All you need is love, love is all you need

I loved my weekend. It entailed celebrating a friend's birthday, seeing a visiting friend I rarely get to see and miss dearly, viewing an incredible movie with a bunch of my friends back in the WDM, and working on writing my memoir.

Sometimes there are movies that come along and inevitably rock my world. Across The Universe is one of those movies. It had all the components of a good movie, in my opinion, at least for the kind of movie you would categorize it as. The music was fabulous, obtaining the soundtrack for it was essential. It was artistic, and it blew me away. It was weird. It was about a different culture, it was about a time in our history when our country was at war in Vietnam and young people everywhere wanted to be radical and revolutionary. They wanted love and peace in true hippie fashion. One of the main characters was burdened with getting drafted and having to go to war, one was an artist who falls in love with another main character, and then there are all these other characters that make up this odd yet unified group of people all on their own journeys to find love, try to make a difference in the world, and bring peace to a troubled nation. The character portraits are fascinating. Jude and Max's voices are absolutely amazing in every song, I just want to listen to them all day and all night. The trippy-ness (trippiness?) is apparent throughout, and it brings comedy to an otherwise dark era filled with student protests ending in beatings and other violent measures by the police. There's a lesbian, there's a jimi hendrix guitarist representation, there's Bono playing a doctor with some weird trippy bus that drives around the country looking for hippies to join the movement for whatever his teaching was, there's the horror of discovering your son died at war and won't be coming home.

My absolute favorite scene (I have several...), was one in which Jude is in his "studio" office whatever you want to call it in the apartment, and Strawberry Fields plays while the movie flashes back and forth between his stabbing of strawberries and sticking them to the wall and watching the red juice run down the wall, to pictures of Vietnam and war devastation. It's outstanding. Then I also love one of the beginning scenes when Jojo is walking through the subway and the streets of New York with his guitar and you see all the people and the representation of the culture back then, and the pimp old man is singing "Come Together"... it's awesome. Then of course I loved the very climactic scene when Jude sings "Across the Universe" while he runs to find Lucy at a war protest after they had an argument, and the police come and start beating people and they get ahold of Lucy and Jude both and they try to grab for each other's hands, all the while flashes of Max in Vietnam come up, and then Jude ends up in jail.

Ugh and I LOVEEEE the scene where Jude sings "I've Just Seen a Face"... Lucy, Max, and him are bowling one night having fun before Max and Jude leave for New York, and Jude sings the song about falling for Lucy and the shots of people sliding down the alleys are just awesome... and I love scenes in movies where you see two people and realize they are going to end up together, so yeah, it made me happy. and I LOVED also the scene towards the end when Max is in a bar in New York and Jude is in a bar in Liverpool, and the mirror makes them appear to be sitting right next to each other and Max starts to sing "Hey Jude" and it's as if Jude hears Max singing to him, and so he gets up and leaves the bar and travels back to New York through the immigration center so he can find Lucy, the love of his life. AHHH, it's so great.

The only scene I really hated was the awkward water scene with all the naked yet not completely appearing naked asian women swimming around. It was very artistic, but very awkward. and I just really hate boobs in the movies!!!!!!! cause they're everywhere these days.

It's controversial, it's an important time of our history, it's an artist's dream come true. I loved it!