Who else watched this? What did you think?
I enjoyed it well enough, but in terms of historical accuracy I think it’s flame bait.
It was as good as any other Beatles Bio I’ve seen, regarding historical accuracy. They always play with stuff, whether for time constraints or poetic license.
But I didn’t particularly like it for other reasons. First of all the guy playing John Lennon, just didn’t pull it off. There was absolutely no resemblance, and his witty remarks seemed over his head. The John Lennon weird personality just didn’t come out. In fact I found most of the performances sub-par, especially the woman who played Julia, John’s mother. Jeez, much of a ham? She wrote the book on over emoting.
Secondly, the music seemed secondary. They didn’t really go into their influences (short of one scene of him imitating Elvis Presley), or the choice of songs which comprised their early sets. And did you notice, there was only one Lennon/McCartney tune in the whole show. I Want to Hold Your Hand at the very end. They must have run into some licensing problems.
Other annoying things: the Pete Best character did not have a single line. And Ringo only had one or two.
But, being as I am (a huge Beatles fan) I’d watch any show on the subject. If they aired “An Analization of John Lennon’s Foreskin as it Appears on Two Virgins”, I’d tune in.
I thought the minimalization of the Pete Best/ Ringo Starr episode was unjust, seeing as it was such an important event
in the life of the band. Moreover, I noticed that in the
movie, Brian didn’t try to smarten up their image until after they were already signed by EMI, and Pete was already out, or on the way out. Virtually every other source indicates that the smartening began well before they auditioned at EMI, possibly even well before the Decca
audition. Every instinct tells me that Brian would have
made them wear their suits to that audition, seeing as how it was much like a job interview. Perhaps what we have here is just a case of incorrectly applying present day standards
to 1962.
By the standards of the time, I think the changeover to stage suits indicated a greater sense of professionalism,
and to say that it happened so much later than it really
did does a disservice especially to Pete Best. It seems to say that they were nothing more than a bar band until he
left, when the truth is that Beatlemania, at least locally, was already starting to happen well before that time.
True, they filmed in Liverpool, and I think the actor who played Lennon visited the house in Woolton where he grew up,
but I think they could have checked their facts a little better.
First, I didn’t even bother to watch, as every posthumous musician bio (including Busey in "The Buddy Holly Story) I’ve seen has sucked.
But as to the quote above…ask anyone in a band–they were drummers; therefore they had nothing to add. I’ve been playing in, and working with, bands for more than 15 years, and I’ve not yet met a drummer who isn’t missing a chromosome.
Y’all have heard the one about why the drummer got fired from the band?
He said, “Hey, let’s play this song I wrote!”
How about the one about the horrible car wreck in front of the local hot-spot?
3 musicians and a drummer were killed.
Thank you, thank you. We’re here all week and the 9:00 show is different from the 7:00 show.
Ah yes, but Ringo was every bit a personality as the rest of the boys.
By the way, how do you get a professional drummer off your front porch?
Take your pizza and tell him to keep the change.
Musicians in general are a flaky bunch, but the bands I’ve been in/worked with always had problems with vocalists for some reason.
Drummers are a very close second.
Ringo definitely added a great deal to the band. And
there are Liverpool old-timers who say that even Pete Best
made a major positive contribution to their sound, during his tenure.
As a guitarist, I have a lot of respect for drummers, not least because their instrument is unforgiving in terms of
its physical awkwardness, its expense to the neophyte, and the logistical problems encountered in finding a time or place to practice. With the guitar, I can always practice
effectively by just not plugging in, and still work on
fingering, melody lines, etc. But a drummer can’t really do that.
did anyone see ‘birth of the beatles’? this was a good version of the early beatles story with a good cast and music iirc. i remember watching it years ago when i was a big beatles fan. in the simpson’s ‘b-sharps’ episode, their manager tells them ‘you just recorded your first number one’, which i believe was a line lifted from this movie after they record ‘please please me’ or ‘love me do’.
You put it so…succintly, Jack!! 
I wasn’t going to watch, John was always my favorite, and it’s still painful to see ‘portrayals’ of him, no matter how well it’s done, it seems to emphasize he isn’t here.
But, I did want to tape it for my oldest son, also a Beatle nut, and I watched XFiles instead and then tuned into the last two hours. I was in the sixth grade when the Beatles hit the US, and was glued to the tv when they were on Ed Sullivan. Even in fuzzy black and white they looked fantastic, their joy on stage was almost touchable.
So, while there were discrepancies in the actual dating of material, the ‘John’ character kinda grew on me after an hour or so. And then to cap it off, MTV, ‘Behind the Music’ aired at 12:30 ‘John Lennon the Last Years’ as if I needed a reason to cry.
It’s been twenty years, and it still hurts. Sounds silly doesn’t it?