not to mention the Peter Fonda encounter in Benedict Canyon when everyone was tripping (“I know what it’s like to be dead”).
At 5’8″ or thereabouts, Ringo Starr was the shortest of the fab four. But Beatles ’64 includes recent color footage of him speaking to producer Martin Scorsese, and Ringo is significantly taller.
Beatles ’64 is an honorable effort, but the Disney + marketing was better than the film itself. It doesn’t quite capture that cultural earthquake feeling. Not altogether.
And the Disney + honchos had the audacity to pop in commercials!
**
Three months ago Edward Berger‘s Conclave played at Telluride Film Festival’s Werner Herzog theatre (8.30.24)…glorious. I sat in the second or third row…elated, throttled, tumescent. Now I’m watching it with headphones on my 15″ Macbook Pro…parked inside an under-heated food court cafeteria on the northbound 95 in Darien. I love it no less and am very happy that I own the Amazon digital file, but you know Berger is quietly weeping as he reads this.
