Lots and lots of songs are by any objective measure just as as as “She Loves You,” like HUNDREDS of songs. Thousands. Today the odds of one getting you noticed are a million to one. There’s nothing special about it.
In the time and place it was made, it was the right song at the right time. So much of this stuff is timing. OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” - released in 2003 - is a masterpiece and was a huge hit, but in 1963 no one would have comprehended it, and if they’d delayed releasing it until 2053 people would likely find it sounded old and boring.
It’s a fair question as to whether their songs would be huge smash hits today. But I do think even some of the very early ones would make for a successful indie singer-songwriter career along the lines of Family of the Year, Jose Gonzalez, or Peter Bradley Adams. Take, for example, one of my very favorite Beatles tunes, which Paul actually wrote in the 1950s, “I’ll Follow the Sun”. It would need to be extended a bit (1:48 was on the short side even then), but otherwise I would say it is timeless.
Precisely. I’m willing to suspend disbelief as I might not in other time travel or alt-universe scenarios, because I think it would be less fun if they altered everything “butterfly effect” style. I am unreasonably excited for this movie, planning to see it opening weekend or soon thereafter, which I normally only do for a very limited number of “event” or “cinematic spectacle” type films (maybe two or three times a year, seeing everything else at home).
iamthewalrus makes a good point about what the movie is ABOUT. That’s the difficulty with fantasy and sci-fi; the needs of what the story is really, truly about often require that you shrug your shoulders about the technicalities. A world in which The Beatles didn’t exist would be different from this world in a thousand ways, but to explore that in painstaking detail just isn’t what the movie is about.
I was thinking about what I’d do in this situation and it occurred to me that I don’t actually know any Beatles songs in their entirety, just snippets and such, and I have no familiarity at all with likely the majority of their catalog. I could hum or sing a few passages here and there and if I wanted to profit from my unique knowledge, the best I could do is take it to someone with some actual musical talent and hope for a partial composer’s credit, if they didn’t just steal the idea entirely or flatly dismiss my half-remembered fragments.
I’d know that there was a potential goldmine of musical compositions, but I’d be unable to recreate it in any useful way. It’d be a Twilight Zone situation to be sure, and not a funny episode but one of those harsh “ironic punishment” ones.
Well, you wouldn’t just sit down and write them out. You’d remember them one piece at a time and it wouldn’t cost you a dime. Wait, that’s Johnny Cash.
Same here, and I’m a fan. But while I like the Beatles a lot, they are not and have never been my #1 favorite band. If the Beatles are the main character’s #1 favorite band, and he’s a musician – preferably a bass player – I could buy into it fairly easily.
In that Otherworld episode, despite not displaying or mentioning musical talent in previous or subsequent episodes, the two teenagers not only accurately “wrote” the music and lyrics to songs from various genres but also played the instruments.
Seeing the descriptions of this movie (e.g. modern-day kids go crazy for Baby Boomer music) reminds me a bit of Stephen King’s “11/22/63”, where a guy who’s born in the '70s is nostalgic for the Kennedy presidency and '50s malt shops. Wait…what? I mean, there are probably a few people in the world that fit that description, but that would be pretty unusual.
I read “11/22/63” and don’t recall the main character being nostalgic for the 50’s and 60’s - he was friends with an older guy who had lived through that era and really cared about it, but the main character didn’t even know much about the Kennedy era (until he wound up there). Once there, he enjoyed some parts of the past, and hated others (which seems pretty realistic).
One of the biggest pushes of current far-right parties in Europe is nostalgia for an era which never existed, by people who were born decades after that fabulous time was over. During the last electoral campaign, Spain’s far-right populist party Vox appropriated a 1985 punk-pop song which made fun of people nostalgic for Spain’s Golden Century… (Los Nikis, El Imperio Contraataca - “The Empire Strikes Back”).
Agreed. He liked milkshakes made with real milk, for instance, but was appalled by segregation. He liked the friendliness of small-town 1963 Texas life but pushed back against its judgmentalism and small-mindedness.
Is Brian Epstein going to be portrayed in the movie? His management and marketing of the Beatles lead to the Ed Sullivan show and much of their early success.
George Martin the “Fifth Beatle” produced & arranged the Beatles from the beginning. His influence on their sound is striking.
I hope both men are portrayed in the movie. It would make it much more believable that someone else could be the face of this music.
Right. The scene in the trailer that hooked me is when he is playing a Beatles song on acoustic guitar for his friends, and they are like “OMG, that song is so good!” He responds “well, sure: it’s one of the greatest songs ever written” and she is like “well, let’s not get carried away: it’s no ‘Fix You’”.
Agreed – everything I’ve been seeing about the film indicates that it’s set in the present day, and that the main character of the film suddenly discovers that he’s the only person on the planet who remembers the Beatles.
So, given that, there really wouldn’t be a role for Martin or Epstein in the film. Even if either of them were still alive in the present day, the film’s presence suggests that neither man would remember having ever known the Beatles.
