Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

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knives
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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#51 Post by knives » Tue Feb 19, 2019 1:49 pm

But we wouldn't have one of the better Bond themes in that reality.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#52 Post by DarkImbecile » Tue Feb 19, 2019 1:52 pm

The worst of all possible realities, for sure

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domino harvey
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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#53 Post by domino harvey » Tue Feb 19, 2019 1:53 pm

This whole thread is the equivalent of getting upset when your favorite indie band is featured in a car commercial, only more (!) pointless. How in the world can people feel the need to defend the Beatles, who literally everyone knows and whose legacy is well-preserved for all time, against anything, much less a silly romantic comedy?

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#54 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Feb 19, 2019 2:29 pm

knives wrote:
Tue Feb 19, 2019 1:49 pm
But we wouldn't have one of the better Bond themes in that reality.
Or a certain Froggy Chorus!

I'm just amused wondering what might happen if the person could not actually remember the lyrics to Yesterday! Perhaps it would turn out like that 2006 gallery installation, where Brian J. Davis got patrons to sing the song only from memory!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Aug 15, 2019 3:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

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furbicide
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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#55 Post by furbicide » Tue Feb 19, 2019 8:36 pm

John Shade wrote:
Tue Feb 19, 2019 8:59 am
This movie looks fun and stupid and won't ruin the greatest band of all time. Take the premise for what it is--they aren't going to go that deep with it, aside from some (my guess) little jokes.
Well, I can certainly agree with all of that – your last sentence pretty much sums up exactly what I expect this film to be – but "fun" is very subjective.


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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#57 Post by rawlinson » Wed Feb 20, 2019 7:48 am

I'd thought a more plausible reference point was Goodnight Sweetheart. An early 90s BBC time-travel comedy. Somebody travels in time from the 90s to wartime London in the 40s and there's a running subplot where he pretends to be a songwriter and he keeps passing The Beatles songs off as his own. Given that Curtis was also writing for the BBC at the same time and it was a very popular show I took that to be something that provided inspiration.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#58 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:23 pm

Oh gosh, that show was popular Sunday evening light entertainment for a certain generation nostalgic for the days of rationing and getting bombed in the Blitz, but it made me pine for the slightly less offensive Last of the Summer Wine! That was also the sitcom in which Nicholas Lyndhurst was trapped between his empty modern lifestyle torn between 'modern' wife and the chance to regularly escape through his conveniently discovered time portal to chat up the more idealised 1940s barmaid as a mysterious stranger with eerie foreknowledge of every future event, including Beatles songs. He ends up juggling both relationships at the same time and ends up having children with both women, although the modern day woman has a miscarriage and becomes a entrepreneur beauty shop millionaire and best friends of the Blairs.

It sort of puts Welcome To Marwencol into perspective!

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#59 Post by Persona » Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:33 pm

Maybe Richard Curtis bonked his head, thought he only imagined this Enormity e-book, and then proceeded promptly to write Yesterday.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#60 Post by Zot! » Wed Feb 20, 2019 12:49 pm

This is kind of a regular time travel joke, like the Chuck Berry mobius strip from Back to the Future. I tried to think of the worst Time Travel movie I could, and thought I've never seen it, youtube confirms the Martin Lawrence vehicle Black Knight incorporates a performance by Lawrence of Sly and the Family Stone's "Dance to the Music" in a Medieval Royal Court.

Also, I am reminded of the anecdote that Frank Sinatra used to introduce "Something" as his favorite Lennon/McCartney composition, when it was a Harrison song. I'm sure it was a equal parts ignorance and contempt for having to incorporate this long-hair garbage to keep his act current.

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Re: The Films of 2019

#61 Post by Mr Sheldrake » Thu Jul 11, 2019 11:15 am

The premise is daft and I was prepared to resist wholehardedly. But having been a teenager at the height of Beatlemania, once I heard the songs being performed in pared down versions by Patel, nostalgia hit me like a ton of bricks. These songs are really good! The joy of being alive!

Boyle keeps the pace lickety-split. The funniest bits were Patel struggling to remember the lyrics of songs that in this alternate universe nobody (including the internet) knew except him. How would the public respond at first hearing? Unsurprisingly, they love them and Patel is proclaimed the new Shakespeare. At a Moscow concert he introduces Back in the USSR, 30 years after the fall and the crowd goes wild.

There are bumps including the gooey, predictable love story. Lily James uses her considerable charm to deflect some of the goo. Kate McKinnon delivers a bizarrely unfunny performance as Patel's money mad LA agent. The surprise cameo appearance near the end probably doesn't work but it was fun to imagine.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#62 Post by Roger Ryan » Thu Jul 11, 2019 12:51 pm

I was disappointed that virtually all of the moments showing Patel's character trying to navigate being a surrogate Beatle were revealed/spoiled in the trailer while huge swaths of this film are devoted to the sub-Love, Actually relationship subplot. In the hands of someone who isn't Richard Curtis or Danny Boyle, this might have been a real charmer about the value of a song vs. the cult of personality, or taken the "Sound of Thunder" concept further (anywhere?) to show how the absence of the Beatles had subtly changed the world.

There are a couple of scenes that suggest much grander ideas than the film cares to deliver on, and too many that are inconsequential. I actually felt bad for Ed Sheeran who is given the line "I always knew someone would come along who was greater than me" and, apparently, directed to deliver the line absolutely straight-faced. As to that "cameo appearance" referenced above by "Mr. Sheldrake"...
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The image of a 78-year-old Lennon is, frankly, too emotionally-fraught for a such a lightweight film to handle appropriately. Still, I was touched...then frustrated with the appearance when "Lennon" was given so little to do. The suggestion that Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr actually exist in this world, but are not famous musicians, should have been what the whole movie is about. In fact, the most logical ending to Yesterday, given that Patel's character ultimately decides to discontinue the ruse, would be for him to round up the four septuagenarian Liverpudlians and teach them how to play their own songs for the benefit of humanity.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#63 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Mon Jul 15, 2019 4:48 pm

This film seems to exist primarily so the entire world can group-brainstorm a better remake.


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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#65 Post by swo17 » Fri May 22, 2020 4:32 am

That makes me actively mad

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#66 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Mon May 25, 2020 6:35 am

After the row about Curtis's script, I watched this and read the original script which had been leaked online (which I didn't think was especially good either - instead of Ed Sheeran, the main guy meets Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand which gives some idea of when the script first came about! And there are references to other UK bland indie bands from the mid 00s e.g. Zutons, Fratellis). I agree with the major point most people make that would the Beatles songs themselves, if written now, be successful in their own right, forgetting the context in which they were written and the fact they were written and recorded by the Beatles themselves? In the original script, the guy is not successful with those songs and in fact, his bandmates (he's in a band not a solo artist) think they're not very good because they're lacking in heart and sincerity (he's clearly the kind of guy who would never write All You Need is Love). The main guy in the film is completely charmless, his own songs are crap, the way he uses the Beatles songs make little sense. The only time I smiled was when Oasis didn't exist. The Ed Sheeran cameo was cringey. Kate McKinnon's character was just remorsely awful and the whole 'music biz' bits with the marketing meetings, the gigs etc. seemed like they were written by someone with no clue who the music industry works. I felt sorry for the Gavin fella who was dating Lily James, who just accepted getting dumped and was OK with it (he shacks up with someone anyway). There's probably more that bugs me. The experience of the original writer is sad, but tbh, I'd let Richard Curtis take full responsibility for it.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#67 Post by furbicide » Mon May 25, 2020 7:01 pm

I have to say, that sounds like a much more interesting script – and whatever its own shortcomings, kind of demonstrates yet again how money and art are so often at odds.

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knives
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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#68 Post by knives » Mon May 25, 2020 7:17 pm

It's certainly a more reasonable telling at least. I especially would have appreciated the comments about the reappropriating as insincere.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#69 Post by aox » Mon May 25, 2020 8:04 pm

“My impression when they first told me ‘Richard Curtis wants to buy your film’ was that he was going to produce it,” Barth says. “Then when we got into the final negotiations, they said, ‘Also, here’s the credit that he’s insisting on having’ where he’d be the sole screenwriter and then I’d get co-‘story by’ credit with him. I thought, well that’s kind of fucked up to pre-arbitrate credits, I don’t think the writers guild would like that. But at the same time, I’d been at this for five years at that point and figured it would be nice to just cash out and finally move on. So I accepted.” (Barth notes that the film was made under the auspices of the British Writer’s Guild rather than the WGA, and the two have slightly different rules).
Where does union protection come into play here?

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knives
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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#70 Post by knives » Mon May 25, 2020 8:18 pm

Credit. Under WGA rules he thought his credit would be co-writer rather than story.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#71 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Jul 04, 2021 5:01 pm

“The second song? I hated it, but I wasn’t interested in it enough to listen to it again to find out why”

Yesterday was a bit surprising in pretty much being a perfect encapsulation of a Danny Boyle film, because it falls entirely within his format of ‘aspirational capitalism’ which asks the question “what if you could become rich and famous without doing any of the actual work to justify that?”

It kind of has the 'perfect crime' structure of Shallow Grave (or Trance, or Slumdog Millionaire, or The Beach) of the main characters living mundane lives until something happens that drops a moneymaking scheme into their laps and all they have to do is to hold their nerve in order to pull off an audacious scam and get away with it. Which is easier said than done when you don’t remember the words (or attract the attention of the thugs looking for their money; or have to remember all the answers to trivia questions). And the sheer amount of effort that has to go into researching and trying to remember someone else’s work eventually becomes as intensive as it might have been to have actually done something unique and individual that expressed yourself, and eventually is much less spiritually rewarding.

The most interesting thing about the film is, as previously noted in the thread, the way that the whole milieu has changed from the early 1960s of the height of the Beatles. You might have exactly the same lyrics and chord changes but live in a world of children’s party performing and mundane chatshows and the whole climate of music existing in a very 21st century context (albeit with Oasis quite understandably having been wiped off of the map to leave Blur to run rampant unopposed). Social media included. And I also like the idea that as a fundamental plagiarist, you are going to swiftly come to the point where you run out of material once the original band broke up, so you might be more acutely aware of your career coming to an abrupt end due to running out of material than most (and not because of being assassinated or wanting to pursue a solo career) and might take the decision to torpedo your career first before it gets brought to a full stop for you. That feels like an interesting development of the idea in Boyle's (much better) previous film T2: Trainspotting of nostalgia for the past being a place to hide away from the realities of the present world inside, and which you can mine for exploitable material (and Steve Jobs, particularly in its final section, is all about that idea of historical nostalgia getting 'weaponised' back at a new audience through advertising for the latest, maybe illusory and conceptual, lifestyle product), though Yesterday is made rather strange by having a naive young man having those feelings of nostalgia for a life he never lived rather than the jaded middle aged characters of T2 looking back on their youthful hijinks with yearning.

It kind of does that normal Danny Boyle thing of the main character becoming a bit full of themselves and their goals whilst starting to be in danger of losing their essential humanity (see Pinbacker in Sunshine, Steve Jobs, the main character of The Beach, all three characters in Shallow Grave, the main character in Trance entirely losing his personality, etc), although the twist here is that rather than the pursuit of their goal leading to people trying to mercilessly kill each other over who gets all of the money (although I particularly like the idea that Kate McKinnon’s manager character, who seems to be channelling Christina Hendricks’ brutally blunt manager from The Neon Demon throughout, might at the end of the film be angling to thrust a carving knife into our lead character’s shoulder in the manner of Kerry Fox in Shallow Grave! She has all the best lines in the film too, especially her final one: “In the name of Money, stop!”), we instead get plunged into the much more terrifyingly twee Richard Curtis-world horror of realising that the girl you left back at home was your source of actual inspiration all along, and racing against time to follow the taxi containing your true love/muse who is about to catch a departing train. It is especially important to acknowledge one's true love when it also allows the possibility of dragging her away from her more lovable but dull fallback boyfriend. In a way the nice-but-dull Gavin is the most touching character of the film, as he was always destined to be the middleman, proxy, ersatz, stand-in, fake boyfriend just marking time before he fades away from briefly being centre stage and back into the anonymous crowd of onlooking audience members again.

Whilst I still fundamentally disagree with the entire high concept premise of this film (and the final act attempt at mitigating it is even worse), it is at least not inconsistent with Danny Boyle’s work, which would have been the worst thing possible. Even at this late stage Boyle still remains the epitome of a New Labour-era filmmaker. Anyway, I bruised my knee on a table this morning and it turns out that I now live in a reality where there are no memories of any Ed Sheeran songs left in the world. Which could have been spun into a personal boon but unfortunately as I have never heard any of his songs I’m pretty much back to square one.

Also where the heck is Jools Holland in this universe? You cannot tell me that a young guitar-acoustic soulful singer-songwriter with a "Pepsi" addiction would have been able to have an entire career play out without Jools doing whatever it took (up to and including kneecapping James Corden) to get an exclusive interview with them!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Aug 19, 2021 11:36 am, edited 12 times in total.

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#72 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Jul 05, 2021 3:26 am

Also, I know that it is used purely as a doubling-down on the high concept premise, final punchline to the film and should not be taken on any deeper level as such, but given how controversial a figure they are currently I could see certain audience members punching the air in joy at a certain figure being 'cancelled' completely out of existence:
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i.e. our character finding out that Harry Potter, and by extension J.K. Rowling, doesn't exist anymore. But that itself raises a whole host of new cultural knock-on questions. Without the Harry Potter series what happens to all attempts to do spin-off 'Young Adult' multi-part film series that followed in its wake: Percy Jackson, Narnia, Ender's Game, The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, I Am Number Four etc, etc? More crucially what happens about the just as influential by-products of Harry Potter fandom in the works that owe their existence at least partially to their parent's existence - the Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey series? Do they exist in altered or fundamentally different forms, or have they been purged from the official record in the Harry Potter pogrom, Oasis-style? Are Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson still viable in this alternate universe? Could the yearly installments in the Marvel Universe of films ever have been seen as a viable proposition until Harry Potter lit the way? (Though I suppose Lord of the Rings played a role there also) Did the Harry Potter-boom in young audiences reading for pleasure again ever happen, and if not what happened to libraries and bookstores, and publishing in general, in this new world?

Even speaking as someone with no particular interest in the legacy of Harry Potter (but what happened to all the HP-themed amusement parks?!), that is still an enormous cultural hole to leave gaping at the end of this!

But they are all questions that a film like Yesterday has no interest in, because all of the wider implications of the Beatles simply not existing any more (the name of Liverpool Airport, etc) are just breezed past as cute in-jokey punchlines rather than the existential terror of the situation setting in too much. If the film dealt more with the fallout of these questions then it may have been better. I mean, our main character meets two other people who remember the Beatles and reacts ecstatically to finding out that others also remember them ("it is like I have met the only other two people who speak English in the entire world!", he exclaims, glossing over the awkward issue that one of the two characters is Russian!), and then just lets them leave without even wanting to take their contact details so that they could maybe get together and fondly reminisce about Yoko some time! There's a fundamental incuriosity towards the most interesting aspects of this premise (i.e. were those other two people also in horrible accidents at the same time as the inexplicable power cut and could that be why their memories also remain, similar to the way that the characters on the very edge between life and death in The Quiet Earth were the only ones left in the new world?) that is the most frustrating part of the whole film. Because we need to spend more time on the apparently more important will they/won't they rom-com questions (spoilers: they won't, then they will) rather than immediately trying to find the nearest Physicist to try and explain how the space-time continuum has been disrupted!

Although, while it frustratingly raises all of those follow up questions that were noted above, I did think that the flippant Harry Potter joke worked quite well not just as a punchline but because it also seems to pose our lead character another challenge (another temptation?). He has been able to bumble his way through the half-remembered lyrics to a few of the most iconic Beatles tunes (albeit with the lyric mangling interference of Ed Sheeran!), but does he have what it takes to plagiarise a seven volume, tens of thousands of words, series of books about magical wizards attending an exclusive boarding school purely from hazy childhood memories of the films?
I do also wonder whether there is anything to be read into the way that it seems that it appears that the well known figures from British cultural life who get wiped off the face of the Earth (or in John Lennon's case put firmly back into his proper place in society) appear to only be those who came from white working class backgrounds! (Incidentally a lot of them figures that were being openly schmoozed and appropriated by New Labour when they first came to power in 1997 as well, much as Boyle and Curtis also were) All the better to get replaced by Southern copycats who fit better into the aspirations of the current late 2010s cultural climate, I suspect.

I have not checked but I would bet that there was a tie-in CD of the cover versions of the songs available in the shops at the same time the film was released! This whole film feels as if it reflects that turn from bands producing their own music (even Oasis produced unique songs despite being highly influenced by you-know-who!) to the current climate of enthusiastic fans singing along to the already well established 'too big to fail' hits of the past to try and win reality shows (see also the nostalgic raucous group singalong that occurs at a number of points in T2: Trainspotting), and that also might reflect Danny Boyle's seemingly longstanding interest in gameshows that comes across in a lot of his films in one way or another (which is also itself perhaps the most naked example of the 'pursuit of fame and fortune without producing anything personally identifiable at the end of it' trend in his films. While I was left curious about what a Christopher Nolan version of Hamlet or Richard III would be like a few months ago after watching Tenet, I would be similarly curious as to what would result from a Danny Boyle directed series of Love Island!) The unholy short-termist, interchangeable, pick up and drop, ahistorically and acontextually glossy, Blairite marriage of values between Danny Boyle and Richard Curtis comes through at its most strongly there, it feels.

And finally: what was the deal with that running gag about the supporting characters continually butting into important conversations to steal food from our main character's plates, or run off with an entire tray of tuna sandwiches from the catering table? That the surrounding resoundingly non-artistic working class characters are living such Philistine, opportunistic existences that they have to uncouthly grab whatever free food may be on offer when they can, wherever they can? This feels where the film is most indebted to Richard Curtis with its meant-to-be-cute bits of business of the supporting cast lightening the tone of the romantic stuff - there is even a dumb-but-lovable best friend character almost exactly like the Rhys Ifans goofball figure from Notting Hill - but in its one-note food stealing gag it feels more of a distracting echo here when compared to such characters sketching in a portrait of a wider world beyond the main couple, as in the actual Richard Curtis films.
Last edited by colinr0380 on Mon Apr 04, 2022 12:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.


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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#74 Post by swo17 » Sat Jan 22, 2022 5:34 pm

More precisely, over her being cut from the film but not the trailer, meaning that the trailer constituted false advertising

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Re: Yesterday (Danny Boyle, 2019)

#75 Post by domino harvey » Sat Jan 22, 2022 5:36 pm

Is it too late for me to sue over Twister not having the tractor coming through the windshield? 🤔

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