Nowhere Boy (2009) Director: Sam Taylor-Johnson Rating: 6.0
The film follows a teenage John Lennon
discovering music, girls, Paul and George and unraveling his complicated
emotional relationship with his mother Julia and his Aunt Mimi. Most of the
film is fairly accurate though it takes some liberties with the timeline
and squeezes events that actually took place over a few years into a one
year period to enhance the drama. It ends with Lennon and his mates heading
for Hamburg.
Lennon was born in 1940. His father Alfred
was a seaman and often away on long trips leaving him to his mother to take
care of. When Alfred came back from one trip he discovered that Julia was
pregnant from another man and left her and kidnapped John intending to take
him to New Zealand. Julia caught up with him and the parents asked the five
year boy who he wanted to be with. He chose his father but when his mother
left he ran after her. At this point his Aunt Mimi stepped in and took the
child and raised him for the next 13 years. John's relationship with his
father vanished not to be reconnected till he was famous while his mother
stayed close by and he visited her from time to time. In fact, she introduced
him to rock and roll and bought him his first guitar in 1956 (the film gives
that honor to Mimi). In 1958 Julia was walking home after visiting her sister
and killed by a car. John was tormented by his off and on relationship with
his mother and her early death all of his life looking for absolution through
primal scream therapy, drugs and depression.
On the White album Lennon wrote a loving
tribute to his mother in the song Julia, but in his cathartic album Plastic
Ono Band his song Mother is a painful scream of resentment.
Mother, you had me but I never had you
I wanted you, you didn't want me
So I, I just gotta tell you
Goodbye, goodbye
Mimi was to pass away in 1991 eleven years
after Lennon was killed and long after she realized her advice to John was
quite wrong - "The guitar's all right John, but you'll never make a living
out of it". Lennon called her every week for all of his life. Backbeat (1994) Director: Iain Softly Rating: 6.5
In August of 1960, the agent of the Beatles
arranged for them to go off to Hamburg after both Rory and the Hurricanes
and Gerry and the Pacemakers had said they could not. The Beatles were still
a rough rock and roll band and had to add Pete Best at the last minute as
the drummer for them to go. So at this point The Beatles were Lennon, McCartney,
a 17 year old George, Best and on bass Stuart Sutcliffe. They were each being
paid 2.50 pounds a day with free lodging in one dark squalid room to work
seven days and many hours.
Hamburg at this time was still recovering
from WW II and had a reputation as a very disreputable sleazy city filled
with crime, drugs, prostitutes and a large Red District area. The Beatles
started at the Kaiserkeller where they perfomed in between strip tease acts.
They would come out and rip off some standard rock and roll songs and then
go back and wait for another lady to finish taking off her clothes to reappear.
Over the nearly two years they played in Hamburg - with trips back to the
UK to play the Cavern Club and at Best's mother's club the Casbah Coffee
Club - they honed their band into one of the best around. They also started
writing some of their own material to play such as I Saw Her Standing There.
They were invited in Hamburg to be the backing group for a recording that
Tony Sheridan did of My Bonnie. Oddly, later this recording sold well enough
in Brian Epstein's record shop that he went down to the Cavern Club to check
them out.
This film covers those two years with a
particular focus on the friendship between Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff) and
Lennon (Ian Hart who has also portrayed Lennon in Hours and Times) - and
the romance that developed between Sutcliff and Astrid Kirchher (who took
some classic photos of the group and also is credited with giving them the
famous Beatles moptop). One evening Klaus Voorman had been walking by the
club and heard the music and walked in and was blown away. He invited his
girlfriend Astrid to join him. Voorman later on designed the cover for Revolver
and was bass player for Manfred Mann for a few years - and played bass on
Lennon's Imagine album. But he lost out on Astrid.
This is a legendary period in the Beatles
lives when they went from ragged bar band to being on the verge of fame -
they also met Ringo - and replaced Best with him later in 1962 just as they
are about to do their first recording. It is a solid film intermingling the
tragic Sutcliffe, the always angry Lennon and the Zen like Astrid into a
piece of rock and roll history. The Hours and Times (1991) Director: Christopher and Munch Rating: 5.5
This is a small intimate black and white
film that fictionalizes a vacation that John Lennon and Brian Epstein took
to Barcelona in 1963. Epstein had of course discovered the Beatles in the
Cavern Club in Liverpool back in 1961 and changed their image and charted
a path to their fame. Epstein was also gay, which was still illegal in the
UK back in that time. He apparently had a strong affection for Lennon which
generated rumors for years that the two of them had an affair. Lennon later
had this to say "I was on holiday with Brian Epstein in Spain, where the
rumours went around that he and I were having a love affair. Well, it was
almost a love affair, but not quite. It was never consummated. But it was
a pretty intense relationship."
The film is a series of conversations,
doubts, conflicts, affection that occur during these few days. Epstein (David
Angus) is portrayed as a refined but troubled soul with elements of self-hate
and a strong desire for Lennon. And indeed Epstein was a troubled soul in
real life looking but never finding love or happiness, turning to drugs and
dying from an overdose four years later at the age of 32. Lennon is portrayed
as acidic, sarcastic, verbally sadistic and a bit of a prick (which seems
pretty close to the truth) - so much so that at least in this film it is
hard to understand why Epstein is so drawn to him. The magnetism that shines
when we see Lennon in clips of him in the real world are buried beneath a
surly moody performance. Still it is an interesting imagining of what took
place on that holiday. Lennon Naked (2010) Director: Edmund Coulthard Rating: 5.0
I have loved the music of John Lennon for
a big chunk of my life and for a long time that transferred to the man especially
when he became involved in the anti-war movement - but when I began to read
about him as a human being it is difficult not to come to the conclusion
that he was basically a real shit - to the other Beatles, to fans, to the
press, to his wives, to Julian his son and eventually most of his old friends.
Whether this inner anger and bitterness stemmed from his childhood desertion
by his mother and father or other demons I don't know, but he was a self-absorbed
dick. But I still love his music because out of this pain came this incredible
music - at least for a decade. Crap after Imagine once he started coming
to terms with himself and his creepy love for Mother, as he called Yoko.
Lennon Naked basically goes with the theory
that it was how he was abandoned as a child that made him who he is - but
his self pity becomes more pathetic than tragic in this telling of seven
years of his life between 1964 - 1971. The film is a series of episodes in
his life - beginning in 1964 when Brian Epstein takes him to see his father
for the first time in 17 years and John has not forgiven him - though other
sources and the film Nowhere Boy posits that his father actually tried to
take Lennon with him to New Zealand when John was five but Julia, his mother
would not let him. The film quickly jumps through the next few years - Epstein's
death, Magical Mystery Tour to dwell at length on the return of his father
and his meeting up with Yoko Ono, who took him from angry to total self-absorption
and him turning his back on The Beatles. It is a slow anxious crawl into
Yoko obsession and the darkness. The film ends with the breakup of the Beatles
and his leaving to live in NYC in 1971 never to return. And thus deserting
his son Julian just as he had been deserted years before. Two of Us (2000) Director Michael Lindsay-Hogg: Rating: 7.0
In April 1976 Paul McCartney and his band
Wings were touring America on the heels of their release of Wings at the
Speed of Sound and the number one hit Silly Love Songs. McCartney was in
NYC on April 24th house hunting and on the spur of the moment decided to
go visit John Lennon at the Dakota. This very nostalgic charming but ultimately
sad film fictionalizes that day and for any Beatle fan it is a pleasure to
watch the day unwind even if the events and conversations are imagined.
Lennon was coming off his nearly two year
bender that he referred to as the Lost Weekend in which he had left Yoko
and gone to California to take up with another woman and his drinking pal
Harry Nilsson. In 1975 he came home to Yoko, they had Sean and Lennon embarked
on a five year hiatus from music to become a house husband. It wasn't until
1980 that John returned to music and produced Double Fantasy in October.
Two months later he was killed outside the Dakota.
In the film the two friends and often adversaries
spend the day together wading through their anger, disappointments, bitterness,
musical differences with one another but also their discovery of how close
they still are. At the end of the night they are watching Saturday Night
Live when Lorne Michaels comes on and makes an offer to have the Beatles
come on the show for $3,000 (they were being offered millions at the time
to reunite). The two jump at the idea of going down there right now and accepting
half the price since there are only two of them, but they never make it.
This is actually a true anecdote. If only. A well-written script and solid
action from Aidan Quinn as Paul and Jared Harris as John.
