tagged w/ nowhere boy
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A rundown of this week's single new release with tons of hate aimed at the Saw franchise.A rundown of this week's single new release with tons of hate aimed at the Saw... more
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Nowhere Boy has got to be one of the best John Lennon movies out for Best Movies Ever. So many have been made, but nothing comes close to this one.Nowhere Boy has got to be one of the best John Lennon movies out for Best Movies Ever.... more
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gooma2
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added this
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1 year ago
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Any movie that attempts to depict famous rock musicians who were active within living memory has a major hurdle to overcome: No matter how good the actors assigned the job, they can rarely supplant the images of the original stars that are so familiar to us from period photos and film footage. In the case of the Beatles – possibly the most extensively chronicled of all rock bands – the challenge is formidable: What with the many films in which the group appeared – features, documentaries and early music videos -- and the copious press coverage they received throughout their career, and of course the continuing ubiquity of their music, it sometimes seems as if the fabulous foursome have never really gone away.
So the new movie Nowhere Boy, released in Britain last year but just now coming out here, is an illuminating surprise. It covers five years in the pre-Beatles life of John Lennon; the word “Beatles” is nowhere mentioned in it, and none of the band’s well-known music is anywhere heard. The picture focuses on Lennon’s tortured relationship with his mother, Julia, and in doing this it movingly dramatizes the feelings of pained rejection that would later inform his music, most directly in songs like “Julia” and “Mother.” The story is essentially a melodrama, but then life is often like that, and anyone familiar with Lennon’s life (which was ended by an assassin 30 years ago) will know that the picture is accurate in outline: director Sam Taylor-Wood and screenwriter Matt Greenhalgh (who also wrote the Joy Division film Control) have done their homework.
The movie’s most impressive asset is Aaron Johnson, who’s superbly resourceful in the role of Lennon. Johnson, most recently seen here as the inept superhero in Kick-Ass, isn’t a dead ringer for Lennon physically, but he captures the man’s cutting sarcasm and his hyper-verbal wit and wounded soul. He’s altogether convincing – he may not be Lennon, but he’s entirely persuasive as someone who could have grown up to become him. It’s a striking pre-incarnation.
The picture opens in 1955, in Liverpool, where the 15-year-old John is being raised by his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), an emotionally remote but devoted guardian. Mimi’s sister, the flighty and promiscuous Julia (a spirited Anne-Marie Duff), ceded mothering duties to Mimi when her son was five (after his father left her when he learned she’d had a child by another man); but she lives nearby, with a new husband and two new kids. Mimi advises her ward to stay away from his mother (“She’ll hurt you, you know”), but John is helplessly drawn to her. Julia is fun; she loves bars and boys, and she turns her son on to Elvis Presley and American rhythm-and-blues records, and teaches him to play the banjo. She also drinks quite a bit, and is ridden by the wild highs and crippling lows of manic depression. (And maybe more: There are scenes in which she and her son begin to cuddle that have weird incestuous overtones – something the movie leaves unexplained and unresolved.)
Meanwhile, John has been inspired by Presley. “Why didn’t God make me Elvis?” he asks Julia. Says she: “He was saving you for John Lennon.” An outsider and troublemaker at school, John finds purpose in forming his own band, a ramshackle group called the Quarrymen. Soon he meets a left-handed guitar-player named Paul McCartney (Thomas Brodie Sangster). Paul’s not a lot like Lennon. (“Want a beer?” John asks when they meet. “I’d like a tea,” Paul says.) But after whipping off a hot version of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” John brings him into the group, and soon they’re jamming together on their favorite songs of the day. At which point Paul says, “If we’re gonna do this, we should write our own stuff.”
And they do: we next see them strumming through “Hey Little Girl,” the first Lennon-McCartney composition. Soon another local guitarist – rockabilly specialist George Harrison (Sam Bell) – is brought onboard, and before long we find them at their first recording session, in a primitive back-room studio run by a Liverpool shop-owner, where John sings lead on “In Spite of All the Danger,” a song written by McCartney and Harrison. (The three faux-Beatles do their own singing and playing here, and they manage it with considerable charm.)
Throughout all of this, John continues to be torn between his mother, who’s incapable of being the emotional rock he needs in his life, and his aunt, the one who really cares about him but isn’t always capable of showing it. In the end Lennon escapes the smothering provincial life of Liverpool (he tells Mimi he and the boys are going to Hamburg for a few weeks -- or maybe months), but his childhood scars never really healed. In a 1962 letter to Stu Sutcliffe, who’d left the band to remain in Hamburg after the group returned to England to begin their ascent to world domination, he was candid about the hurt he still felt, and what it continued to cost him in his offstage life. “I can’t remember anything without a sadness so deep that it hardly becomes known to me,” he wrote, “so deep that its tears leave me a spectator of my own stupidity.”Any movie that attempts to depict famous rock musicians who were active within living... more
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Sam Taylor-Wood, director of the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, sits down to explain why The Beatles aren't the focus of the film, how she got onto the script and why film critics are a bit rougher than the art critic world.
Sam Taylor-Wood, director of the John Lennon biopic Nowhere Boy, sits down to... more
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The John Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, is set for DVD release later this year. The film, which chronicles Lennon’s early childhood and teenage life, was directed by Sam Taylor-Wood and is set for release May 10.The John Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy, is set for DVD release later this year. The film,... more
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Sam Taylor-Wood, director of the John Lennon biopic NOWHERE BOY, sits down to explain why The Beatles aren't the focus of the film, how she got onto the script and why film critics are a bit rougher than the art critic world.
Get more of Current@Sundance at http://blogs.current.com/moviesSam Taylor-Wood, director of the John Lennon biopic NOWHERE BOY, sits down to explain... more
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ctv
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added this
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2 years ago
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We're going to talk to Sam Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson tomorrow.
And we want a few questions from you, the Current users. So ask way whether it's about the Beatles, Kick-Ass or whatever else you've got to know--within reason.
From B-Side:
Growing up in Liverpool in 1955, and raised by his aunt and late uncle, John is a smart, spirited, but directionless, teen who skips school, steals records, and is told he’s going nowhere. Having brought rock music into the "house of Tchaikovsky," John widens the rift with Aunt Mimi when he seeks out his estranged mother, to whom he forms an immediate attachment. Full of energy and sexuality, his mother encourages John’s interest in music, inflaming the rivalry with her sister, Mimi. In opening the door to a painful past, John seeks refuge in music—a journey that leads to The Beatles.
British artist Sam Taylor Wood sees this formative period of John Lennon’s life as a way to explore a maturing artistic sensibility. Written by Matt Greenhalgh (Control), and featuring bright newcomer Aaron Johnson and a smattering of the early repertoire, Nowhere Boy avoids biopic nostalgia, focusing instead on an adolescent soul discovering his voice. "Nowhere" proves an important part of the journey.We're going to talk to Sam Taylor-Wood and Aaron Johnson tomorrow.
And we want... more
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Goldfrapp have scored the soundtrack for the forthcoming John Lennon movie biopic due out later this year. The film, entitled ‘Nowehere Boy‘, was directed by first time director Sam Taylor-Wood.Goldfrapp have scored the soundtrack for the forthcoming John Lennon movie biopic due... more
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