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movies: Belfast and Get Back
Yesterday afternoon we bundled up against the cold and walked to the neighborhood movie theater, where we showed proof of vaccination, picked up our tickets, and saw Ken Branagh's "Belfast" in a screening room with maybe twenty other people, all seated some distance apart in assigned seats, but many not wearing masks.
The semi-autobiographical film follows 9-year-old Buddy growing up in 1969 in a close-knit neighborhood in Belfast where Catholics and Protestants live side by side. As sectarian violence grows, passing the barricades becomes a normal part of daily life, many of the Catholic families are terrorized into leaving, and his own Protestant family is pressured to join in the "cleansing" of Catholics ("you're either with us or you're against us"). Along the way you see a little boy's love for his neighborhood, his aging grandparents (played by Ciaran Hynes and Judi Dench), the movies (almost the only part of the film that's in color), and the (Catholic) girl who sits next to him in class. All but the movies are left behind when the family flees to England. Beautiful and moving.
Then we came home, had something to eat, and (staying in 1969) curled up on the couch, and fired up Disney+ to watch Part 1 of Peter Jackson's "Get Back", a documentary on the Beatles' Twyckenham sessions. In the first ten minutes Jackson summarizes the band's high school origins in 1957, its growth to world-celebrity status, and its retreat from live performance in 1967. By the end of 1968 they had dipped a toe back into the waters of live performance and decided they wanted to try it again, so they booked a rehearsal space for a few weeks in January 1969 to rebuild their relationships and put together a show. Working against a tight deadline (the space was needed for another production in February), they got together in a cavernous room and started brainstorming new songs, old songs, performance venues, sets, and what the show and the band were supposed to be about. The whole thing was filmed at the time, with the intention of producing a TV special along with the concert, and Jackson and his crew have gone through all the surviving 52-year-old footage to assemble something coherent. The result is a technical tour de force: everything looks and sounds as though it were shot yesterday, from picture quality to camera angles and cuts. If this doesn't win at least a "Best Editing" Oscar, there's no justice. And it's also a deeply revealing look at how four talented artists with strong personalities worked together -- occasionally arguing bitterly, but mostly bouncing musical ideas (and thoughts about the world outside) off one another as we watch the development of now-iconic songs from improvisations and a few scribbled lines of lyrics.
The semi-autobiographical film follows 9-year-old Buddy growing up in 1969 in a close-knit neighborhood in Belfast where Catholics and Protestants live side by side. As sectarian violence grows, passing the barricades becomes a normal part of daily life, many of the Catholic families are terrorized into leaving, and his own Protestant family is pressured to join in the "cleansing" of Catholics ("you're either with us or you're against us"). Along the way you see a little boy's love for his neighborhood, his aging grandparents (played by Ciaran Hynes and Judi Dench), the movies (almost the only part of the film that's in color), and the (Catholic) girl who sits next to him in class. All but the movies are left behind when the family flees to England. Beautiful and moving.
Then we came home, had something to eat, and (staying in 1969) curled up on the couch, and fired up Disney+ to watch Part 1 of Peter Jackson's "Get Back", a documentary on the Beatles' Twyckenham sessions. In the first ten minutes Jackson summarizes the band's high school origins in 1957, its growth to world-celebrity status, and its retreat from live performance in 1967. By the end of 1968 they had dipped a toe back into the waters of live performance and decided they wanted to try it again, so they booked a rehearsal space for a few weeks in January 1969 to rebuild their relationships and put together a show. Working against a tight deadline (the space was needed for another production in February), they got together in a cavernous room and started brainstorming new songs, old songs, performance venues, sets, and what the show and the band were supposed to be about. The whole thing was filmed at the time, with the intention of producing a TV special along with the concert, and Jackson and his crew have gone through all the surviving 52-year-old footage to assemble something coherent. The result is a technical tour de force: everything looks and sounds as though it were shot yesterday, from picture quality to camera angles and cuts. If this doesn't win at least a "Best Editing" Oscar, there's no justice. And it's also a deeply revealing look at how four talented artists with strong personalities worked together -- occasionally arguing bitterly, but mostly bouncing musical ideas (and thoughts about the world outside) off one another as we watch the development of now-iconic songs from improvisations and a few scribbled lines of lyrics.