All aboard for the Yellow Submarine YouTube Dress-Up Sing-A-Long Watch Party!
This Saturday, 25th April, join in at 9am PDT (12pm EDT/5pm BST) for the Beatles’ celebration of love, music, and surfacing from strange seas into a beautiful world free of the Blue Meanies!
Dress-up as your favorite character from the film and escape with us to a place where, for a little while, nothing is real. Click the bell to set a reminder on this Watch Page.
Share your photos and videos of you singing along in your costumes at home and tag them #YellowSubLive. Following the film, they’ll be sharing your images and videos on Instagram Stories in the Yellow Submarine Sing-A-Long After-Party. For more info about the event visit: yellowsubmarine.com and check out #YellowSubLive
Copyright 2019 Universal Pictures“Yesterday” would have made a cute seven-minute sketch on “Saturday Night Live” (or, as this movie would say, “Thursday Night Live”) but it does not work as a movie. I wish I could say they ran out of ideas in the last third, but it’s worse than that. They had ideas; they just ran out of good ones. There’s a curious disconnect in watching the film between the weakness of the storyline, including a major jump the shark swerve near the end, and the imperishable music of the Beatles. Every time we hear “In My Life” or a rocking “Help!” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand” we say, “That sure is a great song” and forget for a moment that the movie is not very good. Richard Curtis admitted as much in an interview on Morning Joe: “When I type and run out of ideas I just put in ‘The Long and Winding Road.'”
Jack (Himesh Patel) has been trying to make it as a musician for ten years in his small home town on the English coast. His best friend Ellie (Lily James) believes in him and acts as his manager when she isn’t teaching high school math. But he is not making much progress. He is ready to give up when a mysterious worldwide blackout shuts down all power for twelve seconds and he is hit by a bus as he is bicycling home. During that twelve seconds, somehow the world is rebooted in a slightly different form. The Beatles never existed. Some other random cultural touchstones are missing as well, including Coke. Jack, just out of the hospital and still missing two front teeth, thanks his friends for the gift of a new guitar by playing “Yesterday.” Which they have never heard before and think he wrote. And of course they love it, though one of them says it’s not up to the level of Coldplay’s “Fix You.”
Jack starts playing Beatles songs and people like them. Ed Sheeran, charmingly playing a version of himself, invites him to tour as his opening act. In Moscow, Jack plays “Back in the USSR,” which is a huge success with the crowd, even though most of them were not born when their country was the USSR. Ed Sheeran challenges Jack to a songwriting competition, and has to admit defeat. “You’re Mozart and I’m Salieri,” he says.
An agent named Debra (Kate McKinnon in a sizzling performance) arrives to offer Jack “the poison chalice” of fame and money. Jack, who has waited so long for success as a musician and performer, says yes.
This is very much a lesser work from Richard Curtis, the man who wrote “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” “Pirate Radio,” and “Love Actually.” There are lovely moments — the first recording session, the fun of the astonishment when people are stunned by songs we all know so well they are a part of us, the fantasy of being adored by worldwide audiences, the hilariousness of playing one of the greatest songs of all time for your parents and their not having a clue. And it is intriguing to see a person of color appropriate white musicians’ work for a change. But the friend zone/romance storyline and a bad swerve at the end show that even the world’s greatest songs cannot prop up a script that outstays its welcome. The songs are all sublime, but these new versions do not add anything special.
George Martin, who worked more closely with the Beatles than anyone else, said that their charm was as important to their early success as their music. That early success gave them a chance to develop and grow and take huge risks and reflect on their experiences, all of which became a part of their endlessly innovative and ground-breaking work.
To have even some of their greatest hits all thrown into what is supposed to be one performer’s series of songs, unrelated to what is going on in the lives of the songwriter or in the world, and, to adapt the title of an ex-Beatle song, imagine there’s no Beatles, gives the music an unearned power, relying on our love for the songs and what they mean in our lives, whether we first heard them in kindergarten, at spin class, or as they first came out. That makes this story empty at its Apple Corps.
Parents should know that this movie includes sexual references and situations and some strong and crude language.
Family discussion: Why did Deborah call what she was offering the poison chalice? What did Jack learn from his meeting with John?
If you like this, try: “Begin Again” and “Across the Universe” and the Beatles movies
Behind the Scenes: Richard Curtis and Ed Sheeran on “Yesterday”
Posted on May 23, 2019 at 4:15 pm
Writer Richard Curtis (“Pirate Radio,” “Love Actually,” “Notting Hill”) and singer/composer Ed Sheeran talk about “Yesterday,” the story of a musician who somehow is the only person on the planet who knows the music of the Beatles.
If I may paraphrase John Lennon: Imagine there’s no Beatles. Richard Curtis, who made the greatest movie love letter to pop/rock and roll of all time, “Pirate Radio” as well as classics like “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill,” and “Love Actually” has written a new film called “Yesterday,” directed by Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “Millions”), about a world in which the Beatles never existed. When you look up “Beatles” online, all that comes up is the insect. Just one person remembers their songs, and when he plays them, everyone thinks he wrote them, which of course makes him wildly popular. I can imagine this will be a lot of fun. And I know the music will be great.
This year, we observe the 50th anniversary of many world-changing events and PBS’s “American Experience” will tell the story on January 14.
1964 was the year the Beatles came to America, Cassius Clay became Muhammad Ali, and three civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi. It was the year when Berkeley students rose up in protest, African Americans fought back against injustice in Harlem, and Barry Goldwater’s conservative revolution took over the Republican Party. In myriad ways, 1964 was the year when Americans faced choices: between the liberalism of Lyndon Johnson or Barry Goldwater’s grassroots conservatism, between support or opposition to the civil rights movement, between an embrace of the emerging counterculture or a defense of traditional values. Based in part on The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 by Jon Margolis, 1964 follows some of the most influential figures of the time – Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, Betty Friedan – but also brings out from the shadows the stories of ordinary Americans whose principled stands would set the country onto a new and different course. “1964 was when, for better or worse, the outlines of the America we live in began to be visible,” says writer/director Stephen Ives.
