Screenhead

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Interesting. It’s great to see a trailer that doesn’t use Voice Over Guy to tell you what’s going on, though the obvious downside was that I had to visit Wikipedia to find out what was going on.

Here’s what’s going on: Across The Universe is about a young Liverpudlian dock worker (and artist, apparently) played by Jim Sturgess who heads for the US to find his father and gets himself involved in all that ’60s counter-culture business. It’s also a musical, made up entirely of Beatles’ covers, but you don’t need me to tell you that.

Some of it looks great. The hyper-reality scene of Sturgess’ friend being dragged off to Vietnam is exactly how musicals should be, though I’m a little concerned by the number of Beatles songs crammed into two and a half minutes. If that’s any indication of how the film will work, there’ll be a lot of singing between frustratingly brief bits of narrative a la Dreamgirls. And are musicals more or less enjoyable if you’re already familiar with the songs? I’m leaning towards more.

Brief glimpses of Eddie Izzard and Bono in the trailer – playing Mr. Kite and Dr. Roberts respectively – and the fact that Sturgess’ character is named Jude suggest this will either be a highly conceptualised way of bringing The Beatles work to life, or a highly conceptualised way of killing their work dead by taking everything too literally.

We’ll find out in September 2007, when the film is released in the US.

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