It's easy to be skeptical about the idea of a movie-musical based on the music of The Beatles. After all, we've been there before with 1978's "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," the Robert Stigwood-produced travesty that took the most twee aspects of The Beatles' oeuvre, cast The Bee Gees and Peter Frampton, lathered everything in pastels, and stank to high heaven (barring Aerosmith's evil cover of "Come Together"). It played like "Yellow Submarine" without the drugs, or "Help" without, well, John, Paul, Ringo and George.
So, although I love director Julie Taymor to death — she's one of the boldest visual stylists working in cinema today, as displayed in "Titus" and Selma Hayek's "Frida" — I will admit to great trepidation when the lights went down and her new film, "Across the Universe," a Beatles musical, started to flicker onto the screen.
There is actor Jim Sturgess, sitting on a cold English beach, and he looks straight at the camera and begins singing the John Lennon-penned "Girl."