The Beatles and Now And Then

Now And Then may not be John Lennon’s best-ever song, but the new, orchestrated and augmented version has an undeniable poignance with the surviving Beatles in the final act of their solo careers.

At this writing, I haven’t gone on to Facebook and Reddit to experience the reactions of first and second generation Beatles fans, who are often less forward-thinking (usually spouting knee-jerk racism towards Yoko Ono) than the Fab Four were.

Kudos to Giles Martin, with the aid of Peter Jackson’s software, for a crisp, immediate remix of Love Me Do (the version with Ringo on drums).

New REVIEWS AND OTHERWISE episode on McCARTNEY 3 2 1

The summit meeting between Paul McCartney and famed record producer/podcast host Rick Rubin is discussed, with some side detours into upcoming Beatle legacy projects like Peter Jackson’s GET BACK miniseries for Disney+ and Paul’s two-volume collection of song lyrics.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2qHMfHTdsGYcwRoU3Tzzfg?si=h3djX0PdRJuNGhttuw1Krg&dl_branch=1

Blog commenter with informative CHAPPIE review.

Here's commenter MovieBob from Jeffrey Wells HOLLYWOOD ELSEWHERE site:

It's not bad.

Blomkamp's problem is that he's a crazy-gifted visual storyteller who's also a Big Thoughtful Idea machine, but he's bad at actually arranging a story. Obviously, he had Peter Jackson's help on DISTRICT 9, which is why the narrative part worked so well there and not so well in ELYSIUM or here. Still, it feels wrong to harp on a genre movie for having too many ideas or too complex of a story.

It's a weird animal because it wants to be all shades-of-moral-gray re: the "good guys" being violent gangsters (also, Die Antwoord are playing themselves, for some reason?) but the bad guys are Saturday Morning Evil - as in, Jackman's character is a meathead who bullies the nerdy engineer guy... AND he's a Jesus Freak who hates Chappie because A.I. is "Godless"... AND he's ex-military which in Blomkamp-verse means he's a psychopath whose sole motivation seems to be that he thinks tearing poor people apart with military-grade artillery is fun.

The thing is, if you like the robot you're going to like the movie, and it doesn't surprise me that there's a backlash on that front: It's a hard-R action thing, but Chappie himself is 100% a Disney/Pixar bleeding-heart-sincerity thing - a Terminator but with the personality of a puppy and the mind of a five year-old (he freaks out when people lie or break promises, literally cries for his "Mommy" when he's getting hurt, etc) ...if you can't groove on that, you're gonna HATE this.