Mr. A and I had a debate in class today about the musical Across The Universe, starring Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood. It's about a boy named Jude who moves to America in search of his father, meets his best friend (Max) and a girl (Lucy, who would later be his girlfriend), and the rest of the movie shows their struggles as the Vietnam War escalates. Max is drafted and comes back a completely different person, changed by war. Beatles songs are incorporated into the movie, helping to move the story along, and I think this is a good move. The Beatles were, after all, a band in the sixties, writing music when the Vietnam War took place. Applying their music to a movie not only adds to the plot, but also compares their music and parallels it to the cultural impact of the war.
If you don't think this musical has a plot, it does, and MOST of the covers are pretty good and placed well. It's a trippy movie, but it incorporates sex, drugs, and rock 'n roll into the plot, as well as the war, and that's what we've been learning about the whole time in this class. The sixties were sex, drugs, rock 'n roll, and later on, war. If all of that can be interwoven into the plot of a musical, it's gotta be pretty great.
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