Review of The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years (2016) by Guldfisk — 15 Sep 2016

This movie is nothing revolutionary. I've watched some Beatles documentaries (mainly anthology) and seen a lot of videos on youtube from them playing live and there was certain things I expected from this movie:

-Proper editing of the interviews. They had done a lot of interviews for this and it was apparent they couldn't keep everything in, so they cut people mid sentence to a later part in that sentence and you could tell there was a cut. It could have been done better but this is a very minor point.

- Different cuts on live performance, I suppose what I've seen from the youtube videos is what the TVS aired at that time, I would've liked to see them go to the source material and change how the performances were cut. The sound was pretty fantastic though so I guess it's better they put effort on that rather than the visuals but I really would've liked to see more lingering shots instead of this "modern" or what to call it cutting where there is a cut at least every five seconds.

- More humanisation. This I feel is quite a big flaw, there were many live performances I've seen on youtube that you can tell that John is messing up the lyrics, and it was kind of overshadowed in this video, I even felt as though cuts had been made to shy away from this. Another thing which I've seen from the anthology is Johns stage humour where he would portray a "spastic" and stomp his feet and clap his hands. That was also being shied away from through cuts and not talked about which I felt tried to portray a romanticised version of how John was and not his true self. A minor point on this was how they talked loads of how they couldn't hear themselves but they never once mentioned that they were so stressed they played every song really quickly. But that's a minor point. The Beatles are in a way not really portrayed as humanly as they could, their humour is talked about, the struggle but in a way they seem to have overlooked their flaws and that's a shame because it deprives me some of the realism.

Ron Howard did talk about how he wanted to portray the story of the touring years, which I can agree was the main focus. They briefly mentioned that they got medals from the queen and then cut to an interview where the person asked them how that would change their image. That was good. Overall it's a nice Beatles documentary and I did learn new things.