I’m about half way through watching it, and frankly, it’s so rich and (for me) so emotional that I have to take breaks.
This film presents in documentary form with interviews, concert footage, news footage What It Was About the Beatles.
I don’t think they were the greatest band of all time. But they were brand new, witty, irreverent, charismatic, clever, fun, and brilliant. And what they did was ride the crest of the wave that was the enormous social, cultural, stylistic, and political changes of the 1960s. The vast difference between the USA in 1960 and 1970 is hard to convey if you didn’t live through it…and yet this film does some of that.
A microcosmic example: I started college in the fall of 1966. For the first three years I went to class every day in a dress, heels, and hose. Pants were forbidden on campus except in the gym and on the playing field. Then came the Summer of Love. In my senior year and after that in graduate school, I attended class in bell-bottomed jeans.
They didn’t create the social and political change and they didn’t create the pop culture revolution, but they were THERE just in front of the edge of it. The changes in music, fashion, style, thought (the Human Potential Movement that morphed into New Age-ism)-- all of that followed in their wake.
Watching this took me back to my high school and college days-- the future ahead of me leading down some Long and Winding Road… holy crap. Being taken there is exhilarating and excruciating. If you were born a couple of years on either side of 1950, this film will hit you right between the eyes. A few years older, or a few years younger, and it likely won’t.
