Weekend reading

From The A.V. Club: "Bonfire Of The Vanity Projects Case File #16: Give My Regards To Broad Street and Magical Mystery Tour."

Read about the two films that Paul had the strongest hand in creating. The snide one-liner "Don't quit your day job" comes to mind.

Excerpts:

Part of what makes Give My Regards To Broad Street such a punishingly somnolent endeavor is that nobody in it seems remotely excited to be in Paul McCartney’s presence. Everywhere he goes, McCartney is greeted with nothing but bored professionalism he returns in kind. McCartney’s life, as “dramatized” here, is a tedious checklist of obligations he performs dutifully and with little passion or enthusiasm. One of the most charismatic figures in rock history proves a charisma-free leading man.

. . .

Magical Mystery Tour follows a bus tour that unites The Beatles with a coterie of kooky characters, including a camera-toting little person and a man with a Hitler mustache, as well as Ringo Starr’s corpulent aunt (Jessie Robbins), a guilelessly enthusiastic tour guide (Derek Royle), a sexy hostess (Mandy Weet), and the tour’s creepy conductor (Ivor Cutler). The wiggy experiment is tied together less by a conventional plot than a freewheeling, anything-goes sensibility that delights in random silliness, crude mugging, and weirdness for its own sake. At best, Magical Mystery Tour is the loose, loopy, and bravely improvisatory cinematic equivalent of jazz, a giddy lark from charismatic young men literally making it all up as they went along. At worst, the film is an unwieldy fusion of transcendent music and amateurish shenanigans that are better suited to the McCartney home movies that inspired the project than in a proper Beatles film.