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All Together Now and Manufactured Landscapes

Above: The cast of Love with Yoko Ono, Sir George Martin, Sir Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr ,and wife Barbara Bach, and Olivia Harrison, backstage after opening night.

All Together Now
Where: The Bloor
When: Sunday, April 20th @ 3:45PM
More info

Two years ago, Cirque de Soleil opened a Beatles tribute show in Las Vegas, “Love”, which was a huge collaboration project between Cirque, Apple Corps Ltd., and the Beatles (and wives) themselves. Adrian Wills’s All Together Now documents the development of this production in a film filled with Beatles tracks – remixed by George Martin and son specifically for the show – and spectacle. The cinematography does a wonderful job of capturing the beauty and scope of the Cirque show, which is much cleaner than what one might expect from your average documentary, which makes the film worthwhile.The main focus, however, is praising and remembering the Beatles, and documenting the creative tensions encountered between Yoko Ono, Olivia Harrison (wife of George), Paul McCartney, George Martin and the Cirque du Soleil team led by Dominique Champagne. Caught up in his love for the Beatles, Wills misses what are the most interesting parts of the story. Instead, it focuses on Yoko Ono and Olivia Harrison and this is more soap opera than great documentary.

We are told that great pains were taken to remix Beatles tracks to come up with something new – like a new live Beatles performance – for the show that had enough musical depth to work in a large theatre. Unfortunately, we do not get to see the remixing process. This would have been fascinating and would have added real interest to the documentary. We get glimpses here and there of Cirque rehearsals, but from the perspective of the Beatles and not from the perspective of the Cirque performers, which would have been far more appealing. We never find out what it is really like to put together a Cirque performance, which I imagine, is an incredible process that I certainly would like to hear about.

All Together Now is a tight film - it is well-paced and keeps you emotionally involved. However, it turns into just another Beatles documentary, and not the definitive one, while missing much of the Cirque story that I would have liked to have seen.

Manufactured Landscapes
When: Sunday, April 20th @ 11AM
Where: Isabel Bader Theatre
More Info

Manufactured Landscapes is about the work of Edward Burtynsky, a photographer whose specialty is photographs of environmental destruction and urban development: factories, dumping grounds and mines. It drags at times, but the visuals are truly stunning making this a worthwhile see.

—————————HotDocs is the Toronto International Documentary Film Festival. It runs from April 17-27, at a variety of venues across Toronto including the Bloor, the Royal, and the Isabel Bader Theatre.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 12:29 am and is filed under Events, Film. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.