Across the Universe 12/21/07

Every musical succeeds or fails on its songs. It's not good enough for only a couple of them to be good, the entire soundtrack must be awesome, after all, we are stopping the storyline of the movie just to hear them. They have to be worth the diversion. The songs in Across the Universe are all covers of the Beatles, so right from the beginning the movie has more than a chance to be a very good movie. In fact, you could take away the entire plot and it would still be worth watching. I bet you could even put the movie on shuffle mode and switch back and forth randomly.
The plot, itself, threadbare and exists primarliy to provide the movie with an oppurtunity to have a beatles extravanganza. In fact sometimes there isn't even any dialogue between the songs. Once one is finished, another is amped up. 
Like the Beatles there is no shying away from experimentation be it visually or auditory. Every beatles song is a cover. And the resulting mix can be described as hit, hit, hit, pretty good, hit, and miss. The best ones are the gospel version of 'Let it Be.' The sweet duets of Dana Suchs and Martin Luther who do fantastic imitations of Joplin and Hendrix respectively. The blown up war versions of 'Strawberry Fields Forever" and "Helter Skelter," and too many more I can recall. The big dud was Eddie Izzard's 'Mr. Kite.' 
It was impressive just how many Beatles songs they could fit into this movie and they also did a great job of making sure the best ones were involved. There's a somewhat downside to that though as it thins out the charachters. Like for instance, the asian chick, Prudence, is a bit of a sideshow. All I really know about her is that she's a lesbian. She sings a few songs about that and then dissapears. I haven't the slightest idea what her deal was. 
Then there's the movies love story between Jude and Lucy. It's okay. Alot of that has to do with who this Jude guy is. He's a sad sack English lad who turns into a starving bohemian artist bemoaning the world's current state of affairs. I really don't have much sympathy or respect for dudes like that. When he's all grumpy and crying I'm like get a real job you bum. I mean its not like the Beatles sat around all day doodling strawberries. They composed that one song and moved on! 
Um...I should probably stop preaching. The movie is pretty cool but you might just want to buy the Soundtrack CD instead.