FILTER SCREEN
Every Little Thing
Get Back makes it to Blu-Ray. Nearly eight hours later, Danny Eccleston feels like he was in The Beatles.
End times: The Beatles in fiercely ‘on’ mode in Get Back.
Photo courtesy of Apple Corps Ltd
The Beatles: Get Back
★★★★★
Dir: Peter Jackson
DISNEY. BR
IN RECENT inter views with your writer in MOJO magazine, Glyn Johns and Ethan Russell – the engineer and photographer embedded with The Beatles throughout the Januar y 1969 sessions that produced Let It Be – the album and the film – and now, Peter Jackson’s epic Get Back reboot, professed themselves bemused. Yes, The Beatles were pretty great and all, but would viewers really sit through more than seven hours of what’s long been characterised as the group’s fatal wounding, if not its actual death rattle?
As the reports of MOJO readers’ and Beatles fans’ delight have underlined since the doc’s November 25 debut on Disney+, the answer appears to be yes, and in many cases more than once. For while not without its longueurs (watching The Beatles organise their vocal harmonies, you’re reminded more than once of the Heartbreak Hotel scene in Spinal Tap), the intimacy of the experience is addictive. You’re in The Beatles’ midst, smoking their Kents and drinking their Skol, gaping at the inspired takes, cringing as they bog themselves down in inferior material, sensing the minutest shifts in the political temperature between four lads who shook the world but find that adulthood leaves less and less space for their brothers and their individual emotional and creative needs.