Check out the trailer for the upcoming movie NOWHERE BOY, about John Lennon’s life as a teenager in Liverpool…

If you’re coming to this site, I’ll take it as a given that you know how important the Beatles are to me. When I heard that this movie was getting made, I didn’t really think much. I was just doing the ‘wait and see’ thing. Now that the trailer is up, I have to say I am very excited.

Much of the blogging about the movie seems to focus on the actors’ physical resemblance to their real life counterparts. Aaron Johnson and Thomas Sangster look nothing like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but I actually think this is smart. It means that the movie is not being made by a Beatle fan who wants to give us a two-hour wank fest, and the performances are not going to be about mimicry or doing an impression. I think that it will end up having made the movie way easier to get absorbed into than if the leads had been look-alikes.

Judging only from the two minutes of the above trailer, I think this looks awesome. If you’re going to make a Beatles movie, you’ve got a choice to make as far as who it’s for. You’ve either got to make it for the generation who grew up listening to the Beatles, or you’ve got to make it for the younger generation who are the age that the Beatles where when these events took place. One of the things that excites me most about being a Beatles fan is how us younger fans continue to extract new layers of meaning from their art and their story, and reinvent and redefine their image. It looks like Sam Taylor Wood has made the John Lennon movie I would have made. Not a biopic, but a portrait of the artist living the great message of believing in yourself and following your dreams against all odds.

And most exciting of all is that if this movie is well received, it might just open the floodgates of a whole slew of Beatles movies over the next decade, telling their whole story in great detail.

EDIT: Did you catch that at the end?
John: “I’m off to Hamburg.”
Mimi: “And is this with the new group? Oh, what are they called again?”
John: “Do you care?”
Mimi: “They all sound the same to me.”

It sure is a great time to be a Beatles fan! But then again, when is it not?

What do you think of the trailer? Are you looking forward to seeing the movie?

Tags: beatles, movies, opinion, trailer