Ron Howard's 'Eight Days a Week' Is a Sweet, Slightly Empty Treat for Beatles Fans

How do you even begin to break down the immense mythology of a group widely considered to be the greatest of all time into something digestible and accessible but also still reverent? The eight years of musical, visual, historical, economical, political and social impact The Beatles left behind looms like a giant block of marble that should only intimidate any author or documentarian foolish enough to try and mold it into a singular experience that does the group justice.

And yet in truth, it’s insanely difficult to craft a bad movie around the story of the Fab Four. For all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the band’s legacy, any filmmaker who deigns to cover the band’s story essentially has the perfect subjects: four of the most affable, down-to-earth, creative and interesting people who ever walked the Earth. The filmmakers have a smorgasbord of every kind of song imaginable at their disposal to set a mood or tone, a majority of which are already in pop music’s pantheon of greatest ever. So really you’ve only got yourself to blame if you can make a bad film with all of that at your disposal.

With that said, at this point in history it is much easier to make a boring film about The Beatles. After so many books and documentaries covering every inch and aspect of The Beatles’ career, at some point a hardcore fan can only get so much out of a “new” interpretation a storyteller tries to craft out of that eight year marble block without some hint of what’s already come before.

And Ron Howard’s latest documentary begins dangerously on that cusp of blandness, threatening to turn into just a shiny new coat of paint on the same storyline even the most casual of Beatles fan is conscious of. The montage of those rough n’ tumble nights in Hamburg coupled with their subsequent haircuts/suits that led to Please Please Me’s chart-topping overnight success... it threatens on yada-yada-yada territory before the real fun actually begins.

Where Eight Days a Week begins to differentiate itself is in making you feel the absolute and all-consuming chaos of an event that was The Beatles’ touring years. A treasure trove of great concert material has been carefully remastered and restored for this documentary (a perfect justification for the film’s existence if you really needed one) and the footage of swaths of young people screaming their heads off, rushing stages, and evading police makes you feel just how singular an experience the Beatles were in history. Nothing had ever happened like this before and nothing would ever again.

The baby boomer generation was desperate for a way to express themselves, and these unassuming, charming lads with similar haircuts and incredible songwriting and vocal abilities came along and changed everything,These four young men were at the center of the world’s biggest cultural maelstrom and somehow trying to maintain their own sanity. The film runs you through the elation of Ed Sullivan and Shea Stadium all the way through to the bitter end at the KKK rallies in Memphis and the miserable Candlestick park final gig.

Their cheery and cheeky demeanor on that electric first tour of America heartbreakingly contrasted with the weariness of the magnifying glass is the film’s biggest success. It makes the mere existence of any Beatles music that followed the madness of their touring years seem like a God-given miracle.

The film wisely chooses to focus on the band’s overwhelming unity during these progressively trying times and puts a sunny disposition on the group’s overall dynamic. It’s nice to have a Beatles documentary that pits The Beatles against the world when so many others like to focus on their internal battles that came later. Those touring years, as Ringo mentions in the film, were when The Beatles had to look out for each other first and foremost. So while it may feel dishonest to exclude the turmoil of their later studio work, it’s impossible to deny the bond the Fab Four shared with one another.

There’s a few glaring omissions in terms of Beatles lore, in particular manager Brian Epstein is paid an abysmal amount of lip service considering how especially important he was to the success of this period of the Beatles career and in terms of interviewees, there’s hardly much on offer that hasn’t been stated better elsewhere (for instance the only real archival interview footage with George comes from the superior if exhaustive Beatles Anthology), and a few subjects may leave you scratching your head about their inclusion but overall it’s good fun and good-natured even if it doesn’t forge a brand new vision of history.

While hardcore fans familiar with most of these intimate details may not find anything revelatory here, it’s worth the price of admission for the glut of restored and remastered footage of some classic Beatles concerts and if you’re able to see it in theaters, the entire Shea Stadium concert plays following the movie, fully restored in 4K with remastered sound. It goes down like a smooth, soothing ale for those of us already under the Fab Four’s spell, while still providing those looking for an accessible entry point to the Beatles’ early career with a satisfying result.

Only in cinemas September 15th. With world premiere broadcast live & specially remastered concert footage. Book your tickets now: http://scnl.co/BeatlesTix The Beatles played Shea Stadium on August 15th 1965 in what was to be the first rock concert ever staged in a stadium in front of more than 55,000 people.

'10 Cloverfield Lane' is Highly Effective Slow-Burn Thriller

Proving lightning can in fact strike twice, the marketing campaign that snuck 10 Cloverfield Lane's teaser onto the Super Bowl lineup did in fact generate that similar ripple of excitement that made Cloverfield an enormous viral success.

 But interestingly, producer JJ Abrams and company opted to distance this installment significantly from the found-footage Godzilla-inspired model that made so many waves in the film world and instead opted for a more straightforward thriller that seemingly has nothing in common with its predecessor.

10 Cloverfield Lane plays like a longform classic episode of The Twilight Zone, with a first act punctuated by some gut-punch thrills and a final two thirds expertly constructed to be one of the most effective slow-burn thrillers in recent memory.  So even when the twists and turns it charts are par for the course in this sort of sci-fi/thriller mix, it’s the blend of perfect pacing and a towering John Goodman that truly separates it from the pack.

Michelle (Scott Pilgrim's Mary Elizabeth Winstead) finds herself locked in an underground bunker with two strangers after a seemingly catastrophic event occurred on the world above. Also trapped is farmboy Emmett (Broadway’s John Gallagher, Jr.), a lovable yokel tinged with regret about missing out on his life before the incident.

Their captor is Howard, with John Goodman playing exactly the type of guy you'd expect to build a massive fallout shelter under his farmhouse. Goodman's awkward yet still somehow menacing personality is just enough to put you on edge despite his best intentions. Goodman is nothing if not affable and that’s why the fact that he could snap at any time on the two youngsters is truly unsettling. It's by far the movie's highlight and yet another gem in the filmography of one of the all-time great actors (forget Leo, where’s Goodman’s Oscar for The Big Lebowski?).

Cloverfield Lane takes its time carefully unfolding the mystery of what happened aboveground as well as what secrets Howard is hiding himself, and the result is a thriller that doesn't rely on jumps or gore and treats its audience with respect rather than contempt. The pacing keeps things chugging along at a thrilling rate and aside from a somewhat underwhelming final ten minutes, 10 Cloverfield Lane is nail-biting fun that's far more than just a cheap marketing gimmick. If this is to be our new horror/sci-fi anthology, let’s not wait another eight years to get the next installment off the ground.

Subscribe to TRAILERS: http://bit.ly/sxaw6h Subscribe to COMING SOON: http://bit.ly/H2vZUn Like us on FACEBOOK: http://bit.ly/1QyRMsE Follow us on TWITTER: http://bit.ly/1ghOWmt 10 Cloverfield Lane Official Trailer #1 (2016) - Mary Elizabeth Winstead, John Goodman, Movie HD Waking up from a car accident, a young woman finds herself in the basement of a man who says he's saved her life from a chemical attack that has left the outside uninhabitable.

'Steve Jobs' Is Dynamic Fire-Cracker of a Biopic

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of reading Walter Isaacson's incredible portrait of the tech icon Steve Jobs in preparation for this very movie and I found myself simply unable to put it down. I had always been fascinated by Jobs as a CEO unlike any other, a man I saw as responsible for products that completely revolutionized how I viewed computers, telephones and music.

But Isaacson's book also helped me grasp Jobs' incredibly difficult nature. He was one of the most stubborn and irritable people to work with and often had fractured relationships with many people due to his arrogant and driven nature. But as insufferable as he was, Jobs was wholly dedicated to creating some of the world's greatest ever products. Jobs didn't believe that art and products has to be independent of each other and in fact considered himself an artist above all, just as his idol Bob Dylan whose music is accurately prominent in this latest attempt to capture Jobs onscreen.

Isaacson's biography is an intricate and intimate examination of a very complex individual and probably comes as close as we'll ever get to knowing everything there was to know about the complicated visionary and the demons that drove him.

So of course something is immediately lost in the translation to the screen as the level of detail that is compiled in such a comprehensive overview of Jobs' life would be impossible. And instead of even attempting to cover such an eventful life in just two hours, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin chooses to focus on three of the most important product launches in Jobs' life: the unveiling of the Macintosh, his NeXT cube after he left Apple, and culminating with the launch of the iMac.

This is certainly a clever idea because if there was anything Steve Jobs’ life revolved around it was the launch of his products, but the fact that Sorkin now must pack in all the drama and relationships formed over a person’s life into three very specific events does get a bit maddening at times. Steve Jobs certainly didn’t have three life-defining conversations with CEO John Sculley, marketing director Joanna Hoffman, co-founder Steve Wozniak, and his estranged daughter Lisa Brennan at each of them, but I can understand why they were all included. This is a biopic after all, and Sorkin needs some human drama at the center of these tech talks. So while the bold new format to this biopic is certainly novel, it does require a bit of truth-stretching.

Luckily though, Steve Jobs is helped massively by scene after scene of predictably zippy and clever dialogue from Aaron Sorkin, all delivered by a massively talented cast. Michael Fassbender proves once again he is arguably the best actor working today, imitating Jobs’ high-pitched nasal voice but still managing to fully inhabit Jobs’ arrogant and calculating nature. Jeff Daniels is also an excellent casting as tepid CEO John Sculley, Jobs’ reluctant father figure in his turbulent time at Apple, and Seth Rogen is surprisingly confident as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

And while the film wants to explore Jobs’ up-and-down relationships with Sculley and Wozniak among others, ultimately this attempt to capture Jobs onscreen is about his fractured relationship with his illegitimate daughter Lisa, whom Jobs famously denied ever fathering for a number of years. It’s a relationship that is of course rife with potential for human drama, and Sorkin chooses to explore it as the biggest contradiction of Jobs’ life: that he himself likely felt rejected by his birth parents, but ultimately it took him a very long time to grasp that he was rejecting his own daughter in a similar way. It’s certainly the script’s most compelling element, even if I personally would’ve liked to see Jobs’ ultimately more important relationships with his wife and other children explored at least to a certain degree.

For such a dialogue-heavy film, Steve Jobs certainly needed some solid direction and Danny Boyle absolutely excels. Though its events take place entirely before the year 2000, Boyle's sensibilities lie fully in the 21st century, full of color and life that give so many scenes of backstage exchanges between two characters a crackling dynamism. Beautifully photographed by Boyle’s former Sunshine collaborator Alwin H. Küchler, Boyle’s direction gives Sorkin’s script the zip that it needs to separate itself from the pack. His use of frame inserts to invoke flashbacks, the brisk but clever transitions between all three acts, and his use of visuals to both convey information and illustrate Sorkin’s dialogue all turn what would’ve essentially been a well-acted stage play into something that’s gripping and totally cinematic.

I recommend that if you want the more real and nuanced portrait of the enigma that was Steve Jobs, pick up Walter Isaacson's excellent biography upon which this movie is supposedly based. But Steve Jobs the film is a vibrant fire-cracker take on the Hollywood biopic. Decidedly brisk but somehow managing to pack in a compelling amount of human drama into product launches, it's easily the most worthy portrayal of Jobs yet and probably the best we're going to get committed to screen. Confident direction from Boyle combined with a sizzling Sorkin script allows sparks to fly, even if some parts fizz out instead.

'The Martian': NASA’s Kickstarter Trailer

When you watch movies like Apollo 13, Lincoln, Argo, or any other movie based on a real event, you always end up thinking, “It’s pretty amazing that this actually happened.” Stories carry a grander emotional weight when you become aware that they’re a part of your own history. But as I watched Ridley Scott’s, The Martian -- a movie about a stranded astronaut who attempts to survive on Mars -- I had to repeatedly remind myself that this story is fictitious.

Thanks to the source novel by Andy Weir, the attention to accurate problem solving alone will have you feeling like you could survive on a foreign planet. But on a emotional level, Ridley Scott’s ensemble directing makes this story not just about isolation, but really a collective of humans working together to achieve impossible tasks. It’s a clear and bright vision of what our space program can become, provided that we continue to fund it. A depressing thought when you consider that we’ve only sent robots to the red planet.

While I enjoyed the emotional pacing of the piece, I thought the filmmakers could have done more with the Martian planet itself. Mars is a place that used to be flooded with water, and might have even harbored organic life. But now it’s clutching to the last of its atmosphere, as if someone left it behind like the stranded astronaut, Mark Watney (Matt Damon). The mix of practical and special effects to simulate Mars makes you feel as if you are there, but the editing during the scenic shots is too quick. The audience isn’t allowed enough time to let their eyes wander in a shot.

The story jumps through Sols (a day on Mars) fairly quickly too, so the pressure of Watney’s time in isolation is minimized. I think by extending these scenic shots, the audience would have more time to stare off into the Martian horizon and think about the planet, exactly as Watney does every Sol to plan his survival. Overall the editing was well executed, it’s just at certain points the planet feels more like a prop than an actual location where Watney is stuck.

I’ve seen this type of rushed editing a lot in recent sci-fi flicks, most popularly in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Every time they show a shot of Saturn, or any kind of space scenic, they cut to something else. It makes me long for the editing style in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the opening shots in The Coen Brother’s No Country For Old Men. I understand the need to keep the runtime low, but adding two minutes of Mars scenic shots would have done the trick. There actually could be an interesting way to link virtual reality (VR) headsets, and movies here. Imagine that every time the movie stops to show you a scenic shot of Mars, you could wander the planet in VR, as if you’re Mark Watney, and this is your free time to explore.

For a survival story that manages to stay light-hearted, Watney's ultimate fate is never made too obvious, which makes the movie extremely enjoyable to watch. The experience is similar to watching Apollo 13 as a kid before any one told you about the outcome of the mission. So go see it, or instead donate your $14 to NASA so you can see Mars with your own eyes in this lifetime. Either way, this movie will inspire you to become a fan of supporting the U.S. space program. #NASAKickstarter

Shot in a Single Take, 'Victoria' Will Send You Anxiously Exploring the Streets of Berlin

Here's the deal: your flatmate just killed himself by accident. The problem is that it doesn't look quite like an accident. He lies in the kitchen floor with a knife in his back. A knife that you just used a few seconds ago. Your fingerprints are all over the place. The fact that you two had a really big argument last night and that all of his friends (which absolutely don't like you) know about it just adds more fuel to the fire. 

Knock Knock. Someone is at the door. Apparently the neighbor, an old lady who loves drama, heard some screaming. Cops must be on their way. Fuck.

Quick, think of the implications: If you go to prison, you won't be able to be with the person you deeply love for decades. But there's more. You won't be able to hug your parents. To touch their hands. Or continue your life together with your best friends, or even see their cheeks move while they eat fried chicken.

Within seconds your entire life as you know it will completely change for the worst. The American justice system will hunt you down. The prosecutor will try as hard as she can to put you in jail. It's her job, and having no mercy pays well. The knocking on the door persists. It's time to make a decision.

But that's not exactly the premise of Victoria. For your best interest, I don't recommend watching the trailer, nor reading the synopsis. The less you know, the better you will enjoy the unexpected chain of events. This German independent film aspires to claustrophobically portray the process of someone's life – someone like you and I – falling down like a Jenga tower. And it does it well.

One of the factors that makes this film different from the rest is that it was shot in one single long take, which might sound like a banal filmmaking choice, but it is actually brilliant due to the nature of the story. It couldn't have been used any better, and here's why: nowadays, most psychological thrillers create tension by giving the audience information that the characters in the film don't know yet, an approach that Hitchcock pretty much forged back with the classics. However, in Victoria, the audience and the characters truly learn and progress along together. You will never know more than our protagonist. There are no cuts. You are constantly with her, living the present, and this provides a very refreshing experience.

Now, not everything is perfect about this film. Many might consider certain plot details and some character decisions in particular situations not very realistic, and the first half of the film might be slow for some, but taking into account the promise that things eventually do escalate quickly to a genuinely anxious climax – particularly during the last thirty minutes of the film– it is very much worth the wait.

 Victoria will be released in the US on October 9.