--Yesterday
This film came out last June and though I like a good gimmick of a premise for movies, I was hesitant to see this one because I'm not a fan of the director, Danny Boyle. This film is about a young, struggling musician who suddenly finds out he's the only person who remembers the Beatles and their songs.
For awhile I was pleasantly surprised at how things were going, but the second hour took all the wrong turns in my opinion. Most movies with a gimmicky premise rarely stray past ninety minutes and there's a good reason for that. The audience wants to know how it plays out and the longer you are kept from knowing, there better be a good reason for it. Gimmicks, like fads, can get tiresome pretty quickly.
Himesh Patel, who I'm assuming is related to Dev Patel, is the lead, and I grew weary of him pretty quickly. His performance does nothing to suggest Jack deserves to be a global superstar, best songs of all time or not. As the only one who knows the songs he tries resurrecting them back into the world. As the movie goes on, though, this world without the Beatles doesn't look any different, so there's little potency to the film's fantasy of the Beatles coming back.
The film strays from the gimmick by getting us invested in a love story between Jack and a girl played by Lily James, who can play sweet without being annoying and is quite wonderful, but the story lets her down. This only serves to distract from the premise and the movie then feels like they are padding it with this aspect because they don't know what to do with the premise they created. The premise of this film is actually highly under-explored and really never resolved to any great satisfaction.
It's a curio, like a windup toy that I didn't mind playing with for awhile, but which doesn't amount to much in the long run.
There were 25 minutes or so of deleted scenes that I even watched, one of which was filmed at the Alta Cienega Motel down the street from me at La Cienega.
Also, what do you guys think of when you find out a film has an alternate ending? One always hears that a writer needs to know their ending before they begin writing. If you don't, it would be like going on a vacation, but not know where you're going. Well, there is an alternate ending included. It's really more altered or refined a bit than alternate.
