The Yesterday film, yes or no?

October 2019 can't come soon enough!

 

I'd like to see a Coen brothers horror/comedy about the last days of Bobby Fuller in Hollywood
before his murder (as long as John Goodman does not appear in it!)

 

Saw it with my girlfriend last week and we really enjoyed it. Great movie for a hot Sunday. I also confess I fell in love with Lily James.

 

Lily James has an unfair amount of charm and charisma.

 

That was one of the issues in the film - she's in love with him and he's an absolute ninny to not see it. But on the other hand, women are constantly sending "signals" that are so subtle the average man wouldn't pick them up with a hundred foot ariel.

 

Because they were Ed Sheeran songs.

 

I easily suspended disbelief about the Beatles never having existed.

I had a hard time getting past Jack not digging Ellie. That part was absurd.

 

Re your spoiler comment, I understood the premise to be simply that in the alternate reality, there was no “Beatles”. The four individual members existed but either never met or never formed a band, and just went on to different lives and different careers.

 

A land of ice and snow, good choice!

 

Yesterday is the kind of film that would be fun to catch on cable TV sometime, but not something likely to motivate us to go to a theater. Not that we don't go see movies in theaters -- we do ALL the time (3-5 per month, sometimes), usually more of the art-house variety.

 

I'd be interested in a discussion on this, maybe in a different thread or something so as not to clutter this one up, just to hear everyone's ideas. A world without The Beatles would be very different musically and culturally, and it would be intriguing to see how many things we can trace back to them.

 

Actually, I'd say it was the one thing that the movie got right, the world (by now) would not be substantially different. The cultural revolution of 1963 would still have happened, maybe in 1964, the Rolling stones at the forefront.

 

Think of it this way instead: the main guy in the story wakes up on the first day the movie takes place and everyone has simply forgotten that the Beatles existed, even the Beatles themselves. Also, all record of them being a band has disappeared as well. Run with that.

 

In fantasy, anything is possible. Although it's hard to believe every recording, every piece of paper, every photograph, every piece of motion picture film, every digital image, all of it has been wiped out. Memories, I can buy into.

 

Saw it this evening at the five-dollar cinema (where more-deserving movies go to die once the comic book movies push them out). This one actually pushed-out some presumably-more-deserving movie at the five-dollar cinema.

The plot was a Sea Of Holes (ouch!), but more of them in the actual execution of the film, not the plot itself.
1) How is this film not just about Lily James? I'd pay twice that just to see her sigh and mope her way through 90 minutes. This is how you launch a starlet into the stratosphere.
2) How does a major, cataclysmic deus ex machina become the main impetus of a film...but does no more than erase the advent of four societal powerhouses from the world? Waste of a major, cataclysmic event, that's for sure.
3) How, way back in pre-development and pre-production, would they have known Ed Sheeran would be a big enough media draw to play that part (Taylor Swift, I can see, but...the hobbit...?!)
4) How does one make a film this tepid and fluffy, yet make a strong enough case for Apple to release rights to the music, the likenesses and the Beatles franchise in general? Who was signing these agreements? The same guy who signed off on Robert Stigwood and Al Brodax?

Seriously, the elephant in this room is how there was a Beatles-Blessing engineered, that was worth risking the likelihood that this lite entertainment would be the result. This is NOT the organization that held-off on fixing the first 4 Beatles CD's until 2009, surely learned something from Michael Jackson buying Paul's nest-egg out from under him, and it took Alpha/Omega to push them towards making the Red and Blue albums, not to mention whichever embarrassment(s) finally got them to do their own Anthology project. Was Yoko coming off a sugar high from a weekend bingeing on Lifetime Movie Marathons, or something?

 

Well for one, the Kinks would be a lot bigger.

 

I liked a lot.
Got a tear in my eye, when 'the old man' opened the door...

 

As far as Danny Boyle projects go, this one was not one of his best.

 

Yeah, leaving cigarettes, Coca Cola, and Harry Potter aside, the Beatles are such an important piece of modern culture that had they never existed, the world would be significantly different in all sorts of noticeable ways, none of which are depicted in the film.

Spoiler

Also, I was disappointed that the film didn't ever resolve the cause of these huge changes in the world. They just are and you have to accept that. I would have preferred Jack to have awakened from a coma, cliched as that is, simply because the story of the film would have been a reasonable fantasy for a frustrated songwriter to have, and it would have justified all the various inconsistencies and logical flaws that people like me are annoyed by.

 

Ed was a big worldwide star with his 2014 album "x" (multiply); 11x platinum BPI, 4x platinum RIAA, #1 US, UK, AUS, Canada, Germany, etc....

 

That's a rather minor component to pick over in the scheme of my overall point, but I'm used to that here. Unless Sheeran was involved in getting the movie produced in the first place, I stand by my criticism of their choice. I don't tend to let irrelevant statistics throw out my entire premise because somebody has a focus that distracts them from seeing a bigger picture.

 

It all makes sense if you view it as that big incident only wiped out a few, big specific things from existence and memory. Things like Coke, the Beatles, and cigarettes. Everything else except things directly relating to them stayed the same as they are in 2019.

 

I don't disagree with your premise, was just pointing out that Ed was already a big star at the time of development/pre-production.

 

Okay, fair enough. I've just seen my share of big positions and points distracted on this board by things like, "It wasn't a Pontiac, it was a Buick", when neither brand names or cars were the focus.

John Carney, who did Once, followed it up with Begin Again, in which songwriter Keira Knightley's creep singer boyfriend is played by Maroon 5's Adam Levine. It was basically a "walk-through" role, with the necessary musical performances, but there wasn't really any thespian heavy lifting going on there. Of course he has plenty of "Q-Score" cred from judging on The Voice, so this was a logical good cast decision, and his performance could make any fan proud. If I had gamed this out, the casting of Levine for this role seems perfectly cut-and-dried.

My take on Sheeran was at that point in time, as early as he would have been considered an asset in a film that must have taken years of development in order to get an organization big as Apple to go in on this, he was as much a surprise fluke as a superstar. So my perspective was, him being at the point in history to be big enough to fit that role for a movie that didn't show its' face until Fall 2019, was a fluke in itself. It be like, I can expect the 2019 season opener of SNL to have Billie Eilish, but, that doesn't mean one can conclusively predict she'll be tapped for the 2021 Oscars to sing during the "dead guy segment" on the basis of her fame track, if you get my analogy.

But, as I maintain, Ed's only a finger in a whole handful of dubious things that had to have happened in order for this film to get signed-off-on, before a camera lens cover ever came off. But, that's just my perspective, and as much as I have a right to it, I don't expect everybody to have my brand of Bul**hit Detector app on their iPhone.