George Harrison: Living in the Material World

(Movie Review)

Why I Saw This Movie:

I’m a longtime - Beatles fan.  Plus a friend had recently recommended this movie to me.

Positives:

* The best thing about any documentary is the archival footage-and this film has plenty of it.

* A great soundtrack (naturally).

Negatives

* Most of the controversies in George Harrison’s life are either omitted or glossed over.

* The film isn’t so much a coherent narrative as much as it is just a hodge-podge of interesting tid-bits about George Harrison’s life.

The Review

          This documentary project runs up against a couple difficulties:

            How do you separate the story of George Harrison from the larger story of the Beatles?

            And, since the Beatles have already been documented to death, how do you tell their story without just repeating what’s already been done?

            The approach this film adopts is to not try and tell a complete story, but just focus on interesting moments.

            It stumbles a bit in its narrative, but on the whole it works fairly well.

            And some great archival footage. It’s worth watching just to see the archival footage alone.

Rating:

7 out of 10 stars

Links

This critical review does a good job of picking out the films flaws.  (I’m more of a fan of George Harrison’s music than this guy is, but I agree with him that this film would have been much more interesting if it would have included George Harrison’s flaws as well as his virtues.)

Link of the Day

Noam Chomsky - Brains, Minds and Machines Symposium - 2011
Also, the Daily Show is always brilliant, but I thought their take down on Slumdogs and Millionaires particularly a must watch.