Fall harvest: Beatles, geeks, and pies

The fall season is now fully underway and nothing much is sticking with me. My highest hope was for the Julie Taymor movie Across the Universe, the story of a boy, a girl, and a decade (the 60's) as told through Beatles songs. The New York Times review gave me high hopes, making me think of Moulin Rouge, a musical I fell in irrational love with, but the movie wound up being more like Mamma Mia: enjoyable songs but a tedious narrative--though with Meryl Streep currently shooting the film of Mamma Mia, that might wind up surprisingly good. Jude, a nice working-class lad from Liverpool, goes to the States to find his birth father and winds up in the company of a rich kid, Max, and his friends as they try to find their places in the turbulent times. There's drugs and protest and free love; Max winds up in Vietman and Jude falls in love with Max's sister Lucy.

The narrative certainly seems to have been meant to be secondary to the musical numbers, all Beatles songs sung by the cast, but sadly even the musical aspect leaves something to be desired. Things start well with a wonderful "Hold Me Tight" in which we cut back and forth between a high school hop in America and a scruffy bar band in Liverpool. "Dear Prudence" and "Strawberry Fields Forever" are also promising, but there's just not enough electric splash to the production numbers. It's mostly John Lennon numbers for the storyline, and mostly Paul McCartney numbers for onstage performances (by Dana Fuchs as a Janis Joplin-type and Martin Luther McCoy as a Jimi Hendrix-type --BTW, Joplin and Hendrix wind up together, happy, and unburdened by addictions at the end; hooray for fiction!). The leads, Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood, are pleasant but bland, but this is not actor's movie as none of the characters are really allowed (or probably even meant) to come alive. I did like the games Taymor plays with character names: with a lead named Jude, you know "Hey Jude" will pop up eventually, but other names, like Max and Sadie and JoJo do not lead to "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" or "Sexy Sadie" or "Get Back." Saddest of all, the visuals are not spectacular enough to make a big-screen viewing essential. Wait for the DVD. Maybe "Sexy Sadie" will wind up in the deleted scenes.

On TV, I'm enjoying The Big Bang Theory with Johnny Galecki and Jim Parsons as physics geek roommates, and Kaley Cuoco as the sexy but sweet waitress who lives across the hall. The way the plot is developing, Galecki is getting interested in Cuoco, but I like reading a gay subtext into the geeks' relationship, and that is a compliment to their acting. Galecki and Parsons make the characters feel like intimate longtime friends, and sometimes Parsons's dialogue and his snippy, almost nervous delivery feel just a shade gayish. We also like Pushing Daisies (cast pic above), with Lee Pace as a piemaker who can touch dead people and bring back to life (briefly, at least). With a cop who knows about his secret power, he goes to morgues and questions the recently murdered for clues about their demise. He has a girlfriend (Anna Friel) who he brought back to life to stay, but the catch is that he can't ever touch her again. The show is whimsical, colorful, and wonderfully stylized with a look and tone unlike anything else on TV right now. I also love Swoosie Kurtz and Ellen Greene as Friel's eccentric aunts, and the always delightful Kristen Chenoweth as a pie shop waitress with a thing for Pace--they let her burst out in song a couple of weeks ago, singing "Hopelessly Devoted to You," and that just added to the lively sense of the unpredictable that will keep me coming back to this show.

I still have the debut episode of Viva Laughlin on the DVR but since it's already been canceled, I can't decide whether to erase it, or go ahead and watch it to see just how bad it is/was. We also slogged through the Ken Burns' documentary The War on PBS. A little too long and too dully reverent, mostly due to the somber music. The stories themselves are worth reverence and didn't need the extra emotional tugs of the music and slow pacing. I'm glad to have watched it, but won't be needing the DVD.