‘Yesterday’ or — Imposter Syndrome?

My idea of living hell would to be stuck in a Richard Curtis movie. His early TV work was great but his film work makes my skin crawl to the extent that I want to tear it all off until I resemble Uncle Frank from ‘Hellraiser’ (1987) and I’m just a bloody, skinless body writhing about on the floor. And I can still recall with total precision the exact moment I realised I could never watch another Curtis movie ever again, and that’s the moment in ‘Love Actually’ (2003) when everyone “spontaneously” stands up in the church and starts singing ‘All You Need is Love’.

Now I’ve never thrown up watching a film before but I almost did when this happened as I have never encountered a more cynically, calculated, clichéd trick to pull on our heart strings so savagely, something Curtis loves to do with as much relentless vigour as a psychotic bell-ringer jacked-up on amphetamines.

It’s not just the fact that using (weaponising?) The Beatles music to increase the “love” quotient in your own movie is cheap and lazy but it also misses the same point The Beatles also missed — i.e. all you need ISN’T love because love is frequently a state of total and childish delusion. Personally speaking “All You Need is a Sound and Rational Approach to Reality Combined with Emotional Maturity’ I find personably more appealing, even if the title isn’t as hummable.

So an ENTIRE film of Curtis glorifying The Beatles so he can piggy-back on both their nostalgia, emotion and talent would be impossible for me to view with any form of reasonable objectivity other than raging contempt, spite and… well, I think, contempt and spite is more than enough. “I’m going to hate this”, I mumbled to myself as I settled down to watch Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis’ ‘Yesterday’ (2019) last night

And yeah, ‘Yesterday’ is a highly annoying and irritating movie although for different reasons than I was expecting. It wasn’t fucking god-awful, just awful, and it wasn’t staggeringly offensive in the way other Curtis films are (‘The Boat That Rocked’; ‘Love, Actually’ etc, just mildly so. In short, it didn’t piss me off as much as I expected. And, in many ways, that was even worse because I just found it all so bland.

And that’s the film’s biggest problem — an intense and churning blandness. It even renders the music of The Beatles into sonic porridge! Yes, some of their songs were fantastic, but the way they are presented here (nearly always sung by Himesh Patel on acoustic guitar as though he’s a substandard Richard Digance closing one of his BBC specials with a Beatles number) they end up sounding incredibly flat and dull. Instrumentation is vitally important (it’s why Mike Oldfield’s ‘Tubular Bells’ sounds great whereas ‘Orchestral Tubular Bells’ is shit), and is just one of the reasons The Beatles became a studio band. So to take a song such as Eleanor Rigby and expect it to have the same massive impact by simply belting it out on a semi-acoustic is quixotic sonic nonsense. You can’t invoke the “magic” of The Beatles music when you have stripped all that magic away.

But it’s that invocation and supplication before the shrine of The Beatles and then riding on the coattails of their, supposedly, unimpeachable transcendence that really got on my exposed and bloody nerve ends, especially as the script isn’t even THAT good! The jokes are often woeful (the sort of middle-class bants that nobody, apart from people who populate Richard Curtis movies engage in), the characters annoying and the plot and emotional arcs are obvious to the point of inevitability (we know where all this is going so it’s as dramatic as watching an ice cube melt or a monkey about to masturbate).

So yeah, the message of ‘Yesterday’ is don’t pursue money, fame, fortune or riches and, instead, live out of the spot light doing something worthy and “normal”. Although this is coming from Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis, two men who have spent their entire lives avoiding “normal” jobs and making vast fortunes and accruing immense fame and power by following their intensely selfish dreams all focused on promoting illusion and manipulation instead.

Yeah, I’m starting to feel sick again.