In the Beatles circa 1969, Paul McCartney is the negotiator-in-chief, and he’s aware of every eggshell he has to walk around or smash to achieve greatness or just to get shit done. Most music performed by a group is the product of constant, gracious compromise. Really, you just need to have had a best friend. You just have to have had a spouse, sibling, boss or employee that you played mental chess with, to try to get to a place where everybody wins. You don’t have to have been in a band to relate to the dynamics that make “Get Back” fascinating, though it doesn’t hurt. What it might really be about is the art of negotiation … which means that it’s also kind of about what it takes to survive in marriage, family and business, on top of music, film or theater.
#CAMP ROCK 2 SONG LYRICS MOVIE#
To say “Get Back” is a great, maybe the greatest, movie or series about rock ‘n’ roll is accurate, but slightly reductive. OK, it would have been a terrible title, but you catch the drift. Too bad the title “Scenes From a Marriage” was taken, because that would’ve been a fitting name for “Get Back,” too. It chronicles the dark nights of the soul that might trouble any band before - for the talented and blessed ones - joy comes in the morning, along with perhaps a permanent spot on Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums lists, or just a little local glory. Over eight hours, details and moods accumulate to form a picture that encompasses divine inspiration and drudge work, camaraderie and conflict, and good ideas and horrible ones. But let’s not quibble about which few minutes any of us think it could’ve lost.
I may think this epic could have done without the scene where Peter Sellers shows up at the recording sessions doing nothing but anxiously grinning you may in turn believe it could have done without an entire take of John Lennon and Paul McCartney singing “Two of Us” through clenched teeth, for no other reason than maybe considering ventriloquism as a backup career if this Beatles thing really goes south. It sounds grueling, but it’s hard to think of many of those minutes that feel wasted.
Of course, you’d have to tell them, “Park your saucer - it’s going to be a while.” Jackson has taken 468 minutes to tell the story of roughly 20 days in the life of history’s greatest band. Peter Jackson’s “Get Back” is the only mega-movie you’d really need to show to an alien wanting to understand the creativity and psychology of the rock ‘n’ roll that’d been coming through on radio waves across dimensions. But a film project that lets us look in, at leisurely length, on the creative process as well as personalities of genius-superstars who really are Just Like Us? In 60 years’ worth of pop music movies, that’s something we’ve never really gotten. And we’ve seen our share of rock documentaries that brilliantly captured an artist at a singular moment in time, and/or looked to unwrap a riddle wrapped in an enigma (see the entire Bob Dylan filmography). There was something wonderful, silly and sad about how, up until now, musicians had to look to the fabricated saga of an unabashedly terrible group to be able to say, “Yes, this is our story.” Heaven knows there’ve been other fictional tales that tried to pull off that same kind of Everyband story while treating rock with a modicum of dignity, too - some with a bit of success (“That Thing You Do!”), others not so much so (David Chase’s “Not Fade Away”). A moment of silence, please, for “This Is Spinal Tap,” as that satire formally abdicates its title as the best and truest movie ever made about what it’s like to be in a rock ‘n’ roll band.