Yesterday

A well tuned crowd-pleaser for undemanding audiences. If I wanted to dig deeper, I would find plenty of arguments to tear it apart (like the total lack chemistry between the two main characters, or the morally problematic starting point and consequences), but I decided that I don’t want to. In any case, I will probably forget it before the festival is over. #KVIFF2019 (2019-06-29)

It is a nice idea, but also improbable (would the Beatles and their love songs be as relevant in the current cynical times as they were in the 1960s?) and by no means original (Yesterday essentially just develops an idea from Back to the Future). Execrable processing. The film is merely a terribly haphazardly designed rack upon which to hang Beatles songs, with cheap jokes (the renaming of “Hey Jude” to “Hey Dude”), an unconvincing romantic storyline, impossibly written female characters (a problem with all of Richard Curtis’s screenplays) and a protagonist who achieves everything (and does not lose anything significant) though fraud. A prefabricated crowd pleaser without spark, wit, visual inventiveness or a single real emotion, which in forced dialogue only presents ready-made truths and does not allow the viewer to discover anything or be amazed. It also does a disservice to some of the best songs in history. In fact, the film works with those songs in completely the same way as the caricature of the greedy music manager that Kate McKinnon came up with – like products from which it is necessary to wring as much money as possible. 50% (2019-06-20)

Such an interesting idea and kickoff from a great duo of English filmmakers that resulted in trivial moralizing about life values and love as the most important thing. What, in my opinion, was most astonishing was the completely unused potential of the Beatles’ hits and music in general. This is not a musical film, even though each and every viewer expects it to be. And the key drawback is the unimpressive lead actor, who is outshined by his character’s girlfriend. Is the overall outcome attributable to the film being a quick attempt to ride on the back of the success of Bohemian Rhapsody? That seems so, as it even panders to the viewer in a similar manner as BR. But in this case, a similar recipe produced the almost opposite result. (2019-08-26)

Danny Boyle has made another fairy tale, but compared to Slumdog Millionaire, I was less bothered by its fabulousness, in fact not at all. Why is that? Well, the script by Richard Curtis, who doesn't hesitate to mine an amazing idea from start to finish, keeps capitalizing on it and, thanks to Boyle's imaginative direction, turns it into a terrific comedy and one of the coolest stories in recent memory. Indeed it is, for the entire two hours I was either smiling or laughing and it's been a long time since I've walked out of a theater from a comedy that I remembered so many jokes and laughed when I recalled them. The comic plot clearly outweighed the predictable romantic one, but it didn't matter, on the contrary this ratio fit the overall mood of the film perfectly. Of course, I agree with the message that the Beatles' music is brilliant in any era;so if you feel the same way and if, like me, you'll spend the whole film looking for Paul and Ringo to appear, Yesterday has something wonderful in store for you. (2019-06-29)

The initial euphoria I felt from being able to hear The Beatles’ biggest hits in a romantic comedy, at least indirectly, the very songs that you could not previously hear in movies due to exorbitant licensing fees, has diminished now. Richard Curtis’ 'interesting idea to create an alternative world where a number of cultural phenomena have disappeared (not only The Beatles' music), turns out to be a bit of a half-hearted concept designed to string a number of ideas and jokes together (among them a pertinent jab at the modern trend of political correctness that the name of the legendary White Album is not racist), but in the end we have not found out much about its reasons for this world and its logic, plus how it actually functions. What is more, the muddled screenwriting seems a bit incoherent. Not to mention that there was a substantial intervention regarding the plot during post-production (they completely cut a subplot with Ana de Armas). The romantic storyline is really clichéd, and is simply there to frame the narrative. In addition, the wooden acting of Ed Sheeran had too much screen-time in the movie for my taste. Otherwise, it is, of course, a technically well-executed summer movie, which simply aims to create a feel-good nostalgic mood and entertain, which of course succeeds with most audiences. (2019-07-23)