Beatles Get Back by Peter Jackson Episode 2 Review

hi everybody welcome to my review of episode 2 of the beatles get back movie directed by peter jackson so we had the first episode yesterday i did my review if you want to see that episode 1 review if you've not yet please feel free to go and watch that first uh but it was great to see the positive reaction that people had to that episode uh certainly the main takeaway that i got that people thought was the moment for them was was paul who just made seem to make up get back out of thin air in the studio and he's just riffing on his base and all of a sudden the melody just comes to him in the words and they're away with it that was uh that seemed to be a lot of people's highlights for episode one episode one finished on that uh that downer of george walking out quitting the band and them having a meeting on the sunday to to try and sort things out and it just said the meeting didn't go well so that leads us into episode two that's just dropped today worldwide and it's 174 minutes long again i've got loads of notes i've watched this today i'm going to go through what i sort of feel the moments that i picked out as as my favorite so interesting things that i saw and and i hope that some of it chimes with what you've taken away from uh from it in episode two as well but let me know in the comments which bits of this you've been really enjoying so it starts off on the 13th of january and it opens up with ringo is the only beetle present he's the only one who's turned up and they don't know whether the others are going to show basically eventually paul and linda arrive but it seems that john's assumed to be still in bed so it's a really kind of slow and nervy start to this particular day and the the discussing the sunday meeting and we hear them say that george just got up and left that part way through didn't even stay till the end so it's not looking good at this point there's then a really nice part where uh paul's talking to the others john hasn't arrived yet but paul's talking to the others and he's talking about how his relationship with john has changed from well since yoko arrived but not in the way that you might expect he's very complimentary about yoko he's saying some really nice things about her and he's saying how he really likes her but he's just basically just kind of saying well you know they just want to be together and he's and he's kind of acceptance of that but he's kind of lamenting the fact that uh it's obviously had a big impact on his relationship with john uh it's discussing the live show is paul and he says you know something's got to happen this week uh and he also mentions the possibility that maybe this this whole special at the recording should end with the band breaking up that would have been uh that would have been one way one way to end the show uh paul looks around as he sort of sees that there's him and ringo there there's no sign of john george is off and he just sort of says and then there was two and the camera lingers in on him and he just looks so close to tears and it cuts to ringo ringo's looking really glum as well so it doesn't look good at this point but then john arrives and there is probably what i thought was just about the most jaw-dropping moment of this series so far so it says that john arrives and that he and paul go off to have a private conversation about what's been happening over the last few days then it comes up on screen to say but what they didn't realize was there was a microphone placed in the room where they were in and we hear the conversation so you don't get to see it because there wasn't a visual camera there was just a it was just recording the audio but we hear this conversation between between john and paul and it's it's kind of astonishing really that we were allowed in to hear this conversation they both agree that they've treated george unfairly over the years in terms of how they've tried to direct him in songs maybe not give him the room to to grow as he's as he's been capable of doing they both agree that they've both treated him unfairly and john really kind of lays bearers well to paul about how he feels he's been treated by paul uh just sort of saying he's kind of felt pressured into doing his own songs the way that paul wants them to be done and maybe the way that paul wants them to be arranged and paul's really just sort of laying it on the line to paul here about you know this is this has really bothered me and so just the fact that we got to hear that i thought it was was pretty astonishing it's like we've heard the beatles talk in interviews after the event where they've sort of said about fallouts that they've had or conversations they've had things that have gone wrong but we've never really apart from the famous paul and george moment that was in episode one we've never really sort of seen or heard those things happen as they happened so that i thought that was really incredible and probably one of the the biggest things i've taken away from these two episodes so far to be honest we've then got john paul and ringo working on get back we're hearing that the lyrics are taking form we kind of hear them becoming the lyrics that we're gonna start to know they also agreed to put the shows back for a week now what they don't go into at any point in this is any discussions around how that affects ringo the whole point of them supposedly doing the shows uh when they were originally planned around the sort of i think it was roughly around the 24th ish of the month was because ringo had to go off and film the magic christian so they don't go into any detail about sort of how that affects ringo's situation but they basically say they're going to put everything back a week we then move on to the 14th of january we've got paul at the piano real real interesting piece where he's is one of the is with one of the crew uh and is he's kind of sort of explaining to this guy how um tips about songwriting we see him playing martha my dear at the piano which was great for me because it was one of my favorite beatles songs and he's kind of showing him how to play martha my dear as well so that's really fun ringo enters paul and ringo you've probably seen this clip before where paul and ringo are just sort of bashing out like a 12 bar blues on the piano that's what happens at this point uh and they paul just sort of starts singing why she was an impromptu song that is titled on the screen as i bought a piano the other day so a real nice fun moment there between paul and ringo paul then says this is what i came up with this morning and just starts playing backseat in my car uh so of course we're not gonna the public aren't gonna get to know that song for another couple of years when it appears on ram personally i've always thought that that song would have really suited abby road but wasn't to be and it's well worth its place at the end of ram but you can see that it's there a couple of years earlier polls that sat there playing that in these january 1969 sessions we've then got a visit from peter sellers so obviously he's going to be filming the magic christian with ringo shortly in a couple of weeks time so he's kind of around and it's going to be filmed in that studio and we have this sort of meeting where he's are not meeting as such but where he's just kind of hanging around with them and it's a bit awkward to be honest uh i don't think i don't think john and peter especially really um it just didn't quite quite seem to gel for me and seemed a bit awkward and then some peter sellers sort of gets up and says goodbye and walks out and he's gone but this day overall it it felt to me like it must have been just about the least productive day there's ever been on a beatles working day in history they just sat around achieving nothing and you hear paul at the end of it say we can't carry on like this indefinitely and yeah they really couldn't i think they had to get more focused after this otherwise it was just going to fall apart we then moved to the 17th of january it's the final day at twickenham because by this point they've had another meeting with george which we don't get to see a lot of detail on screen about but it we kind of know already what happens in that meeting it's information that's been around for years george agreed to come back to the band but he wasn't going to go back to twickenham he wanted the sessions to move to the apple uh office on savile row so this is the final day at twickenham george isn't there but you've got malin the road he's packing up the packing up drum kits and all the musical equipment while paul's there recording an oh darling demo really nice demo just him on the piano and then that's it for twickenham we've finished the twickenham sessions and we're going to start moving into savile row now which happens from the 20th of january but as it says on screen there's no cameras allowed uh in there on the 20th they decided they just needed maybe presumably a day just to get used to it but we see the beatles arriving and again it's some famous clips that we've seen before of the beatles arriving and they've been a couple of the apple scruff girls just hanging around outside the building and we see a little bit of an interview with them where they sort of that they're explaining about why they hang out they just want to see the band one of them says that she just wants to see paul and then they're asking about well what do you hope from the beatles what are you wanting from them and then oh we want them to do a show so it was nice to see that so the 21st is the first day where they're in twickenham studios with the cameras there so that we can see what's going on spirits what seemed really high uh on this session john and george there's quite a funny moment where they've been reading a newspaper article that seems to suggest that john and george have come to blows and been punching each other which they're just completely denying but they have like a mock fight where they come on come on like this and just sort of pretending to act out what the papers are claiming has been happening so that's quite funny so they then run through various oldies with a lot of enthusiasm but it doesn't really feel like it's getting them any nearer to their objective of having an album and a show ready uh it's just it just sort of happens with no real purpose it feels then you've got a funny extended sequence with john george and ringo the jamming on oldies while paul is shouting into a mic so he's not playing the others are playing but paul's just shouting into a mic reading a newspaper article uh that's criticizing the beatles saying about how they've all gone weird and the finished but they don't include ringo in this because because ringo just sort of does what he does so paul's reading that out in a sort of a mock voice while the others are all just jamming on oldies and that's quite a fun sequence to see we've then got digger pony it's progressing nicely and as is i've got a feeling and don't let me down you can tell that they're really starting to bring these songs up to some kind of a good standard now i also noticed at about this point that uh something about the picture quality so we know that there's been criticism as during episode one about the uh sort of the how digital some of the uh some of the footage looked and i saw people sort of say about how skin looked like quite waxy and not real but the the footage here looks a lot better quality and i just wonder whether it's a much better lit room you look at some of that twickenham footage and it's quite a dark room and you know cameras don't like darkness that's going to affect the picture quality so i wonder whether maybe it was a lot of what was done uh for making this film in terms of the processing of the images was kind of based really on what they had to do because of the lighting in the room i don't i don't know i'm not trained um lighting technician but it just seemed to me that as soon as they were in a bright room the picture quality looked a lot better and did through did throughout the rest of the episode we've also then got the first mention uh by john of that they could really do with someone to play electric piano john's been playing a bit of electric piano but he's obviously fairly basic on that paul could do a better job but you know he who's going to play bass if paul's doing that so he mentions that there might be somebody needed at that point and of course that's going to have big implications fairly soon we then move on to the 22nd of november and now it feels much more like we are flies on the wall watching a proper beatles recording session rather than a lot of the stuff that we've watched up to this point which maybe feels like we've been flies on the wall a marriage guidance counselling session it actually feels like a beatles recording session now and they're playing really well coincidentally or not i'm not quite sure billy preston happens to pop in to say hello because obviously he knows them from the hamburg days he used to play with little richard in hamburg and the beatles got to know him he's in town he pops in to say hello doesn't know that he's about to be recruited into the band uh he sits at the piano the the electric piano and he jams on i've got a feeling and immediately it goes straight to the the piano riffs that we know from the final song it's fantastic it's magnificent everybody's blown away with it and he gets offered the job there and then do you want to stay and play with us for a few days so billy preston's on board and everything just kind of lifts at that point we then see uh a moment that harks back to something earlier where earlier on yoko had been seen uh sort of asking where where she could get sheet music from george martin had suggested a particular shop and now when the beatles are playing you see a sat there with a book and it opens up and it says the beatles complete works so she's got she's got sheet music for all the beatles songs there and she sat reading it while the beatles are playing so i thought that was quite funny i also noticed while the rehearsing don't let me down we've seen a little bit of this on the trailer and you don't see much more here but alan williams is in the studio their first manager the the guy who got them the hamburg gig back in the very early 60s he happens to be in town he pops in and it's it just sort of seems really weird where he's he's a person who's just so associated with a completely different phase of the beatles career and he pops up during the get back let it be sessions uh but you just see him on screen for a few seconds just sat there looking pretty bewildered to be honest at say what's going on this i don't think this is the beatles as uh as he remembers them we then get peter brown uh one of one of the beatles friends which is specifically one of john's friends asking if he's free on friday to meet up with alan klein and i just kind of got a bit sad at that point thinking oh flippy neck just say no john tell him to get lost john john agrees to to see him a couple of days later but uh you know it just makes you think oh here we go here we go it's starting we then move on to the 23rd of january we've got uh a sequence of john paul yoko and billy preston and playing what it calls freak out jam with paul on drums so that's uh i mean if you if you've listened to any of yoko's sort of um plastic oh no band sessions for example where she's playing with uh john klaus and ringo it's very much that kind of thing where yoko's doing what yoko does and paul's bashing it out on the drums so that's that's interesting to see i'm fine with seeing little bits of this here and there i know some people don't like it but you know it happened so i'm fine with that we've then got some really focused work on get back uh it's getting a structure it's becoming more the song that we know they're they're they're looking at where can we give billy a space for his keyboard solo where can we leave space for a guitar solo and you get that distinctive intro when it all comes in you see that taking shape as well so it's starting to become something like what we know we then get paul reminiscing about early um earlier years touring with jimmy nickel uh and and this got me thinking as well there's so many instances here where paul's talking and reminiscing about things like jimmy nicholl in 1964 or things that they were doing in hamburg pre-hamburg all sorts of things where the paul is dead people there is as stupid as that always has been anyway but this just blows that out of the water for anybody i i think who has still got thoughts along those lines it won't of course because they won't be swayed but you know there's no way that if they got a replacement in for paul mccartney uh that they would have trained him up to that level of minutiae of detail impossible uh they then goof off anyway into sort of self parodies of help please please me and they're just having fun it's really good to watch george then makes a suggestion george harrison he suggests let's do get back now let's record it and it can be our single everybody seems happy with that as as a suggestion but they don't quite feel ready to do it there and then so they decide well maybe we'll do that tomorrow but you actually see the conversation there you see the moment where george says i think we should have this as the next single and again it's quite interesting um that george is suggesting a paul song because we know that there's been all that tension between them not just during these sessions but during 1968 as well um george asks at one point what was our last single someone says it was hey jude and you think well the last single is a pole single and george is suggesting another pole single here so it's good to see that george seems fully fully on board with being a beatle again and and sort of happy working with all uh all the rest of them 24th of january now uh they're talking about billy preston he's not there on this day because he's got some other commitments that he's got to take care of john says he wants to ask him to join the band properly as the fifth member of the beatles paul says it's bad enough with four which again i thought was quite funny but you know they're really seriously them seeing the benefits of what billy preston can bring to the band here they decide to try try two of us uh as an acoustic because so far it's been um paul's been on base it's been a bit more sort of rocky but they decide to put john and paul on acoustic guitars and and just see if it helps the groove of the song because they don't seem to have been very happy with the uh the sort of flow of the song and and how it's been going but immediately it starts to sound a lot more like the song that we we know as the final version so that's starting to have its uh um change taking place around about now we've also got we've seen it several times but we see it a lot more here now where you know the the genesis of the abbey road album really is uh happens within these sessions and we see john playing polythene pam followed by paul playing her majesty i'm not sure whether i realized that paul did her majesty during these sessions maybe i did know but i'd forgotten so but we've got more songs that would later appear on abbey road being practiced here now there's then a really great moment uh which was great to see on camera it's a really really happy fun rendition of maggie may followed by fancy me chances with you it's exactly the same version that's on the in the recent let it be box set in the the apple sessions disc but to see it as well uh it's just a it's probably my favorite version of maggie may i think the harmonies work so much better on this but i loved watching that it was a lot of fun we also see as well earlier on in this day george had said to mal mal can you get me a bow tie a black bow tie um sends him off to the shops to get him one mal brings one back but it's purple and george doesn't put it around his shirt puts it around his neck so that that's been happening a little while earlier we now see that john must have liked that idea because suddenly john's got one as well so john must have at some point asked mel hey mal can you go can you go and get me one as well so they both sat there wearing bow ties around the neck we then move on to the 25th of january paul is there in the morning telling everybody that he said last night he said i watched the film that we've uh that we took in rishikesh which had obviously been about what 11 months earlier um and is telling the other band members about all these things that he saw um pictures of the other people who were there images of cynthia jane asher etc but we get to see all this while he's talking about it and i'm just thinking god i would love to see this as some sort of proper film we saw some of it in the anthology we saw the we saw the helicopter uh taking off that supposedly had the maharishi and john in it and a pilot as well presumably but you actually see that on the ground now you see them sat in there so it's really great to see some of this rishikesh footage apple we need this film we need you to get hold of john's private film paul's private film anybody else who did it and make a proper official film of rishikesh that would be fantastic but anyway the guys in the studio they're having a great time in each other's company during this it just looks like they really really still love each other despite everything that's gone they are just so at ease in each other's company and it's brilliant to watch and it's such a shame thinking that you know we've just heard a little bit earlier that alan klein's lurking that's all going to change over the next few months and the the thought of what you see there happening them all just having a right laugh in the studio that couldn't happen a year later it would be unthinkable um so it's great to watch but it just makes you feel a little bit sad as well about the fact that you know this it didn't happen very often after this because the business things really start to take hold very shortly after this then playing two of us and another really funny part again there's a lot of fun here they just keep swapping vocal styles to john and paul they do um they do a verse where they're singing it in a scottish accent they do one that i think was supposed to be a bob dylan accent they do one that's very quiet and another one that i think was supposed to be jamaican and it's just really fun they're really enjoying themselves they're playing for you blue that's sounding great we get to see um images from the actual take that we know from the album and um you know there's the piano parts and it's like a real sort of honky tonk piano but what you get to see here is that it's actually the same uh same sort of bluthner piano that one that the recorder let it be on long and winding road etc it's the same piano but this stuff it full of um newspapers so that it's kind of deadens all the strings inside and because george said in his words were i want it to sound like a bad honky tonk piano so i don't think i realized that it was the same piano that they used on this things then turned a little bit more serious but not in um i mean in a friendly way not in a falling out way they're talking about the fact that they still have no idea what they're gonna do to end this film because they want this big payoff they don't just want it to be they don't for example want to play these songs in the studio because it feels like it's not had the big ending that it deserved um and then there's a bit that we see we don't hear it and presumably that is because there was no audio that could be recovered from this otherwise they would have played it for definite you see glenn jones sort of knelt down talking up to paul and it comes up as a caption on the screen that this is the moment when glenn johns suggests to paul mccartney why don't you go up on the roof and play and possible's looking down at glenn and you see this sort of come up as it tells you when it's uh when it's happening and you just see paul's face go like that and you just feel you feel like you're witnessing a little bit of beatles history here you are seeing that moment when for the first time paul mccartney is given the suggestion why don't you go up there and you could tell immediately he's up for that and then the next thing you see paul and ringo up on the roof they've got up on the roof and the dragging they've got they've got an arm each of michael lindsey hogg the director and the dragging him up the wall and onto the roof so that he can get up there so that they can go and survey the scene he's all he's in his full suit but they're just pulling him up this wall so again that's quite funny to see so i really wish we could have heard that conversation between glenn and paul but obviously there must not have been audio capturable there if that's a word um otherwise they would have shut they would have played that to us uh so that's great to see the sort of the the absolute start of the idea of the rooftop concert the then back downstairs they're doing some work on let it be uh and they agree between them all to do the concert on the roof and as it comes up on screen it says dot dot in four days time the end the end of episode two uh so it's it's a really good i wouldn't say it's an episode of two halves it's kind of an episode of one fifth and four-fifths that first fifth is really sad that that sort of portion where george is still gone they have no idea if he's coming back or not they don't even know if john's gonna come in at one point um and you just feel oh god it could it could re so easily i've all just finished at that point and then the rest of it is just them being so happy in the studio what we see and you know you get we're getting these a lot of people saying oh this is revisionism well no this is this is in far more depth than the let it be film ever was uh this this new peter jackson film is not shying away from showing the bad things you know judge walking out uh george and paul's argument uh john and paul off in a room thinking that they're in secret sort of basically just saying you know you've not allowed me to do what i want for a couple of years they're not shying away from that it's still being shown but you know there is a lot more happy stuff happened than we perhaps knew about and i think we're getting to see this and i think if anything this is probably a more accurate film than anything we've seen before but two episodes in it's just fantastic we've had what we had now we've had about five and a half hours so far the third episode is to come that's going to come tomorrow again i'll be doing my review of this i'll be watching it tomorrow um tomorrow been saturday as i record this and i'll be doing my episode three review then and uh obviously we're going to see the build up to the rooftop concert we're going to see their sort of final preparations probably a lot of things that we don't know that we're going to see as well we're going to see that rooftop concert in full tomorrow how exciting is that brilliant and i expect then it will probably go on to the day after which is where they filmed some of the videos the films let it be long winding road two of us as actual performances for video and whilst i could be wrong what i'm expecting is that they will will they end this the way that it started so in episode one it started with that kind of ten minute um sort of potted history of the beatles up to that point i wonder if it will finish with something similar it won't take 10 minutes but maybe this is what happened next the the february 1969 sessions where they did i want you i want you so heavy for example it'll probably talk a little bit about abby road um i hope they mentioned the third of january 1970 session as well uh where paul george and ringo recorded i me mine because you know that that version that's on the album that didn't happen in january 69 that didn't happen until nearly a year later so i'm hoping that that will be covered in some kind of detail so i'm really looking forward to episode three it's gonna be hopefully as great as the other two episodes let me know what you think down in the comments uh and i'm gonna go and let my voice rest because it's going again but thank you very much for watching i'll see you again soon bye bye [Music] you

Channel: Andrew Dixon

Views: 24,179

Rating: 4.903337 out of 5

Keywords: Beatles Get Back by Peter Jackson Episode 2 Review, Beatles Get Back by Peter Jackson Episode 1 Review, the beatles get back movie review, the beatles, get back, peter jackson, episode 1, review, andrew dixon, andrew dixon the beatles, the beatles get back, the beatles documentary, the beatles disney movie, the beatles disney plus, get back movie review

Id: R-FLIy7rDXI

Length: 28min 51sec (1731 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 26 2021