Hey, you! You dig the Beatles, right? ‘course you do! That’s because you belong to some subset of the umbrella group Human Being With A Soul. So, enjoying the music of the Fab Four as you do, you rushed right out to theaters to catch director Julie Taymor’s gonzo Beatles fantasia Across the Universe, right? ‘course you didn’t! That’s because you also belong to some subset of the umbrella classification The Movie-Going Public; and nobody from that demographic appears to have bought a ticket.

Well, not exactly nobody. The movie, which cost $45 million to make, did a worldwide gross of $25 million, playing on les than a thousand US screens at the height of its release. So, at a guess, it managed to scare up an audience of terrifying Beatles lifestylers, the friends and families of its cast and crew, and possibly Ringo (although he’s been pretty busy of late, apparently). Peter Frampton was allegedly ejected from a matinee engagement for shouting at the screen: “Ha! It’s not so easy, is it?”

You see, Across the Universe is an attempt to uncover — or impose — a narrative thread on a string of beloved standalone pop songs. Or, as the DVD box coyly puts it, avoiding the B-word altogether, “Within the lyrics of the world’s most famous songs lives a story that has never been told… until now.” It’s a bit like Mamma Mia, or (God help us) that legendary, coke-addled career-killer that was 1978’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band.

It would be bad form to speculate on what kind of drugs Julie Taymor is on, but she is surely possessed of the kind of batshit visual imagination that gets a director labeled as “visionary.” She came out of experimental theater before being tapped to bring Disney’s The Lion King to Broadway; that show was a commercial and artistic triumph, assimilating the techniques of the avant-garde — masks, puppetry, mime — into a mainstream family entertainment. Her first film, Titus, was a bloody, perverse revenge tragedy with eye-popping visuals. (more…)