“Across the Universe”, Spans and Spins on a the Best Known Generation

We’ve seen it all before in the movies and various forms of entertainment: Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, the riots, the speeches, the love story. It has been common territory for entertainment. Part of the reason is that it was one of the biggest eras of political mistake making so its the easiest go to when making a point about our current political culture, but it was also one of the biggest artistic renovation periods of American History. This era and the jazz/blues era I would put at the forefront. Also making it an easy choice for creative stomping grounds. We’ve also seen in movies about this era those scenes when the songs beat over the various films images with the meaning they were created to have. But I’ve never seen it done with so much excessive creativity and literalness as I have in Julie Taymor’s “Across the Universe”, and that’s the biggest compliment I could pay any movie this year, because with a sharp hand she makes it work, almost all the time anyway.