Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

Saw Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, an extended music video of covers of the album of the same name by The Beatles, covered by The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton.  It was not good.

The film is a fairly tedious and intentionally goofy frame story about Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and their magical instruments and how their hometown was ruined by mean Mr Mustard.  You can see the song list being queued up as soon as you hear the names.  Frampton's girlfriend is named Strawberry Fields.  It's mostly on the nose, uninspired, and tedious.  More than one of the songs is incongruously covered by aging celebrities doing spoken-word covers.  When it's not that though, it's disco-ified versions of the songs, with synth-y bleep-bloops and pitch-adjusted vocals.

The film is strange collision of the late 60s with the late 70s.  The flowing psychedelia of the 60s is replaced by the robotic synths of the 70s.  We get the worst of both worlds, with lyrics not making much sense and buzz-saw whines and beeps playing over it.  Sometimes they'll go Joni Mitchell Blue and do something sincere which is better, but the synth music inevitably sneaks back in.  The worst song cover is probably Steve Martin doing a zany cover of Maxwell's Silver Hammer, a song which is clearly about a serial killer, but is here inexplicably applied to a plastic surgeon.

The plot of the film is about a small-town band who makes it big and is chewed up by the big record companies, as their town is chewed up by crass modernism.  The film is at war with itself.  If the homey old past is so great, why are we needlessly updating the music?  Several times the pursuit of money is vilified, but the band's manager (a good guy, I think) is literally rolling in cash at one point.  There's a rival band of black women (Lucy and The Diamonds) who they wind up kind of dating?  Or friends with?  It's a mess.  There is a cover of Got to Get You Into My Life by Earth Wind and Fire however which was fairly alright.

This was not a good film.  It's the worse version of Across the Universe which is pretty hated to begin with (although I liked it okay.)  It allegedly began the death of the musical careers of The Bee Gees and was subject to multiple attempted pull-outs by various leads.  This was a film no one wanted to be in except old established actors who had done worse for a paycheck.