Great music. Great singing. Great choreography. Inventive visuals. An engaging young actor in the lead. Strong supporting actors. With so much going right for Julie Taymor's 2007 all-Beatles musical, why does it end up as nothing more than an extended, glorified music video? Well, there's little in the way of spoken script, so we move from one musical number to another with scant connective tissue and no material for the characters to develop beyond the sketches in which they're introduced. I like a good cameo as much as the next, and Bono would make a good Doctor Robert as described in the song, so it's somewhat unfortunate that he's not... or at least doesn't appear to be, aside from a quickly spoken line referring to the song's lyrics. Still, his rendition of "I Am the Walrus" was amusing. Unfortunately, Eddie Izzard's Mr. Kite sequence, coming immediately on the heels of the Bono cameo, fails miserably because it extends a stretch of film that does nothing to advance what plot there is and lacks the musicality present in the rest of the film.
But back to what's good -- I'm always a sucker for Princeton footage, even when they play hell with geography; the "I've Just Seen a Face" sequence at the bowling alley is just fun; the a capella arrangement of "Because" in the tall grass is beautiful; and the sight of the strawberries pinned to a sheet with the juice running down like blood is interesting, at least until it's expanded upon in order to provide enough different visuals to fill up the entire song.
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