Across the Universe

I really liked the film Across the Universe. It’s both amusingly clever and an interesting look back at the 60s. Plus it’s a musical. I particularly liked the combination of “nothing’s going to change our world” with “helter skelter”–simple but effective.

I tend to like movies which take a more formal approach, like musicals. By restricting themselves and avoiding naturalism, they force the story to be both good and unusual. Or, of course, terrible–that happens pretty often too, but those movies can be ignored. A completely different example of a formal film would be Memento, with its trick of telling the whole story backward.

A film about the 60s naturally makes me compare that time to today. Many people then really thought society was falling apart or changing radically. The protests were dramatic and certainly changed U.S. society, but they had no real effect on the war. The protests against the Iraq War before it started were very large, though nobody thought they would change society, and they had no effect at all. And seeing that the Iraq protests had no effect caused them to more or less stop after the war started–there are still regular protests, but they are much much smaller than the ones before the war. Of course, the lack of a draft is a key difference.

Even after all these years of war it’s so strange to see men like Bush and Cheney, who were both careful to avoid going to Vietnam, sending other men to fight in Iraq. In a movie it would be simplistic. How does it happen in real life?