The
Beatles: Get Back
With "Get Back", director Peter Jackson has achieved the impossible: Making a documentary as long as the Lord of the Rings Extended Editions.
Presented
with 60 hours of film and 150 hours of audio recorded in 1969 as part of a planned documentary
of the making of the "Let It Be" album, Pete has proven himself well and truly
incapable of making any kind of editorial decision, and basically just kept everything.
There
are three episodes to this thing, each over two hours long, but the only one
worth watching is the first as that’s the only one in which anything of note
happens—to whit, Paul comes up with the riff for the song “Get Back” and George
decides to leave the band. While there are brief moments of delight here and there, such as John's monolog about masturbation in the Boy Scouts or the black humor that arises once George leaves, the rest is mostly just the four of them rehearsing, then
the rooftop concert at the end which we’ve all seen before.
Even faced with such a logical and fitting end to the documentary Pete just keeps right on going, showing us the boys coming downstairs after the concert and anticlimactically going back to rehearsing again.
I leave you with one final thought about the song "Get Back": At one point Paul and John thought about turning it into a protest song opposing the white nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment in Britain at the time. Fifty years ago. Thank goodness that would never happen today. Look how far we've come. Look how much we've grown.
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