Repeat the Beatles?

I know private jets are expensive, but at their age I hope Sir Paul and Sir Ringo are not so in need of money that they had to extrude a new Beatles song, using a Lennon demo tape and a failed Harrison guitar track. 

McCartney recently had to defend the project against allegations that artificial intelligence was being used to re-create the talents of the deceased Beatles, saying that "nothing has been artificially or synthetically created". The story goes that the reason this song was not released in 1995, along with "Real Love" and "Free as a Bird," is that John's vocal track was messed up, but AI has now solved that problem.  

I have issues.

I know -- Mr. Killjoy.

 

First, as Ed Driscoll wrote on Insty's page, 

A demo recording is a way for an artist to explore his ideas for a song, and/or to give to his backing musicians to learn a song’s riff or chord progression. On a demo, often he’s not singing with as much effort as he would give a polished recording designed for wide commercial release.

Ed also quotes Ian MacDonald on the 1995 project: 

Unimpressed with the quality of these two ‘reunion’ tracks, Harrison declined to have anything to do with Lennon’s third demo, which consequently remains in its original state and was not included on Anthology 3, as originally planned.

But Harrison did try to noodle around with the cut and was unhappy with the results. Nevertheless, whatever he did is going to be on the new record.

According to Charles Cooke writing in National Review,  

As an application of artificial intelligence, making a badly recorded vocal performance “pure” is fairly benign — equivalent in some sense to cleaning dirty tapes, remixing a recording for stereo, or remastering it for new media. But AI does not — and it will not — end there. For both audio and video, AI can be used as a simulation tool, which an operator can use to sample a given voice or physical appearance and then create something entirely novel from the results. If we are not there already, we are getting close to the point at which a director could make a movie with a deceased actor in the lead role and at which a record producer could generate a full album’s worth of material “by” an artist who is now unable to record a note.

You may recall how in 1997 Fred Astaire's moving image was used in a series of Dirt Devil commercials, showing him dancing with the brand's vacuum cleaner. There was outcry against that at the time, and that's nothing compared to what's on the horizon. 

For the Beatles project, Sir Paul says there's nothing fake about the AI used on Lennon's voice -- but he could say that honestly even if the AI used a pile of Lennon recordings, stealing a morpheme here and there and combining them to make Lennon sing the Malaysian National Anthem or whatever else you want. It's John's voice, just "remixed." Deepfakes are showing us how it's done, using existing images of famous people and merging them to make videos. A voice may be that much easier to fake with the actual sound of a person's voice, given a large enough dataset. 

So, in effect, the upcoming song required unheard-of amounts of electronic fooling, was rejected the first time around by the now-deceased George, was something Lennon made three years before he was killed and apparently didn't think it met his own standards for publication, and will be mixed not as a Beatles song would have been done but as a McCartney (and I guess Starr) song. 

I'm not terribly excited. 

And look, if we're going to start screwing about with Beatles stuff using artificial intelligence, how about correcting some past problems? For example: 

🎵 "Within You Without You" -- Did anyone not stoned ever enjoy this five-minute brick in the middle of Sgt. Pepper? I much preferred Big Daddy's take, doing it as a beatnik bongo number. It was still boring, but it was less than two minutes long. 

🎵 "She's Leaving Home" -- Always wanted a more realistic take on the last verse, like: 

Sheeeeee... is lying... in a diiiiiiiiiitch...

🎵 "Revolution 9" -- Could be replaced by something more interesting. Like, a blank soundtrack, or an apology. 

🎵 "Sun King" -- Maybe we could speed it up a bunch? Might be a passable song played at 45.

🎵 "Boys" -- It has never been clear to me why Ringo sang this song by the Shirelles on the Please Please Me album. Maybe we could dub in the Shirelles singing. Or just dub in their whole song. 

You laugh -- ha! ha! -- but it seems that AI is destined to be used to exploit the past -- and to "correct" errors of the past, the way censorship is being used to "correct" undesirable things in old movies and books nowadays. If our barbarous overloads are determined to destroy the past, maybe we could at least make it sound more pleasant first.  

Jack and Stan: My take.

When Stan Lee died last year, I got sick of the hagiography pretty quickly.

Polite people, of course, prefer not to speak ill of the dead, especially when the dead is still warm, but it's silly to ignore the fact that Stan was a personal wrecking crew to some very talented people, a glory hog, and before being rescued by Disney movies, his Marvel Comics stock was tanking and the company was in danger of falling apart. It had bounced back from its debt-ridden depths, and Lee was not the man behind the worst of the financial shenanigans, but if the Mouse had not stepped in to snap up the works in 2009, Marvel might have sunk without trace in a quagmire of unreadable comics and bad Sony movies.

The thing that irked me most, though, were several cartoons of Jack Kirby (who died in 1994) welcoming Stan into heaven. When I heard Kirby speak in the eighties, he sounded like a guy who would have been promising St. Peter a great action-packed portrait if he could arrange to keep the gates closed when Stan the Man showed up.

It was a long time ago, and I was a kid, so I don't remember the Kirby event very well. I certainly don't recall Kirby sitting on the panel complaining "Stan Lee is a bastard" and such. But he gave Stan as little credit as possible for any of their supposed collaborative efforts. Jack explained how he had created the Fantastic Four, for example, and detailed meticulously how he came up with the Silver Surfer, whom he imagined as an angelic herald from the Bible, and how that led to Galactus -- because you can't have an angelic herald without a god. Jack gave Stan no credit for any of this.

When Kirby jumped ship to DC Comics, he created a minor toupee-clad character named Funky Flashman, a fast-talking promotional jerk, as a sort of foil to escape-artist hero Mister Miracle. It was an obvious and unflattering portrayal of Stan. So there was clearly not a lot of love.

I don't know if Kirby and Lee ever made up, but I doubt it. The irreplaceable Mark Steyn had this bit of information in his obit for Lee:

With the exception of Spider-Man, almost all of Lee's household-name heroes were drawn by a fellow called Jack Kirby, who never enjoyed the star cameos Stan did in the Marvel movies. Kirby lived modestly in Irvine, California, and spent his days sat on "an old, straightback kitchen chair parked in front of the crummiest old drawing table you ever saw". He ought to have died the wealthiest guy in Irvine. Instead, his widow had to beseech Marvel for a modest pension sufficient to cover her mortgage, groceries and medical bills.

Stan was worth $50 million when he died.

The biggest names in the Avengers movies were all Kirby creations, if you asked him: Captain America (with Joe Simon), Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, Ant-Man, Black Widow, Hawkeye -- even Groot started life as a Kirby monster. Oh, but not Spider-Man and Dr. Strange -- Steve Ditko created them. I'm not saying Stan Lee had no part in the creation of these characters; other people would know better than I. I'm saying that neither Kirby nor Ditko would give Stan much credit. Something about Stan Lee, at least in the sixties, was not inspiring a lot of love among the artists.

At DC, Kirby had a gigantic creative explosion, a pile of "Fourth World" books that seemed to contain every idea he'd ever wanted to use at Marvel, maybe some he shouldn't have. He started proudly by reforming DC's lowest-selling title, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen; people are amazed to hear that it was in Jimmy Olsen's book that the great villain Darkseid of Apokolips was first seen. (Darkseid was totally ripped off when Jim Starlin created Thanos, a bad guy currently causing some fuss in the Avengers movies.) At DC, Kirby set himself a workload as artist and writer that was probably more than even he could handle, fountain of crazy ideas that he was. The books New Gods, Mister Miracle, Forever People, and even Jimmy Olsen were really wild, unlike anything seen before in DC or maybe anywhere else.

But, to be fair to Lee, Kirby needed a good editor, and DC didn't give him one. Letting Kirby go his own way gave us some truly bad ideas, including the infamous Don Rickles series in Jimmy Olsen.

Yes, that Don Rickles. Benton Grey, who's been running a great series on Bronze Age DC comics on his blog, summed it up neatly:

Apparently Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman, Kirby’s assistants, were huge fans of then popular insult-comedian Don Rickles, and they thought it would be fun to have him appear in a comic for a few panels and insult Superman. They wrote up some dialog and showed it to Jack, who loved the idea. He, in turn, took it to Carmine Infantino, who never met a gimmick he didn’t like. The editor got permission from Rickles and decided that this needed to be promoted and made into a two-issue feature. Then, out of the unfathomable, beautiful madness of Kirby’s mind came what followed. Apparently, Rickles himself was none-too-pleased with the final result, and I can’t say I really blame him.

The problem was, Kirby was a lot better at writing ponderous operatic hero fantasy than stand-up comedy, and his assistants weren't much help (and I say this as a guy who loved Evanier's work on Blackhawk and other DC properties).

Amazingly, the series continued publication for three more years, but Kirby left a year after this storyline.

Kirby and Lee were probably better together, even if all Lee did was prevent Jack's excesses and sillier ideas from running amok. I have always felt that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were much better together than apart for the same reason, curbing each other's worse impulses. Possibly the same was true with Ditko, judging by his work with DC. What happened to Kirby was like if John Lennon had kept the rights to all the music and Paul was stuck begging for work. Guest starring Steve Ditko as George Harrison.

So I don't quite see Stan Lee as saint material, no.

(Fair warning: This deep dive into dorkitude continues tomorrow, on a different but equally dorky topic....)

Kick it into high gear!

You're sick of Christmas already?

That's a shame.

Because tomorrow is December and we're kickin' it into high gear!

I was in the supermarket yesterday and it was all holiday-themed music on the PA. I was disgusted to hear a cover of the second-worst Christmas song ever, Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime." I wanted to find out what idiot would sing that stupid song, so I looked it up when I got home to find that 23 idiots have covered that song to one degree or other. To rub salt in the wound, not five minutes later the PA played the McCartney original. I think it was Mark Steyn who questioned the lyrics:

The choir of children sing their song
They practiced all year long
Ding dong, ding dong
Ding dong, ding dong
Ding dong, ding dong

Who the hell has to practice all year long to sing "Ding dong, ding dong"? Is this a choir of particularly slow children?

Of course, the worst Christmas song of all time is John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)," unless some fool thinks "Imagine," the worst song of all time, is suitable for Christmas. When I hear either song coming on I make Spencer Tracy's transformation to Mr. Hyde look like a walk in the park.

But lest I've left you with a bad taste in your ear, here's a seasonal ditty from another rock star you'll be sure to enjoy. 

 

Bob Dylan is the only Nobel laureate since Linus Pauling to record "Must Be Santa." Some people think Nicolaas Bloembergen was first, but he did "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus."

Merry Christmas!

Sir Ringo.

I was mildly surprised and a little amused to see that Ringo Starr is getting a knighthood.

Do I think he deserves it? I don't think any pop musician deserves it, or I would feel that way if it were still an award that had anything to do with personal and national honor. For a long time that hasn't been the case.

Not that I want to go slaggin' on Ringo. Like a lot of people I have a soft spot for Ringo. For decades he didn't get the respect he deserved as a drummer -- but may have gotten more than he deserved as a singer, so maybe it was a wash. I have always liked "Photograph," which he sang with that classic Ringo sorrowful twang, and even dopier songs like "Sunshine Life for Me (Sail Away Raymond)," "Goodnight Vienna," and "Down and Out." His version of "Drowning in the Sea of Love" is great, if you don't listen to Joe Simon's original. On the whole I approve of Ringo, doubly so because he wasn't a pretentious git like some other Beatles I could name who wrote the worst song every written, called "Imagine." Just saying.

Ringo also had something of an acting career beyond the movies he made as a Beatle. He starred in 1981's Caveman with Dennis Quaid and Shelley Long, which... Well, it sucked. He starred with Peter Sellers in The Magic Christian from 1969, which has a cult following but is an object lesson in how unfunny comedy was in 1969. (Satire is still what closes on Saturday night.) And of course he played a dual role as Ringo Starr and his doppelganger Ognir Rrats in the 1978 TV film Ringo. 

Ringo's cameo in 24: Live Another Day

If Paul McCartney could get a knighthood, and he did twenty years ago, there's no reason Ringo couldn't get one. Paul claims to have lobbied for Ringo's honors, but I have my doubts. Why would it have taken so long? George Harrison would certainly have gotten one if he hadn't died in 2001, and John Lennon as well, even though Lennon wrote the worst song ever written. (Which is "Imagine.")

Personally, I think Paul was dreading this day, perhaps lobbying against it, knowing that Ringo would be calling him all the time after he got the knighthood.

"Hey, Paul. Is there some special club for us knights, something nice with a swimming pool?"

"No, Ringo, I don't think so, mate. I have to---"

"Oh, see, I thought for us knights the queen might have some special place to, like, hang out, you know? Have tea or something."

"Not that I ever heard of."

"Are we allowed to just go up and knock on the door at Buckingham? Us being knights? You know, walk on up and ring the bell and say, 'Just in the neighborhood, thought we'd stop in and see Mum'?"

"No, Ringo, probably not a good idea. I think I hear Nancy calling..."

"Maybe if we wore armor? Did you ever get a suit of armor? Don't know where to get mine."

"You shouldn't need armor, but of course---"

"I thought about hiring some heralds, do some art for me, some rampant stuff, maybe with rings and all. Seems knightish."

"Yeah, nice."

"Say, you want to go jousting?"

"No, I don't want to go bloody jousting. I have to---"

"Can I get a free Wimpy Cheese Burger, d'ya think, if I show 'em me knighthood?"

"Good-bye, Ringo."

That's how I figure it would go down. Then Ringo will play the recording of the conversation at his next concert. That's what I would do, anyway.

New Year's revolutions.

Resolutions failed you in the past? Want to start the year with something more potent? More awesome? More INSANE? Well, friend, give up on those New Year's resolutions and instead make some New Year's REVOLUTIONS!

Like this one!

Sounds good, doesn't it? But it doesn't always work out well. In fact, revolutions often turn out to be pretty bad.

For example, any revolution where the word "communist" can be applied automatically means "calculator-error-inducing body count." The Chinese Communists couldn't even have a cultural one without killing 1.5 million people. So I'm not even going to mention those. I mean mostly down-to-earth, everyday revolutions, like:

New England Revolution: This Major League Soccer franchise has been around since 1994 and has yet to win a league championship. In fact, Wikipedia tells us that "The Revolution hold the record for most losses in MLS cup games." They did win a U.S. Open Cup in 2007 but that's not the league championship and I don't know why they even have a stupid separate cup. Oh, yeah: Soccer.

"Revolution 9": The infamous mishmash of sound clips on the Beatles' white album is a clear indicator of a band that is running out of ideas -- and decides to put out a double album. The damn thing is eight minutes and twenty-two seconds of nothing but audio garbage. It probably resulted in more needle breaks in 1968 than any other record, as listeners leaped to their hi-fis to move the needle over this "song." Even guys butt-up high on dope couldn't listen to this. This is what happens when bands resort to "art." When something on an album sounds just as good played backward as forward, you know there's a problem. Bad revolution! Bad!

Makeup Revolution: London-based makeup outfit. Looks like all the other makeup to me. Maybe I'm not a good judge.

Revolution (NBC TV series): Failed after two seasons. The plot had to be resolved in a comic book. Which, to be fair, was more than FlashForward ever got.

Dance Dance Revolution: The perennial favorite video game has more lives than a disco kitty, but still overpromises its revolutionary effects. You dance around on pads and score points by... dancing? As Ask a Ninja put it some years ago, "How is that gonna prepare you for the dance floor of life? How about 'Death Death Revolution'? That is a challenge."

The Matrix Revolutions: With a tomatometer rating of 36%, probably better to just leave this one alone.

The French Revolution: I guess we need to address this one. Jacques Mallet du Pan said, “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,” and as we know the hungry guillotines of the French Revolution eventually developed a taste for its perpetrators. The 17,000 death sentences carried out in the reign of terror gave the rest of us a taste for what later revolutions could achieve (once we stuck Communist in them). This seems to be the pattern for most revolutions; a genuine oppressive grievance leads to armed revolt, death to a ruling class, and ultimately murder murder murder for everyone.

Why didn't this happen in the American Revolution? Some historians note that one difference is that ours was not really a revolution at all, in that the colonists were not trying to overthrow the crown and turn out Parliament, but rather wanted to get those characters to leave them alone. In that regard, instead of E Pluribus Unum or In God We Trust, perhaps our national motto might have been better served as Leave Me Alone. Which makes me think that the one kind of rebellion that doesn't turn on itself is the kind made up of people who wish to be left alone and are willing to extend the favor to their fellows.

Maybe that should be our New Year's Revolution: Live and let live. Not the worst slogan for a fresh start, I guess.

Happy new year!

Beatles songs as written by dogs.

Oh yeah I'll tell you something
I bet you can't guess what
Now I'll say that something
I wanna smell your buuuuutttt...

I once had a bitch
Or should I say she once had me
She showed me her stick
Isn't it good
Norwegian wood...

Baby you can chase my car...

Now I'm chewing up this old brown shoe, baby, I'm in love with you...

Lady Madonna
Puppies at your feet
Wonder how you manage to get them treats...

She said
I know what it's like to play dead...

He stuck his head out of a car
He hadn't noticed that the light had changed...

Now we live a life of ease
Every one of us has lots of fleas*
Sky of blue, and sea of green
With our belly rub Marine
We all live with a belly rub Marine
Belly rub Marine
Belly rub Marine

Thanks, K9 Pride!

----

I just want to point out that on that last one, the dog version rhymes better (ease/fleas) than the human version (ease/needs). Just saying.

Póg Mahoney.

The excitement mounts as we are a mere seven days from the second annual Talk Like Slip Mahoney Day!

"We've osculated by joy!"

To help buoy your enthusiasm for the king of the Bowery Boys during the seven-day countdown, here's seven things you may not know about the great Leo Gorcey, who portrayed Slip for more than a decade. Today we will take a look into the darker side of Leo, I'm afraid, but we shall want to know the whole man.

1. Gorcey's father, Bernard Gorcey, played shopkeeper Louie Dumbrowski in the Bowery Boys series, at whose sweet shop the boys frequently hung out. Bernard died in 1955 in a car accident, so Louie was not in any further films in the series. They couldn't CGI a guy into the film in those days.

2. Leo Gorcey, and consequently Slip Mahoney, did not appear in the last seven of the 48 films considered to be part of the Bowery Boys series. He got drunk and wrecked a movie set, then was incensed when the studio wouldn't give him a raise. ('Magin' dat.) He was replaced by Stanley Clements as Duke Coveleskie.

3. Gorcey's drinking was pretty horrid, especially after his father died, and ultimately killed him at the age of 51. Despite that, he managed to get married five times, which is pretty impressive. I mean, I know he was a movie star, but he was 5'6", kind of funny looking, and not always a cheerful drunk, and his movie career was pretty much washed up by 1956, when he still had two marriages to go.

4. Huntz Hall, who played Sach, is on the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, but Gorcey is not. He was going to be in the blank spot to the left of Hall. Supposedly his agent demanded $400 from the Beatles, which even in 1968 would have been pocket lint to Paul McCartney, but they just took him out. I don't know if Fred Astaire got any money out of it.

5. Leo's kid brother David actually appeared in more of the Bowery Boys movies than Leo, playing Charles "Chuck" Anderson. Funny that his character should have such as WASPish name, since he was just as much of an authentic New York ethnic blend as anyone---born in Manhattan, half Jewish, half Irish. After his acting days David became a minister and founded a halfway house for recovering alcoholics.

6. Leo Gorcey wrote a book toward the end of his life, the hard-to-find An Original Dead End Kid Presents: Dead End Yells, Wedding Bells, Cockle Shells, and Dizzy Spells. Reviews are mixed; seems he wrote like, well, a rambling drunk. But Gorcey really did have a great sense of humor and was known as a practical joker, and it seems a lot of that comes through in the book. The title is horrible, though.

7. Leo Gorcey's son, Leo Jr., wrote a book about his father in 2003 that sounds like it should have been a Mommy Dearest type of Hollywood complainorama, and certainly Leo Sr. earned it, with his drunken, explosive temper. But the title (Me and the Dead End Kid: Leo Gorcey, the Hollywood Legend: His Happy Ending) tells you that this is going to be a more loving story of survival and grace. I haven't read it, but the Amazon reviews have been mostly full of praise.

Considering Gorcey's personal problems, he was a monster for work, cranking out movies day in and day out for years. He was one of the most popular film stars of the time. Although working in B movies was never a means to critical acclaim. He would have to settle for the abiding love of the moviegoing public.

Keep thinking those Slip thoughts, and we'll have more Mahoneyist information later in the week.

Thoughts on Yellow Submarine (the film).

Yellow Submarine was one of my favorite movies of all time, one I've seen more often than any other I can name offhand. Now I'm kind of meh about it. What happened? Let's enjoy the Thoughts below and see if we can understand why.

The style of the art is terrific; it was unlike anything in animation at the time, but was much imitated afterward. I always thought psychedelic artist Peter Max was inspired by it, but many people believed the reverse; Wikipedia tells us: 

The animation of Yellow Submarine has sometimes falsely been attributed to the famous psychedelic pop art artist of the era, Peter Max; but the film's art director was Heinz Edelmann. Edelmann, along with his contemporary Milton Glaser, pioneered the psychedelic style for which Max would later become famous, but according to Edelmann and producer Al Brodax, as quoted in the book Inside the Yellow Submarine by Hieronimus and Cortner, Max had nothing to do with the production of Yellow Submarine.

 

I was a Beatles fan in my youth---although they'd long broken up when I got into them---so I enjoyed the music. The dialogue was full of puns, which I liked, and I often think of the insanely imaginative scenes in the movie. When I've been through any difficult time and am asked about it, I have to urge to describe it as "'Arrowing," plucking arrows from myself (as happened to Ringo in the Sea of Monsters). (I suspect Rick Riordan got the title for the second Percy Jackson novel from the film's Sea of Monsters, by the way.)

 

 

It's loaded with neat ideas, like the various seas, which are bizarre in very different ways (Time, Science, Holes, Monsters, Green), and has a lot of fun with the public perceptions of the individual Beatles---Paul comes out of a room where all the women are cheering and throwing flowers, for example. The side characters are great, including Jeremy, the crazed Chief Blue Meanie, Max, and the Mayor. Naturally I loved that the captain of the submarine was named Fred, even if he couldn't make his soap float. The various forces of the Blue Meanies were distinct and nefarious, including the Apple Bonkers, Storm Bloopers, Countdown Clowns, Butterfly Stompers, and of course the Dreaded Flying Glove (shudder). 

 

 

 

But I have some small quibbles and one huge objection, and the huge objection has rendered it unwatchable for me. Spoilers ahead, as they say.

 

Quibbles:

 

1) Ringo is Billy Shears, damn it. When, during the climactic concert, Billy Shears is introduced (at the beginning of "With a Little Help from My Friends"), John takes off his Sgt. Pepper disguise to start singing. What the hell? Ringo is the heart of the movie; it would have been perfectly in character. Still sore about that. 

 

2) Real-life Liverpool is painted as a terrible, depressing place at the beginning of the movie (complete with "Eleanor Rigby"), but Ringo's friends live in a weird, fantasy building full of wonders and delights. Not so bad after all, is it? Seemed too much like the magic worlds waiting on the voyage ahead.

 

Huge Objection:

 

I recent heard columnist Jonah Goldberg say on a podcast that gun culture is one place where movies are conservative: "I've yet to see an action movie where the protagonist... vanquishes the enemy with a wonderful poem about peace." Well, Mr. Goldberg, I do know of such a movie, and this is it. And now it is a problem for me.

 

Like a lot of young idiots, I once thought that our parents were dim bulbs about confrontation and violence, that reacting to violence with violence only perpetuated violence. War was never the answer. In this movie, the Beatles and their allies are victorious with the twin powers of music and love. In the end everyone becomes friends. Why, the Chief Blue Meanie even admits that his cousin is the Bluebird of Happiness!

 

This works great, provided your enemies hate love and "shrink from the sound" of music, the way the Meanies do. Then love and music work well, but not because they're so awesome, but because they become weapons. I enjoyed the ultimate battle of John vs. the Dreaded Flying Glove (to the wonderful poem set to music, "All You Need Is Love"), but nothing in life has ever led us to believe love would do anything against humans who want to kill other humans. Nonviolence works fine against people unwilling to commit mass atrocities, but oh so many people are. And I reiterate that the Beatles won the battle because to their enemies, love and music were the equivalent of violence. 

 

So the film's message has lost all resonance with me, especially after September 11, 2001, when we Americans got an education in how much others really want to kill, how little they care for our most sincere overtures of friendship, how little love they have for anything beyond tribal affiliations. The Taliban does despise music, but sadly they do not get knocked senseless by it---they just ban it and jail musicians. 

 

 

It is not that the movie is not entertaining; it's that the lessons it wants to teach are foolish. It tried to lift more weight than it was capable of bearing. For much too long, I believed it could, too. You can say "It's just a cartoon, for Pete's sake! Lighten up!" But the Beatles were serious, or wanted to be taken seriously, with the antiwar "All You Need Is Love" stuff, and I respect the filmmakers enough to believe they were too.