“The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years” revisits the Fab Four in a new documentary by Ron Howard. “Mia Madre” relates the anguish of a filmmaker over her dying mother. Both will play at the M.V. Film Center this weekend.
“The Beatles” covers the years from 1963 to 1966, as the legendary band paved the way for rock concert tours as we know them. Most of the material covered will be familiar to Beatles fans, but there are new interviews with Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney. “We weren’t an overnight sensation,” they say. “It’s what we’d been doing all these years before.” But once manager Brian Epstein enters the scene, they develop a more consistent presentation with matching clothes and well-groomed hair, and Ringo Starr joins the band. No mention is made of early members Peter Best and Stu Sutcliffe.
The strength of “Eight Days a Week” is, of course, the music that viewers hear again and remember with so much fondness. Director Howard, well known for his role on the TV series “Happy Days” and his direction of “American Graffiti,” has said he was aiming at millennials who didn’t grow up with Fab Four songs. The band’s breakthrough classic, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” from 1964, helps start the film. The film ends just before the success of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Of the remarkable 800 Beatles songs, 300 were collaborations between John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
What the director doesn’t provide is analysis of the songs, their history, or how they influenced other groups. The film does illustrate the audience frenzy the Beatles inspired, and the subsequent rise of youth culture that Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley started. It also covers the hostility generated by Lennon’s comment that they were more popular than Jesus. Eventually the Beatles grew fed up with touring, feeling that they, not the music, became the show.
‘Mia Madre’: A love song to a director’s mother
In “Mia Madre,” directed by Nanni Moretti, Italian director Margherita (Margherita Buy) is immersed in the production of her new film about a factory workers’ protest over possible layoffs. At the same time, she must deal with the illness and hospitalization of her mother Ada (Giulia Lazzarini). Mothers, of course, play a central role in Italian culture. Margherita visits her mother nightly after each day’s filming, often accompanied by her brother Giovanni, played by director Moretti. It soon becomes evident that Ada is not going to recover, despite the hopes of Margherita and Giovanni. Margherita grows increasingly anguished by the prospect of losing her mother as “Mia Madre” moves back and forth between visits to Ada and Margherita’s film set.
The film Margherita is making stars American actor Barry Huggins (John Turturro), an egotistical jerk. Director Moretti inserts gentle humor into the plot, especially with Barry, who makes bogus claims that he worked with Stanley Kubrick. Margherita tells a cameraman and several actors to “be both the character and exist next to him.” The catch is nobody understands what she means. She doesn’t seem to either. Ms. Buy’s beautiful and expressive face goes a long way to appeal, and Ada, a classics teacher, is calm and kind in the face of her daughter’s anxieties. However, she expresses no real angst over the prospect of dying. As it explores Margherita’s devotion to her mother, “Mia Madre” offers insights into Italian culture.
For tickets and more information, visit mvfilmsociety.com.