Ron Howard's Beatles Documentary Feature Film About The Band's Touring Years, "Eight Days a Week"*

Same here.

One thing I'll say is modern filmmakers can't resist fiddling with things that are non-issues. Why apply colorization to low-res videotape footage? Why animate still photos with smoke? Just tell us something interesting with high-quality sources and people will appreciate it.

 

I watched on PBS last weekend and enjoyed it more than the first Hulu showing. Lower expectations probably influenced that.

 

I thought the colorized DC footage looked terrible. And while I agree the animated smoke was weird and unnecessary, I was pleasantly surprised that cigarettes weren’t completely digitally removed.

 

Well, "many people here were complaining" that it was "not as good as it could have been."
So you are in good company!

 

Pretty much...

"Puff Piece" is as good of a description as any. The "story" was so watered down and sanitized...hardly any mention of Hamburg or Pete Best. If Opie's intention here was to make some sort of "definitive" Beatles documentary it was an epic fail and a half IMO.

 

I don't think that was his intention or his assignment. We already had the Anthology, which had hours to spend on the same time period. 8DaW comes across more as a brief overview for the casual fan/mass market, directed by someone usually associated with mass market films rather than a scholarly documentarian. Not diehards who would notice that half of the concert audio has been swapped out for Hollywood Bowl tracks. Is it everything a rabid fan would want? No, but Apple is not required to tailor all of its output to rabid fans. It's not always about us!

 

Sorry, but as soon as someone says Opie or Whoopie, I stop caring.

 

Whoopie! It's Opie! You mean, like that?

Lighten up, man...in my opinion Ron Howard made the kind of Beatles documentary that Opie would have made, does that work for ya? If the g-ddamn Canucks had actually been winning the hockey game I wouldn't have ended up watching the dumb documentary in the first place

 

I finally watched this several months ago when I was bored and alone on a rainy afternoon, and I remained bored and alone during and after it. *yawn*

 

What about the rain though? Did it stop raining? ..

 

Interesting article, thanks. Also the fact those mixes were done 4-5 years ago gives a bit more grist for my own "pet" theory that Giles has already remixed everything in the Beatles catalog, and is just waiting for the Beatles or Universal Music to tell him to pull various mixes off his hard drive. According to my pet theory, he's already gone through pretty much the whole lot of multitracks and started remixing everything in Pro Tools, he's already got all the Beatles multitracks digitized and sitting on a hard drive, in folders and Pro Tools sessions that are all set up and maybe 80% of the way there, and whenever they ask for something he simply refines and polishes up his existing remixes, and finishes them properly.

 

gotta say, i haven't seen it yet, but my ma (an actual first generation beatles fan, who's still got her scrapbooks of all the current news clippings etc from back in the day) caught it on the pbs broadcast, and really, really liked it. took her back to the mania, etc.

i've followed enough of the criticism since the release, and although i, too, would love something that's a full, detailed overview of, say, the first half of their career, i don't think this was meant to be that. i think that this was meant to be pretty much what it turned out to be, and though i KNOW i'll have some quibbles with it (be they minor or major), it sounds like it did it's job. i don't know if either hamburg or pete best had much to do with the whirlwind couple years that happened between '64 and '66.

i know some folks dig hurling the insults at ron howard ("opie?"), whoopie goldberg, etc, but at the end of the day, this dumb movie made my ma's day last week, which was cool.

looking forward to seeing it.

smitquest

 

I am a fan of the Beatles and because of that I enjoyed this film when I saw it in the theater. not sure what the complaints are about. Anything could theoretically have been done better. Anything.

 

Was Clint Howard in this? If so, did he have a speaking role or was he an extra in an audience scene?

 

Saw this recently on PBS. Ok as a documentary. But as a fan, I wanted to see complete performances and no voiceovers. Didn't happen. Wasn't impressed. I want complete performances.......

 

Why spend much time on Pete Best? Mark Lewisohn's research has established why Pete got the boot. And it turns out, the reasons aren't all that sexy or interesting: He wasn't good enough and he didn't mesh personality-wise. To be honest about that on screen would have just embarrassed Pete all over again. Why go there? Best to let it go (pun intended). There's just not much more to be said on the Pete front.

And this is a documentary about the Beatles the world came to know for years, not the bar band they were for a couple of months here and there. Eight Days a Week is a documentary with a stated objective of covering the band's touring years from 1962 through 1966. Given that, why would they spend a lot of film time on Hamburg trips in 6o and 61?

This film is for a general audience. That was always the point. Just like the point of the Christmas box set is for diehard fans. Personally, I found the movie thrilling to see it on a big screen and I enjoyed watching it at home, too. I saw things I hadn't seen/noticed before.

 

I don't remember...I think it and the film put me to sleep

 

A favorite of the (relatively) modern era.

 

This is a really great find! Amazing what can be done today.

I never knew that the Hollywood Bowl audio engineers actually mixed in the overwhelming sound of the audience into the instrument tracks! That's why the '77 release is tough to listen to!

 

An opinion doen’t Have to include insults. Ron Howard is a fine director. And “a documentary Opie would have made...” makes no frikken sense!

 

With all the crappy Beatles documentaries out there, this isn't that bad, at least it actually features the Beatles. Whoopie Goldberg tells a short story of what the Beatles meant to her, which is similar to a lot of people, and it shouldn't be lost on people the positive influence the Beatles had on race relations. I found that aspect of the film useful. That said, celebrity culture didn't need to be even hinted at. It might of been more useful yet to have included more insight from peers of the Beatles.
(A relative term, being the Beatles are/were peerless) .. I watch every crap documentary presented on Amazon just in case a kernel can be extrapolated......What's one more..... I'll be keeping my copy

 

I don't think they had much choice. The Beatles said they couldn't hear themselves playing. I believe the crowd noise simply bled into the stage mics, rather than being intentionally mixed in from a miked audience. If the technicians miked the audience in 1964, hoping to capture the excitement of the gigs, they would have quickly learned that the end product was barely releasable. They wouldn't have repeated that mistake in 1965, but the crowd is just as loud on the later tapes.

 

If you watch the video, he points out that the Beatles’ instruments were close miked and couldn’t have picked up the audience screams. He also says that the audio on the vocal track is clean, ie no screaming. The audience was deliberately mixed into the instrumental tracks. The reason it happened again on 65 is that different engineers did it and made the same error.

 

Thanks. I didn't watch all 22 minutes of the video so I missed that part. I'm quite surprised that they would do that on purpose in 1965 after hearing the results from the prior year.