Peter Jackson – Memphis Flyer

I was 15 the first time I played with a real rock-and-roll band. The first song we learned was “Get Back” from The Beatles’ final released album Let It Be. We started with that one because it was easy — or at least it sounded easy. That’s when I learned that great rock music is deceptively simple. It wasn’t hard to hit the notes. What was hard was hitting them at exactly the right time, with exactly the right feel. We must have jammed on “Get Back” for an hour trying to get it to sound right, which of course we never did.

I went on to play in rock bands for 30 years. In college, I played a lot of gigs and made a lot of money. After college, I played cooler shows, made good records, and didn’t make much money. I’m still doing it — my last album was released in 2020, got good reviews, and even turned a modest profit.

Maybe that’s why, in the new Beatles documentary Get Back, when we see Paul McCartney, frustrated because his bandmate John Lennon is late for rehearsal, plop down on a chair in the corner of a soundstage and pound out “Get Back” off the top of his head, it’s kind of like watching a tape of yourself being conceived: profound, moving, and also a little icky. Paul, it turns out, was just a band geek like the rest of us.

Let It Be was recorded in January 1969. Having spent 1966-1968 revolutionizing studio recording, the plan was to get back to their bar band roots by writing a new album’s worth of songs and premiering them with their first live concert in three years. Crucially, they were going to do it all in front of director Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s cameras, in a soundstage at Twickenham Studios, where A Hard Day’s Night and Help! had been filmed. That meant they had essentially three weeks to write 14 songs, whip them into shape, and record them in front of an audience. This was difficult, but not out of the question for the band who had changed pop music in one day with the 10-song session that produced Please Please Me. Legend has it that the sessions ended in acrimony, with George Harrison briefly quitting, and the band trying to salvage the project with an impromptu live show on the roof of their Apple records studio. The album was shelved, and the band returned to the studio for Abbey Road. After they broke up in early 1970, Let It Be was finally released, and Lindsay-Hogg’s feature documentary became notorious for capturing the “breakup of The Beatles.”

A few years ago, Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson acquired the rights to the Let It Be sessions footage, which encompassed more than 60 hours of film and more than 180 hours of audio. He spent four years editing the chaotic mess down to a “crucial” 468 minutes.

If your first reaction is, maybe he could have gotten a little more crucial than eight hours, you’re right. This is not a film with a punchy narrative; in part three, Lindsay-Hogg complains that he has lots of footage, but no story. This is the ultimate hangout picture, because you get to hang out with The Beatles. That’s what’s so compelling — you’re watching some of the greatest artists of the last century at work.

For a seasoned show dog, it’s fascinating to watch the greatest of all time systematically violate the rock band rules. First, the rehearsal space is sacred. Don’t record the writing process, or the frank discussions that take place there. Second, no significant others in the studio. This is known as the “Yoko Rule,” which Get Back shows is unfair. Yoko Ono is omnipresent and clingy, sitting next to John in the early going, before getting bored and leaving as the sessions drag on. She’s a non-factor in the lads’ conflict, which largely stems from trying to do the delicate mental work of composing songs while under the camera’s gaze.

The Beatle who is up to the challenge of working in the spotlight is Paul. In one stunning moment, while John is meeting with Lindsay-Hogg to plan the ill-fated concert, Paul is in the background, noodling around on the piano, and “Let It Be” emerges. When he takes it to the group, and The Beatles’ eyes light up, it’s like watching Leonardo da Vinci sketching The Last Supper. Get Back shows that The Beatles, often reduced to cartoon characters, were human after all — and that makes their art even more extraordinary.

The Beatles: Get Back is now streaming on Disney+.

There’s The Hobbit that is, and The Hobbit that might have been. Let’s talk about the latter first.

Far back in the mists of time (read: the mid-1990s), Peter Jackson and his screenwriter/producer/significant other Fran Walsh wanted to do a film trilogy based on the work of
J. R. R. Tolkien. Their original plan logically started with The Hobbit and condensed the events of the three Lord of the Rings novels into the remaining two films. But getting the fantasy movies financed was an uphill battle, so they cut costs by excising the “short” prequel of The Hobbit and pitching only the two darker and more action-packed Lord of the Rings movies. But when an exec at New Line finally saw the light, he wanted three movies, all based on The Lord of the Rings. Jackson agreed and made history with his now-classic fantasy trilogy, which culminated with 2003’s Return of the King winning 11 Academy Awards.

Naturally, New Line wanted more and set about an epic quest to bring The Hobbit to the screen and thus earn another dragon’s hoard’s worth of gold. They partnered with MGM, who then promptly went bankrupt, to make two movies out of the book that established Middle Earth. Jackson, Walsh, and screenwriter Philippa Boyens were back, and they brought in Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim) to direct. The actual book Tolkien wrote is much lighter in tone than The Lord of the Rings books and is the shortest of the four volumes. But the chance to make a single, tight adaptation of The Hobbit had passed, and so Boyens and company brought in some material from Tolkien’s notes, short stories, and appendices to flesh out the story. But after years of delay, del Toro reluctantly moved on, and a recaptialized MGM demanded three movies to ensure steady cash flow as it emerged from bankruptcy. Professor Tolkien’s pastoral fantasy about dwarves who loved to sing, dragons who loved gold, and a pathologically honest hobbit burglar was now budgeted just shy of half a billion dollars.

The Battle of the Five Armies

Which brings us to The Hobbit that is. Boyens and Jackson worked from the two-movie plan they had developed with del Toro to expand the material even further and, with 2012’s The Unexpected Journey and 2013’s The Desolation of Smaug, have now crafted three financially successful films. But were they artistically successful?

The short answer is no; the long answer is yes with a but. There are shots, scenes, and whole sequences of The Battle of the Five Armies that are as riveting and beautiful as anything in Jackson’s oeuvre. When the elf Legolas (Orlando Bloom) tries to cross a bridge made from a fallen, crumbling tower while dwarven king Thorin Oakenshield (Richard Armitage) fights the orc champion Azog at the top of a frozen waterfall, it is a virtuoso display of action movie choreography worthy of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Martin Freeman does an excellent job of holding down the trilogy’s center as Bilbo Baggins, and Armitage brings a stately, tragic air to Thorin, the penniless dwarf who risked it all to reconquer his rightful throne as King under the Mountain from the dragon Smaug, only to lose his soul in the process.

As a work of epic fantasy to be binge-watched on HD flatscreens over a weekend, The Hobbit will hold its own against Game of Thrones, provided you’re not just in it for the HBO series’ extensive nudity. But as a filmgoing experience in its own right, The Battle of the Five Armies is erratic and unsatisfying. The opening sequence, where Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans) confronts the dragon Smaug (voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch) as Laketown burns around him should be edge-of-your-seat thrilling. But even a dyed-in-the-wool fanboy like me, who first read The Hobbit when my age was still counted in single digits, had trouble working out who was who and why I should care until the old guard of Cate Blanchett’s Galadriel, Ian McKellan’s Gandalf, and Christopher Lee’s Saruman slip on their Rings of Power and mix it up with Sauron on the top of a mountain. But even that incredible scene isn’t part of Tolkien’s book, and it’s the plague of additional subplots that keeps the entire trilogy from achieving greatness. There’s a great movie buried in the almost eight hours of The Hobbit trilogy, and I’m sure Jackson, Walsh, and Boyens, know it. But as the dwarf Balin (Ken Stott) says, “Don’t underestimate the evil of gold.”