I believe I’m in the minor­ity opin­ion here, but I really liked Across the Uni­verse. Already lov­ing the songs of the Bea­t­les and the films of Julie Tay­mor, per­haps I’m pre­dis­posed. Tay­mor rounds up all the usual sus­pects from the Lennon & McCart­ney oeu­vre: Lucy, Jude, Maxwell (as in “Sil­ver Ham­mer”), Jo Jo (from “Get Back”), Sadie, Pru­dence… even the Blue Mean­ies from Yel­low Sub­ma­rine kick up their heels as Mr. Kite’s Rock­ettes. But unless I missed them in the crush, Rocky and Rita didn’t make the cut.

At two plus hours, Across the Uni­verse may in fact be too much of a good thing. The Bea­t­les wrote a great many won­der­ful love songs, but even these canon­i­cal clas­sics can seem a lit­tle redun­dant when strung together in a series, illus­trated by Jena Mal­one & Jim Sturgess swoon­ing over each other over and over.

Chris Cun­ning­ham & Por­tishead called & asked for their fish tank back

The best sequences are the weird­est, espe­cially the “She’s So Heavy” num­ber which resem­bles some­thing out of Alan Parker’s cracked Pink Floyd The Wall. But some­times the inter­pre­ta­tions are ruined by being a lit­tle too lit­eral; the “Rev­o­lu­tion” sequence starts out great with Jude try­ing to sway a rad­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion­ary group away from vio­lent protest (“But when you talk about destruc­tion / Brother you know that you can count me out”), but he pre­dictably points at a por­trait of Chair­man Mao right on cue.

She’s so heavy, indeed

Topped off with cameos by Salma Hayak (times five) and Bono in a rare dra­matic role as a sort of Tim­o­thy Leary fig­ure (sport­ing an enter­tain­ingly loony Amer­i­can accent mod­eled, at least to my ears, after Den­nis Hopp­per), this rumored-to-be-troubled pro­duc­tion can be a lit­tle over­whelm­ing and redun­dant, but it’s really some­thing to see.

Offi­cial movie site: www.sonypictures.com/movies/acrosstheuniverse

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

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