MovieChat Forums > Magical Mystery Tour (1967) Discussion > Were the Beatles on a lazy trend?

Were the Beatles on a lazy trend?

posted 17 years ago by LeatherJacketWeather
3 replies | jump to latest

To me it seems like their evolution for movies just involved less work at least for them.

Hard Day's Night was a cute movie. I wouldn't say that it was the best ever made but it definately wasn't that bad. Although there wasn't much of a story to it other than a "day in the life" it was still entertaining and fun to watch.

Help! was a big step of evolution. It took a bit more acting than just "be yourselves" and it actually had a real plot with real conflicts and a real conclusion, no matter how extremely simple that conclusion was. But Help! was a great movie.

Magical Mystery Tour brings a great notion that a Magical Mystery Tour does exist but it isn't really about anything. No plot, and no real acting ability required but a mix of bizzare events that the bus strings together. They definately started to go downhill.

Yellow Submarine was a cartoon. No real work for them aside from the usual recording and the voice overs.

Let it Be isn't even really a movie so much as a concert. This took no acting whatsoever and I can't imagine what sort of planning went into this one aside from bringing the cameras.

Any thoughts?

Any society that would give up liberty to gain security will deserve neither and lose both.

[–] bredlau3 17 years ago

They didn't even do anything really for Yellow Submarine, except the songs and the brief part at the end where they are actually in it, they didn't even do the voice overs.

I think they were under contract to do films. So they had to do them. There was some planning on Let It Be, but it just got to be too much of a hassle for them.

[–] cbartal 17 years ago

I Don't think the Beatles were thinking too much about their film presence by the time Help came around. I think they've admitted that they were mostly stoned during the filming of Help. It's wonderful to see the Beatles in vivid technicolor, but Help was afflicted by many of the silly devices that would be copied by the Monkees in ensuing years. I doubt the Beatles had much creative input, let alone interest, in the making of Help.

Magical Mystery Tour was a Beatles, more precisely, a Paul Mccartney creation. It didn't help that the four were most likely under the influence of LSD during it's production. I wouldn't call it laziness exactly, unless you call the self indulgent excesses of the film lazy, which they very well could have been.

The Beatles weren't filmmakers, they were songwriters. Artistic talent doesn't necessarily cross over from one medium to another, and it certainly didn't in MMT.

Let it Be was a documentary. The Beatles had become a conflicted, dysfunctional non-unit by the time Let it Be was made. The Beatles themselves may have been guilty of laziness in their desire to keep the band together, but the film itself wasn't lazy.

There aren't too many films that chronicle the sad de-evolution of the collaborative creative process; Wilco's I Am Trying to Break Your Heart is the only other one that comes to mind.

From this perspective, one could argue that Let it Be was a successful expose memorializing the downfall of the Beatles; one of the most iconic symbols of 1960's, and possibly even the 20th century.

[–] CineramaMama 11 years ago

They were growing up, and growing away from each other. After Brian Epstein died, they had no direction as a unit, and no one who could provide the professionalism needed to ensure successful outcomes for their projects, thereafter.