Sir Peter Jackson's The Beatles: Get Back | Page 17 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

In a word…FANTASTIC!

It truly is amazing how much Jackson was able to do to be able to not stand on LIB ‘s toes, in avoiding repeating it as much as possible. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that when you have 60 hours of footage and 150 hours of audio to draw from, that you’d have this much difference and variety.

Anyone who was worried this documentary would be a whitewash clearly shouldn’t have been, because if anything, Part 1 is much darker than the original film, with lots of creeping tension, boredom and moments where either John, George or Ringo are clearly not into it. This is probably more than anything what George meant when he referred to it as “the winter of discontent.” Indeed, on January 10, one can see the light going out in George, where he’s getting fed up, he’s feeling unnecessary and ignored, so it really is no surprise when he says, “I’m leaving the band now.”

It was nice to finally see anything of the Yoko jam, even with the understanding it would be trimmed for consumers (and inevitably so!), and get the fact they didn’t know how to deal with George leaving, that it wasn’t until the end of the day it truly it hit them.

Getting to see and notice so many songs being worked out and birthed, even in as harsh and unforgiving a space as Twickenham, is something mesmerizing all the same. The fact I didn’t realize that Carry That Weight was meant to be a comic number for Ringo in the vein of Act Naturally , complete with a pub piano, really shows that even someone like me can learn something new about something I know so well.

The big surprise, to me, was that the “Pakistani” verses and other assorted jams in that vein would be released at all, and distributed by Disney, given the political climate of today, especially where the Enoch Powells of modern times are louder and more easily noticed than ever. Then again, maybe that’s the reason why it came out. Especially almost as a veiled response to the fact Eric Clapton is under so much hot water right now with his pandemic comments and his 1976 rant being revisited again. (Personally, I think about Eric the same way I think about Mel Gibson: someone who is a good person, but who is often bipolar and has immense anger problems, which get worse when self-medicating with booze, and when lashing out says things that aren’t necessarily from the heart as much as done for shock value and a little boy’s sense of causing an uproar. I do think that Eric’s critics are overplaying things a bit, but I also think the fact Eric can’t admit when he’s wrong and can’t directly apologize definitely hurts him, and it does get hard to defend him at times. If George were still alive, I’m sure that he, in his own fashion, would be telling Eric that he’s acting quite stupidly right now. Van Morrison, that’s another story, and he’s far worse than Eric, but that guy, in my eyes, was always a grumpy old man, even in his younger days)

If all this comes just from Act I, then the real goodies are sure to come when moving to Apple!