'Across the Universe': A Musical Mind Trip

We saw it tonight. It was pretty cheesy in certain ways, but it was still quite enjoyable. The "dita von teese-esque nurses crawling on an underlit cross" were all Salma Hayek, which was a nice surprise. Eddie Izzard made a completely gratuitous but marvelous appearance as "Mr. Kite" - an insane circus barker - and Bono did a fine turn as the Ken Kesey knockoff. Overall it was a fairly predictable story, but still engaging thanks to the enduring nature of the songs, and thanks to Julie Taymor's finely tuned psychedelic vision. The saving grace of the piece is that they set the movie in NYC instead of San Francisco; even a heavily stylized '60s-era NYC is more palatable to my modern taste than yet another look at '60s-era SF would have been. The Janis Joplin & Jimi Hendrix knockoffs helped add a little edge as well.

I've been kind of obsessed with this movie since I heard about it. Being a big musical and Taymor fan, aesthetically, but on a much dorkier level, with regard to the licensing issues involved in using 33 (!!!) Beatles songs. The estimates are that these guys spent over 8 million dollars just clearing the songs, not to mention the costs of re-recording them. mind boggling to me, but hell yeah! It opens in NY today, and I will see it sometime this weekend and report back. Although, my preliminary guess is that my reaction will be "gah! sproing! woo-hah!" I mean, come on, dita von teese-esque nurses crawling on an underlit cross? ok! i just wish i didn't want to punch evan rachel wood in the face all the time.