Across the Universe.

"Julie Taymor's long-awaited Beatles-fueled musical seems to have split critics neatly into two camps," notes Karina Longworth, opening her review of Across the Universe at the SpoutBlog. "There are people like Aaron Dobbs and Anne Thompson, who give Taymor's spin art 60s pastiche an A for effort, but ultimately concede that the film could, at the very least, stand to have some rainbow-hued fat cut. Then there are the full-on haters, like the journalist I spoke to immediately after yesterday's press screening, who used the phrase 'literally retarded,' and Glenn Kenny, who compares the 'mortifyingly soft-headed' experience to 'watching Sesame Street. They're all right, and they're all wrong."

For Ella Taylor, writing in the Voice, it "ends up both reductive and smugly condescending to a presumptively know-nothing audience."

Then for Jason Clark, writing at Slant, this is "a two-hour-plus Forrest Gump-on-acid pageant tracking a group of idealistic, artistic souls through the Vietnam era, unfortunately plays more like one imagines next year's film version of Mamma Mia! will be: a catalog of pop tunes cobbled together via a rather trite and forgettable storyline, except here you can't dance along to 'Waterloo' at the end."

"How is it possible for one of the premiere theatrical stylists of our era to make a movie filled with some of the most memorable pop songs ever written, and yet only achieve a few scattered moments of transcendence?" asks the AV Club's Noel Murray.

Variety's Anne Thompson profiles Taymor.

Christopher Campbell gathers comments from Taymor for the Reeler.

Updates, 9/14: "Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person," writes Stephen Holden in the New York Times. "Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you've tumbled."

"Would the visionary stage director Julie Taymor have embarked on this folly - a decades-late adaptation of songs by the Beatles as pretext for a story about social unrest - if she had seen Neil Jordan's Breakfast on Pluto, a glorious personal interpretation of Irish history through pop music?" asks Armond White in the New York Press. "Or would she have bothered shoe-horning the Beatles catalog into an operatic Iraq War allegory if she had seen Ken Russell's wildly inventive Tommy, the definitive interpretation of a classic work of rock music?"

A "grandiose folly," writes Ray Pride. "Bono, performing 'I Am The Walrus,' and Eddie Izzard, as Mr Kite, are merely insufferable; the SDS and terrorism elements less offensive than oddly unenlightening and an anti-Catholic-cum-dervish musical number is just jejune. All you need is rewrite..."

"Although her movie is certainly unique, Taymor clearly owes much to Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge," writes Jessica Reaves for the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

"Even tunes that zip by too quickly on an album can feel overlong when they're being used as shallow illustrations of teen angst in the all-too-often-explored tumultuous 60s," notes Tasha Robinson at the AV Club.

Update, 9/15: "Four decades may have passed since the Summer of Love, but our cultural fascination with the music, fashions and social upheaval of the 1960s refuses to fade away," begins a piece from Stephen Dalton in the London Times.

Update, 9/19: "Pasting Beatles songs onto this storyline makes no more sense than scoring every Western set in the 1870s with the arias Verdi was composing at the time," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "But even those resistant to or unmoved by the story can appreciate Taymor's settings of the songs, and the arrangements by T-Bone Burnett and other studio masters."

Posted by dwhudson at September 12, 2007 6:08 AM