The Beatles: Eight Days a Week - The Touring Years (2016)

Touches You

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Ron Howard's nice documentary about just how crazy Beatlemania was and how the touring degenerated into a screaming noise where - as Ringo put it - "I had not idea where we were in the songs, I was drumming by watching how they were shaking their asses to know where we were in the song".Perhaps glosses over some of the later tensions but it's a good fun movie.Hang fire after the credits for 30mins of restored footage of the Shea Stadium concert.

This does have some interesting elements to it but in the main I didn't really see or hear anything new.Of course it is always great seeing the Beatles perform in their hey day but even the clips chosen were not necessarily the best they could have used. I would have preferred to have seen better and longer clips of them playing instead of concentrating on the screaming stadium concerts which I am sure even the Beatles would admit were not their best.Some of the 'guest stars' chosen were bizarre. I couldn't care less what a second rate comedian such as Eddie Izzard thinks.I like Ron Howard and think he is usually a good director but this is not his finest moment.

If like me, you were (or are) a fan of the Beatles, this film should be an inspiration. I was growing up at the time of their touring days, yet I was too young to have attended any of those shows. But, by the time the White album came out, I was hooked, and their music was quite iformative, inspiring, and powerful to me at the time. Watching this movie brought back some of that power and charm, and the sense of what an amazing point in history the 1960's were. The film was a bit sketchy in that it did not reveal much about the men. Could have delved into the characters and craziness of the touring a bit more. But, I sense that Howard was bringing a sense of reverence to the project, and did not feel the need for the sordid details. He have certainly seen enough of that in various other documentaries about rock stars over the years.I have to say, I found this film uplifting, and very, very enjoyable to watch. Witnessing the evolution of their music (I never really payed much attention to them until Rubber Soul) was great. What a band. What a bunch of great guys. Gentlemen, spokesmen, sincere, brilliant, and creative as they come. Wow.

...and in some ways, they still are.This is a group that played their last live (paying) show over 50 years ago, and they get still get a documentary movie made about their formative years which is released in theaters in 2016 and does respectable business.I was all of seven years old when they quit touring, and don't remember it happening in real time. So even though I've seen a bunch of these clips "snippeted" in the last half-century of my life, many of the behind the scenes day-to-day nuggets were all new, and well worth a viewing.To see the fan-love of the tours (U.S. and around the world) is still pretty unbelievable to look at. It was a different era, so instead of online mass adoration, EVERYBODY (REALLY, EVERYBODY!) JUST WENT OUT & SHOWED UP TO CATCH ANY KIND OF GLIMPSE THEY COULD GET OF THEM!This phenomenon probably wouldn't still be looked at with this much reverence today if the music doesn't stand the test of time. BUT IT DOES.If you like the sixties, or love the Beatles, you gotta' see this one.