I may think this epic could have done without the scene where Peter Sellers shows up at the recording sessions doing nothing but anxiously grinning you may in turn believe it could have done without an entire take of John Lennon and Paul McCartney singing “Two of Us” through clenched teeth, for no other reason than maybe considering ventriloquism as a backup career if this Beatles thing really goes south. It sounds grueling, but it’s hard to think of many of those minutes that feel wasted. Of course, you’d have to tell them, “Park your saucer - it’s going to be a while.” Jackson has taken 468 minutes to tell the story of roughly 20 days in the life of history’s greatest band. Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” is the only mega-movie you’d really need to show to an alien wanting to understand the creativity and psychology of the rock ‘n’ roll that’d been coming through on radio waves across dimensions. But a film project that lets us look in, at leisurely length, on the creative process as well as personalities of genius-superstars who really are Just Like Us? In 60 years’ worth of pop music movies, that’s something we’ve never really gotten. And we’ve seen our share of rock documentaries that brilliantly captured an artist at a singular moment in time, and/or looked to unwrap a riddle wrapped in an enigma (see the entire Bob Dylan filmography). There was something wonderful, silly and sad about how, up until now, musicians had to look to the fabricated saga of an unabashedly terrible group to be able to say, “Yes, this is our story.” Heaven knows there’ve been other fictional tales that tried to pull off that same kind of Everyband story while treating rock with a modicum of dignity, too - some with a bit of success (“That Thing You Do!”), others not so much so (David Chase’s “Not Fade Away”).
ORIGINAL ENIGMA ALBUM MOVIE
A moment of silence, please, for “This Is Spinal Tap,” as that satire formally abdicates its title as the best and truest movie ever made about what it’s like to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band.